Building on my blog post from last week, here are some additional ways to use your LinkedIn profile to brand yourself.

In that blog post I focused on your LinkedIn URL, background photo, and the about and featured sections. This post has tips related to the experience and volunteer experience sections, skills & endorsements, recommendations, and the accomplishments section.

Brand Yourself in Your Experience and Volunteer Experience Sections  

Most of my tips for the experience section also apply to the volunteer experience section. So, I’m grouping these sections together for this post. In both the position titles and position descriptions, use key words to help increase your search engine optimization (SEO).

  • Elaborate on your position titles. You can use up to 100 characters for a position in both these sections. Think of ways to make your position title more interesting than “Owner” or “President” or “Founder.” If you work for a company, check with your manager or marketing department before using an expanded job title.
  • Business owners – please avoid the temptation to make the description about your role in the company simply a PR piece for your company. Focus instead on YOU and your role in the company. Did you start it? Purchase it? Have you grown it from nothing to a super successful enterprise?
  • Create a separate position for each of your major business offerings or your major leadership roles in a nonprofit. Associate each of these offerings or roles with the same entity and give each of them a different title. Doing so gives you more space to fully describe that offering or role.

 

Brand Yourself with Your Skills & Endorsements and Your Recommendations

  • Carefully review your existing list of skills. Remove the ones that aren’t relevant for you now and add ones that you haven’t included. When choosing your skills, make sure they are terms that are used when people do an internet search.
  • Rearrange your skills to have the most important ones listed as the three featured skills. Click on the pencil icon, then move the current ones down by clicking on the green push pin by them. Click on the white push pin by the skill(s) you want to feature.
  • Selectively request recommendations from LinkedIn connections who will write a powerful testimonial for you. Consider suggesting a few words and phrases for them to use when you request the recommendations. Again, these should be the kind of words found in searches for the work you do or want to do.

 

Brand Yourself in the Accomplishments Section

There are many parts of this section where you can brand yourself. Here are three parts of this section where you can do that: organizations, honors & awards, and publications.

  • Complete the template in the organizations part of this section, don’t just list the name of the organization. Even if you didn’t volunteer with this organization, you can still describe your experience as a member. The organizations we belong to are part of our brand.
  • Include any honors and awards you have received. Sometimes the contributions you were honored for in a volunteer capacity are those you use in your business. Or they are relevant to the type of job you are applying for. Having verbiage around these contributions is also part of your brand.
  • Include books you’ve written and articles you wrote for someone else’s blog, newsletter, or other publication. You enhance your professional brand and differentiate yourself from your competition when you are published in this way.

 

About Joyce

Joyce Feustel helps people, especially those age 55 and up, to become more effective using social media, especially LinkedIn and Facebook. She works with business owners, business development professionals, business consultants, job seekers, and more – ranging from entrepreneurs to people in large corporations. Find her at www.boomerssocialmediatutor.com.