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LinkedIn is packed with features to help you build your personal brand and connect with your audience. The folks at LinkedIn are continually adding new valuable features for career-focused professionals. The challenge is staying on top of all these exciting improvements. Some come out as part of a major platform upgrade, others appear with little notification or fanfare – leaving us to inadvertently discover them – or through articles like this one.
This article and the following one highlight some of LinkedIn’s lesser-known features, which are personal brand building, time savings, and relationship building.
This first article focuses on elements to help you unleash your creativity to build and grow your personal brand. In part two, we’ll unlock features that will help you get more reach from your network and become more efficient when using LinkedIn.
1. Present your area of expertise. LinkedIn’s creator mode allows you to identify your top five hashtags and display them at the top of your profile, just below your headline. This new feature (and regular use of the appropriate hashtags) makes it easier for you to find relevant content and makes it easier for the people you influence and want to influence to find you. This helps you convey how you want to be known and it also helps you get your content seen by the people who are interested in your topic. Use the mobile version of LinkedIn to enable creator mode and then post related content, remembering to add any relevant hashtags to those posts. This feature is the antidote to the fact that finding what you’re looking for on content-laden LinkedIn can be difficult.
2. Link to your website. Before this feature became available, giving viewers of your profile easy access to your website (or YouTube channel, or wherever else you want people to learn more about you) was a challenge. Now, in that very important top section that contains your headshot and headline, you can add a link to any website that will serve as a showroom for your personal brand.
3. Improve your posts. No matter how great your content is, no one will see your brilliance unless you entice them to click on your posts. There are two ways to make your posts more engaging and visually appealing.
- Carousel Posts. LinkedIn lets you share multi-page documents as a carousel, allowing viewers to flip through the document directly in their LinkedIn feed using arrows that appear on the post.
- Animated Featured Images. Each time you share an update, you can add an image or video to get clicks on your post. To grab the attention of LinkedIn members, consider using an animated GIF instead of a static image. That little bit of movement makes your message stand out in a sea of text and flat images.
4. Reveal your profile. Use the profile section labeled “Highlights” to highlight the unique aspects that reinforce your personal brand and demonstrate your brilliance. This profile section takes up some pretty valuable real estate and helps you brand and make your profile stand out – but only if you take the time to build some attractions on top of that real estate. Use it to publish infographics, images, videos, white papers and other visually interesting content. You can rearrange the content in this section to keep it current and align with what’s important at the moment.
Stay tuned for the second part of this article, which will expand your access to nearly a billion other LinkedIn members.
William Arruda is a keynote speaker, author and co-founder of CareerBlast.TV and creator of LinkedIn profile type indicator (LPTI), which measures the likeability and credibility of your LinkedIn profile.
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