If you mention LinkedIn to any small business owner, it’ll typically trigger the ‘marmite’ response — they’ll either love it or hate it.
But regardless of how you feel about it, it’s hard to dispute the fact that LinkedIn is an important social channel for business owners and those working in small, ambitious businesses.
If your business is in the B2B sector, having a strong LinkedIn profile can actually be really important for driving leads and sales, and building meaningful business relationships. In fact, 40% of B2B marketers believe that LinkedIn is the most effective channel for driving high quality business leads.
But when you’re trying to spin a dozen different plates managing your business, it can be hard to find the time to optimise your LinkedIn profile and engage on the platform. You might even be struggling to think where to start!
So in this post, we’ll jump into some of the most important areas for optimising your LinkedIn profile to ensure that it stands out and helps you make meaningful connections in your industry
Start with defining what you want to get out of the platform
If you’re not sure what you want to get out of LinkedIn as a platform, it makes it very difficult to optimise your profile to deliver meaningful results.
So the first step I’d recommend is always to think about the people you’re planning to reach, the message that you want to communicate, and what you ultimately want to achieve from Linkedin.
You can then tailor your approach to all the following steps accordingly.
There’s genuinely no right or wrong on this — any of the below (and dozens of other alternatives!) are valid.
- I don’t really have time for LinkedIn, but I want to make sure I have all the basics covered.
- I’m not after leads on LinkedIn, but I want a credible profile for potential customers to see me as authoritative.
- I want LinkedIn to deliver me inbound leads, so I need to become a bit of a thought leader in my areas of expertise.
- I’m thinking of future career options and want my LinkedIn profile to look authoritative and highlight my experience for potential future employers.
Once you’ve got a better understanding of your objective, you’ll be able to approach the optimisation of your profile with greater clarity and focus.
Deliver the right first impression with an appropriate profile picture
They say a picture is worth a thousand words. And when it comes to LinkedIn, this rings true — your profile picture is the first thing people see when they come across your profile.
It’s important to get this right, and make sure it delivers the impression that you want to deliver.
There are plenty of online articles that provide guidance on how to ‘stage’ your LinkedIn profile photo, such as making sure you look warm and friendly, using a high-resolution image, making sure you’re in natural lighting, having a plain background, and taking it easy on the use of filters.
There’s more detail if you’re interested at:
If you’re looking for a new job or work in quite a formal industry — you might want to follow these best practice guidelines.
However, I’m not sure I 100% agree with all of the recommendations if you’re the owner of a small business. Yes, you need to look professional. But it’s also your opportunity to stand out a little.
So I would say take the time to read the ‘rules’ for best practice LinkedIn photos, and then make your own call on whether there are any rules you want to break.
Make the most of your cover photo / banner image
The banner or ‘cover photo’ of your LinkedIn profile is another highly visual element that many people overlook!
How you approach your banner really depends on what you want to get out of the platform.
For me, I actually get quite a few business leads through my LinkedIn page — and I’d like to get more! So I’ve made it really clear in my header what Bright Cat offers, and included a clear call to action for people to DM me to find out more.
My general advice for small business owners is to make sure your personal profile includes your business logo, company colours, and a clear (but succinct) overview of what it is you do. You might even choose to include your web address in there.
If you’re an employee and want to show alignment with the business you work for — you might choose to use a banner that incorporates their logo and corporate colours.
If you’re looking for a new job role, you might choose to include a short personal statement on your banner highlighting some of your strengths.
LinkedIn has a handy guide with all the ideal dimensions of profile (400 x 400 px) and cover images (1128 x 191 px) and design solutions such as Canva have lots of pre-built templates that can help you create images at the correct dimensions.
The biggest tip I can give you is to make sure you don’t include your logo or important information in the bottom left of your cover image — it’s likely to get covered by your profile picture!
Create a headline that captures attention and communicates your value
Your profile picture and cover image are the visual elements that help make the right first impression with any profile visitors.
Your headline provides an opportunity to clearly and succinctly communicate who you are, what you do — and in the case of small business owners looking to generate leads, how you can help.
Leadzilla has a great and in-depth article advising entrepreneurs and small business owners how to optimise their LinkedIn headline — including being clear, concise, using actionable language and including relevant keywords.
But if you’re looking for a new role, there’s a really nice tool at Cultivated Culture that analyses your headline and comes up with recommendations for how to improve it for your job search.
Make sure your ‘Experience’ section is up to date
The ‘Experience’ section of your LinkedIn profile is your opportunity to really showcase your working history, and the expertise that you’ve built up in your career.
Whether you’re a small business owner or someone looking for a new role — this section of your Linkedin profile is really important in establishing your credibility.
One of the most useful articles I’ve found on how to optimise this section of your profile is from Karen Brown. I’m always a little wary of slightly dated sources (it was originally published in 2014) but all the recommendations she makes are still relevant in 2023, including linking through to the company profile page from each role, front loading your achievements in your summary, and paying attention to your tense and phrasing to sound proactive.
Display relevant certifications
Another thing that can really help boost the credibility and authority of your LinkedIn profile is including a list of relevant licences, memberships and certifications.
As an example, I’ve chosen to include references to my membership of the Society of Virtual Assistants, Association of Professional Virtual Assistants and Chartered Institute of Marketing:
If you’ve taken part in any online training courses recently, it’s worth checking if it worked with any digital certificate platforms such as Accredible, Credly or Certify.Me. If there was a digital certificate issued from your training course, these platforms make it super easy to automatically include it on your LinkedIn profile.
Personalise your LinkedIn URL
This is a really quick point, but an important one that many people aren’t aware of!
LinkedIn makes it really simple to customise your profile URLs, with a step-by-step instruction guide.
I went simple with: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joanne-oneil/ which is a lot more friendly and professional than my original URL which was something like https://www.linkedin.com/in/joanneoneil493243240234324!
How you approach your custom URL is entirely up to you — I’ve seen some profiles with a really creative use of their custom URL, for example using keywords related to their profession or service in their profile address.
Make the best use of the “featured” section
Another great way to optimise your LinkedIn profile is to take advantage of their ‘featured’ section.
It’s really easy to set up, and it’s designed to help showcase examples of your best work to viewers of your profile, or link to articles you’ve written on the platform.
You’re able to include:
- Links to posts
- Links to articles
- Links to external websites
- Media files, including videos and PDFs
I personally tend to use it to highlight some of my favourite posts I want to draw attention to, but I’ve seen some Linkedin profiles that use the space to link through to their appointment calendar!
Based on your objectives for LinkedIn, have a think about the type of content that you might include if you choose to activate your ‘featured’ section.
Don’t be shy about asking for recommendations
I wrote a blog post just before Christmas about the importance of asking clients for testimonials and recommendations — it’s something that so many business owners are apprehensive about, but it can really help build trust with prospective customers!
LinkedIn has a dedicated section for recommendations, which I’d highly recommend anyone with a LinkedIn profile took advantage of.
You don’t necessarily need dozens and dozens of testimonials — but a handful of really comprehensive recommendations that explain what you’re like to work with and the results you’re able to deliver can really help to give prospective clients the reassurance they need.
Looking for support in optimising your LinkedIn profile?
Whether you like it or loathe it — LinkedIn is an important place to be if you want to be visible and make an impression with prospective clients, suppliers or employers.
The tips and resources in this article should hopefully help you optimise your Linkedin profile, but if you’re like a lot of busy owners and think “when do I have the time?” — I’m here to help.
Just drop me an email or give me a call on 07828 796700 and I’ll be happy to chat about how we can take your Linkedin profile to the next level.
