Think of LinkedIn as your online resume and your profile as the introductory paragraph of your resume. As people scan your profile, they should be able to understand exactly what you do as they read your headline.
Your LinkedIn profile provides people with a comprehensive summary of you, your education, work experience and your achievements. Your LinkedIn profile also links people to other social media properties and websites where you can showcase your expertise.
Your LinkedIn profile consists of:
- Your headline
- Your photo
- Status updates
- Vanity URL
- Summary
- Applications
- Experience
- Education
- Recommendations
- Additional information
- Personal information
- Contact information
Headline
Your profile headline is the single most important part of your profile. Your profile headline will appear next to your name in the search results. As your name appears in the search results, your headline must be compelling enough to make people want to click on your profile to learn more about you. You should never just put your name and company name in your headline.
You will also select your Location and Industry in this section of your profile setup. You can also create multilingual profiles in the Basic Information section of your profile.
Here's my finished Profile Headline.
Here’s the profile headline for Viveka von Rosen. You know exactly what she does for a living.
And here’s why it’s important to use your target keyword phrases in your profile headline. Viveka is the top search result in Google for “LinkedIn expert” out of 159 million search results.
Take time now to create your compelling profile headline using your target keyword phrases.
In my next blog post, we'll continue developing your LinkedIn profile. Feel free to add your profile headlines in the Comments of this post and I'll let you know how you're doing.