Four Ways to Make Your LinkedIn Profile Effective

Social media has become a major asset for job hunters in every industry. More specifically, LinkedIn has proved to be a valuable tool for companies and recruiters to locate and evaluate potential employees. However, the social networking site for professionals has also proven to be a vital tool for companies to highlight skills and abilities of individuals. Whether a user stumbles across the profile of an executive for marketing reasons or research reasons, having an effective and informative career summary is important. A look at Clarence Gooden on LinkedIn demonstrates how the site can be used to relay relevant information and present the experience of an executive.

Keep it Relevant

While highlighting personal experience can be an all-encompassing task, a profile summary for networking purposes needs to stay relevant to the experience of the professional. Breaking up work history with stories about adventures or personal tastes is generally a good way to lose a reader. Staying on topic without focusing too much on any single facet of experience is a great way to keep readers engaged and entice them to offer up a connection.

Tell a Story

All great profiles tell the story of the specific user. Simply churning out facts and accomplishments are tasks that resumes do quite well, but putting the document into paragraph form for friendly reading is what a summary is all about. Profiles that start at the beginning and chronicle the highs and lows of a career give readers and researchers a sense of what the person is all about. Basically, sounding interesting, informed, and educated helps elevate every online profile.

Use Details

Details are one surefire way to keep recruiters and researchers interested. Stating a specific date, monetary value, or deadline is one way that readers become aware of the skills and accomplishments of particular people. Plus, those dates can be researched to illustrate just how effective a particular person actually was during a specified point of time. In short, the more details provided the more professional the summary sound and the more intriguing the profile becomes.

Proofread

Even the experienced of individuals can stand to have their profile read by others before being published. Spelling and grammar need to be above average for a page that could be read by thousands of people. In fact, many executives opt to have the summary written by professional writers to avoid any potential catastrophes. After all, nothing raises red flags quicker than misspelled words or bad grammar in a profile.

In the end, enhancing a LinkedIn profile takes care and effort. Keeping the summary relevant, telling a compelling story, using details, and proofreading are great ways to elevate a profile and increase connections. Social media has become an important part of the business process, and maintaining a friendly and complete profile are necessary to providing the right digital face to the world. After all, increasing contacts and connections is the point of social media, and taking advantage of the technology to further a career or a business just makes good sense.