LinkedIn Assignment: Do a Self-Audit of Your Profile

LinkedIn can be an incredible resource for your business — if you know how to leverage it’s features for maximum impact.

In today’s post, I want to give you a little LinkedIn assignment. This assignment is going to help you to look at your profile with a critical eye and ensure that it is setup as robustly as it needs to be to allow you to attract the right people in.

Ready? Let’s get started.

Conduct a LinkedIn Self-Audit

1. Log out of your LinkedIn profile
2. Go to Google
3. In the search box, type your name and add “LinkedIn” to the search box (see photo below for an example)
4. Find yourself online and view your profile

Once you find your profile, and you’re not logged into LinkedIn, you’ll be able to critically view your profile from the perspective of the people who find you via search. What you want to do is review your profile and identify gaps in the information. You’ll want to ask yourself questions like:

• What critical information is missing?
• What important messages am I not getting out immediately about my work and my experience?
• What do I want people to view on my profile that may not be there right now?

Once you identify what those gaps are, go into your settings and review your privacy settings to make it easier for people to see the information that you want to share. If key information is not showing up when you pull up the profile, there’s a good chance that it is simply set to only display to connections. An easy fix that will result in more information being absorbed from new visitors to your profile.

This is also a great time to review your bio, your work experience sections and all other content to make sure that it is relevant to your present day situation.

Consider Paid vs. Free

As you are doing your self-audit, you’ll likely notice that certain features are not available to you. LinkedIn has two account levels: paid and free. Free accounts will display less information and have fewer features whereas the paid accounts are much more robust.

For example, paid users can gain access to additional features such as viewing who has viewed your profile, having the ability to request and make introductions and being able to mail other users right from inside of LinkedIn.

If you are going to be auditing your LinkedIn profile, it is a perfect time to assess the decision between paid and free in order to determine if you should change your account type now or leave it as is.

How Do You Do in Search?

The last thing that I want you to do during the self-audit is to test your search power. To begin, create a list of keywords that are relevant to you and your business. For example, you may list the word “sales” as one of your keywords because it is an area of expertise for you.

Once you get the list, search your keywords inside of LinkedIn. I want you to look at the results to see where you show up and who is ahead of you (also known as your competition!) When you find the people who rank higher than you do in search, view their profile to see how often they are using the keyword and what they may be doing to strengthen their profile around that term.

Keywords can be used in your summary, job descriptions or in your headings. This will help people know what your expertise is, find you much more easily and will increase your exposure on the platform.

Your Turn!

Now that you’ve done this LinkedIn assignment, how did you do? Did you find gaps in the information that will be valuable to fill in? Leave your comments below – I’d love to hear from you!