Linkedin has become the cornerstone of professional social networking for businesses and employees alike. It saw an incredible 22% increase in engagement in 2022 and now has 900 million members, making it the perfect place to cultivate your personal brand.
LinkedIn audits are a fundamental part of any yearly brand spring clean. You can use an audit to enhance both your business and individual profile to make it more suitable for advertising yourself to your target audience.
In this article we’ll cover nine major areas to focus on, with tips on how to optimize your content.
What is a LinkedIn audit?
First things first, what even is a LinkedIn audit? Well, it’s really just a fancy way of describing an analysis of your LinkedIn profile with the aim of enhancing its performance.
If you’re an individual, you can look at the data to see if your posts are getting engagement, how many people are looking at your profile, and whether you’re getting relevant hits on your page. This can help you work towards your career goals, whether that’s building your network or looking for your next opportunity.
If you’re a brand, carrying out an audit can help you create a whole new content plan for your mass recruiting efforts by looking at how you attract potential employees and making your adverts and word choices more attractive. It can also help you to optimize your existing strategy.
How to enhance your profile with a LinkedIn audit
1. Understand your target audience
Who is looking at your profile? Who do you want looking at your profile? These are two things you need to figure out in order to craft the best content for LinkedIn. You want to keep, and get, your target audience interested.
But first, you need to decide who you’re trying to attract. Do you want high-flying investors, fellow start-up professionals, or customers? What are you trying to achieve with your LinkedIn profile – investment in your business, collaborations, or customers for existing products and services?
By finding out who follows you, you can figure out if you’re getting the people you’re trying to attract. You can use LinkedIn’s analytics to find out who is engaging with your ads and visiting your website.
To take your analysis further, you should also consider using Keyhole’s free trial to conduct an analysis of your LinkedIn. This will provide you with more in-depth insights such as what your best performing posts are and what size companies are following you, enabling you to pinpoint your audience and what they’re interested in.
2. Optimize your profile photo and banner
They say that first impressions are important, and this is definitely true when it comes to your LinkedIn profile. You want your profile photo and banner to look fresh and profesh. Take a look at these two images: when did you last update them? Are they still relevant to your business’s image, core values, and services?
Every aspect of your LinkedIn profile should reflect who you are as an organization. Your profile picture should be clean and professional, and help you to stand out from the crowd. If you are a brand, we would recommend using your logo as a profile picture.
If you’re an individual, you should choose a headshot photo that represents you at work. If it’s several individuals’ profiles from the same team, it’s a good idea to hire a professional photographer in order to have a consistent style throughout. Your head and shoulders should be in the frame, and shots should be natural to convey your personality.
Next up, your banner image. A simple formula goes like this: One actionable insight about your brand, one short call to action, and of course, your logo. When it comes to having a great banner, less is more, but what’s on there should be to the point and relevant.
You can either use a graphic designer or make use of free software such as Canva to create a background image to LinkedIn’s size specifications. The style should be consistent with the company’s style as it appears on the website. If you’re an individual, you could use a background image relevant to your industry or expertise. Lastly, remember to check how the banner looks on both mobile and desktop.
3. Create a catchy headline and interesting summary
Your headline should grab the attention of passersby: it’s your chance to emphasize the most important thing about you as a brand or an individual. It would ideally summarize what you do in a few simple words, such as “Sports lawyer with background in contract law”, or “Green Energy Engineer Firm”.
There should be little confusion about what you provide to your customers in your headline. Your summary should be similarly to the point and clear, albeit a little more wordy. Your summary is vital when it comes to being found on LinkedIn. By using the right keywords, users will be able to easily find your profile.
Just like an Instagram bio, your brand’s LinkedIn summary should be both interesting and informative in order to hook investors, collaborators, and future clients. Users need to feel compelled to add you to their LinkedIn connections.
You can tell people more about your brand, how it started, what you do, the products and services you provide, and of course link to your social media and website.
You can also use this space to include calls to action, like:
Check out our website at…
Follow us here for daily inspiration…
Got questions? Shoot us an email at…
4. Enhance your skills and work experience section
Your skills and experience section is a great opportunity to show how your current and previous roles enhance your relevant achievements and skills for the industry you want to work in. You may be tempted to include every aspect of every content creator job and related skill you have, for example, but it’s important to be selective and to focus on the skills employers are looking for on job applications, especially if you’re learning how to write a CV with no experience.
The information you include should be as relevant as possible to your target audience. Your LinkedIn profile should tell your story, showcasing the journey you have made to get to where you are, and why you, and only you, are the right person for the collaboration, investment, job opportunity, or client.
The reader should get an idea of what you have done in your role, as well as the scope of projects and responsibilities, without going into exhausting details. How many people, if any, do you manage? Which geographic locations are you responsible for? This section is essentially a snapshot of your resume, highlighting your previous work experience and providing insight into the progression of your career.
With the growth of automated recruitment practices, you want to make sure that your Linkedin and CV are telling the same, cohesive and clear story. This will help you stand out and ensure you don’t miss-out on any potential new opportunity.
5. Establish contact with the right people
LinkedIn is more than just a public CV – it’s a place to link up with people in your industry, potential investors, and even future clients or employees. It’s a good idea to look through who you have connected with and see if they are relevant to your area of work. If you want to engage in diverse recruiting for example, you need to make sure your profile looks accessible to all kinds of people.
If not, it’s time to start searching relevant keywords and connecting with people who are on the same professional wavelength as you. You could look at LinkedIn’s own suggestions, as well as type in keywords in the search bar.
It’s a good idea to link up with people you’ve worked with previously, especially to get some endorsements and reviews from satisfied clients on your profile, as well as to keep track of future opportunities.
6. Maximize LinkedIn recommendations
Recommendations are very powerful, whether they come as testimonials for projects done, or references for future job and project applications. Having a couple of recommendations from your current, as well as your most recent, role will go a long way to making you look good to your target audience.
For recommendations to pack a punch, you should gather them from people who are as senior as possible. If you’re trying to promote yourself or your team to a particular business type, or applying for jobs in a particular field, you should choose to feature your most relevant recommendations.
7. Provide correct contact information
This is one of the easiest things to do, but also super easy to forget about. You should make sure that all of our contact details are up-to-date and free of typos.
A small mistake in an email address can cost you countless opportunities, especially when it comes to a business profile. This is partly because people genuinely can’t get in touch with you, and partly because it can make you look sloppy and disorganized which puts people off.
Getting a second set of eyes to check these kinds of details is a great way to avoid problems, protect your brand reputation, as well as make sure you don’t end up with a 404 error on your links.
8. Create your own LinkedIn URL
You can create your own LinkedIn URL very easily, and it might seem small but it can help people to find you through a simple Ecosia or Google search, as well as make you stand out as a company or individual that goes the extra mile.
You should make your LinkedIn URL as simple and relevant as possible, including the name of your company or yourself as an individual. For example:
9. Boost privacy and enhance account security
Finally, you should check over your privacy settings if you only want your profile visible to people on LinkedIn or people you’re connected with on there. Some people prefer to keep their profile details private except to serious business connections, while others prefer to make it public to get a broader reach.
Utilizing an online data removal service can help individuals regain control over their online privacy and remove any sensitive or unwanted information from the internet.
Bonus: How can Keyhole help in LinkedIn audit?
Keyhole’s LinkedIn analytics tool helps understand how your content is performing, which posts have the most engagement and find new audience insights. This LinkedIn engagement tool gives detailed insights that help you nail the goal of growing your company page’s LinkedIn presence.
Conclusion
Your LinkedIn profile is more than a dusty afterthought that you can throw together and then forget about. It requires regular audits to make sure it’s doing the best job at advertising you the way you like.
Whether it’s changing up your profile picture and header for something more cohesive and on-brand, or filtering your recommendations to keep them relevant to your current field and interests, we hope that this article has given you some useful ideas for spring cleaning your profile.
Need to supercharge your success on Linkedin? Check out Keyhole’s free trial for 14 days to boost your profile and posts!
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Frequently Asked Questions
1. Who can see my public profile?
Anyone who searches for you using a public search engine such as Ecosia, Google, DuckDuckGo, etc, can see your profile. It can also be found on public profile badges, and on approved third-party services such as Outlook,Samsung phones mail app, etc.
2. How can I apply for jobs on LinkedIn?
-Click on the job title to view the details.
-Click the Easy Apply button.
-Enter the necessary information in the popup screens.
-Click Review.
-Click Submit.
3. What do I see on ‘who's viewed your profile?
Depending on the profile viewer's privacy settings, you can see one of these:
-The viewer's name, headline, industry, and location.
-The viewer's semi-private profile characteristics, like their job title, school, company, and industry.
-LinkedIn Member if the person who viewed your profile chose to use complete private mode.
