Beyond B-School
Differentiate Your LinkedIn Profile
with William Arruda
with William Arruda
Multimedia
The use of Multimedia in your LinkedIn profile is the best way to differentiate your profile. It helps integrate images, videos, slides, covers of documents in Summary and Experience sections of your profile. It's a great because it provides proof of performance and helps your brand come to life in LinkedIn. You can put your client presentations, different course activities, images of you presenting, working in a team or things you want to be reinforced, etc.

Slideshare
Slideshare is one area of multimedia. It's incredibly powerful in Google searches because every word that you have in every slide is searchable. It's also valuable because it's one of the most frequented places people go to online when they want to learn about others and when they want to learn about content.
LinkedIn purchased Slideshare as an opportunity to take all that thought leadership and connect it to your LinkedIn profile. To use Slideshare, simply create an account, upload your slide presentations or PDF and right from there you can share it to your profile. Once it's in your profile, you can decide in which section you want it to appear in.
Think about what content you want to repurpose in Slideshare and then integrate it in your profile.

Changing your Profile Background
Background sits behind your headshot and headline. It helps reinforce what you want people to know about you. Just using color helps you reinforce your brand attribute.
Start with that as template. Then add images that you want to reinforce your message. You can use tools such as PicMonkey and Fotor to help you integrate various images and create a background.
Visuals are powerful. This new feature is one of the best ways to visually create that differentiation that you need.

Reordering the Sections of Your Profile
Section order is one of the things most people don't know about but it's a great way to get the content that you think is the most valuable, that's most credible that gets you connected to the people who need to know you up top.
An example is a white paper you've written on a topic that's so important to people who make decisions about you. Typically, publications show up at the bottom. You can move the Publications section up top so people can easily see that you're the author of this publication that's critical to your skills and experience in demonstrating what you want people to know about you.
If you're new and you don't have much endorsements, you can put it at the bottom. Then once you have enough endorsements you can put it back up top. Reordering the sections of your profile can be done regularly so you can always be featuring the most important element of your brand.

Longform Publishing Platform
The most powerful way to get your profile to stand out from everyone else's is to use the Longform Publishing Platform or Blog.
Blogging is an opportunity to create updates for people to know what's happening in a few sentences. You can use your thought leadership and demonstrate that and make it visible to potentially 330,000,000 LinkedIn users.
Use the LinkedIn blogging platform to make your content visible to the right people. Personal branding is all about being selectively famous. Use this to be visible to your connections and to your groups.

What to do:
1. Create valuable content. Go for quality over quantity. 2 blogs a month is great if your providing quality content.

2. Follow 80/20 rule. Spend 20% of your time creating quality content and 80% of your time promoting it. It has no value if people that need to see it, don't see it.

Spend 80% of the time promoting your blog post. Take your blog post, make it visible to all the right groups, make it visible to all your Linkedin connections and use other social media like Twitter, Facebook and Google+. This is important to attract as many people as you can to your blog. When they find this valuable, they will share this to the members of their network. And that's how it expands.

Tips for Maximizing the Content that you will create:
1. Start with a neutral Headline.
How to ___
__ Steps to ___

2. Choose a compelling picture so they will click on your content.

3. Use longer articles. Longer posts work better than shorter posts.

4. Remember to give valuable information and be sure to include something like an a-ha or a tip that people haven't heard before. That's what makes it more shareable.

5. Insert Images and Headlines. This is very easy with the LinkedIn blogging platform.

6. Supposedly, the best days of posting: Thursday, Sunday or Tuesday as these days will get you the most views.

7. Promote, promote, promote. Create your promotion plan before you even create the content in your post. Once you know what the topic is, think about how you will promote it to the right people.

Having a great profile with a stellar summary and all the right content with great headshot and great headline is not enough. Differentiate your profile from everyone else's who seemingly does what you do by following the 5 ways listed to get your profile to stand out and connect you with the right people.


William Arruda is an international branding consultant, author and public speaker focused on professional development and executive leadership.  William is the Founder of Reach Personal Branding, the #1 provider of personal branding services to Fortune 500 companies and leading universities, guiding professionals to unearth what makes them exceptional and use their unique gifts and experience to drive value for their career and organization. He lectures and conducts workshops on personal branding at top-tier graduate schools of business, including Harvard, Duke, NYU, Berkeley, Wharton, University of Michigan, UCLA and Cornell. In addition, he lectures and consults to executives at the world's largest corporations including Johnson and Johnson, Price Waterhouse, Sheraton, Microsoft, Disney, Ogilvy and J.P. Morgan.  He is the co-author of Career Distinction: Stand Out By Building Your Brand, a guidebook with the tools managers need to differentiate themselves from their peers and thrive in today’s job market.  William blogs at http://www.thepersonalbrandingblog.com/tag/william-arruda/.