501. Profile top card basics

John Espirian: 00:00:00

It's time to take a look at some of the basics of your LinkedIn profile. This is episode 501 of the Informed podcast.

Hi, everyone, I'm John Espirian, your host of the Informed podcast, a show all about LinkedIn best practice run by me, an independent LinkedIn consultant and trainer based in South Wales. We're going to get started as usual with listener feedback and questions in the Postbag section.

OK, let's get started with the Postbag section. And the first item is a voice note contribution from Mark Lee.

Mark Lee: 00:00:44

Hi John, thanks for including me in episode 500. Wanted to offer a follow up to Mary Wu's early comment about 16 plus year olds using LinkedIn.

My daughter, when she was at university, was doing a sandwich course and I must have been talking too much about LinkedIn before she went because she registered set up an account while she was working for that year out and requested and received recommendations from people that she'd worked with and for which are still on her profile now stand her in good stead. And I'm sure that they contributed to her future employment prospects.

And she's had some great jobs because they evidenced that she was hard worker, team player, etc in a way that it's very hard for people to do very early in their careers generally. So, I encourage others to do that, too.

John Espirian: 00:01:39

Thank you for that contribution, Mark. I'm trying to do the same with my daughter who recently turned 17, but LinkedIn I'm afraid isn't cool enough for her to bother herself with just yet. I hope she doesn't regret that in the future, but I will keep trying my best.

And yes, if you've got any kids or if you're very young in your career as well happen to be finding this podcast, please do get on LinkedIn and get a profile filled out as soon as you can. It will benefit you in the long run.

Lynnaire Johnston: 00:02:07

Hi, John. What a great 500th episode it was. I really enjoyed hearing from all your other correspondents on the podcast. It was really nicely done.

I wanted to ask a question, if I may, about newsletters. I have two. One is, my main newsletter I've had for a long time and the other is one mainly to do with my podcast. Now, I haven't been able to find a way in my Activity section to get my main one to display first because I tend to post more on the other one. Do you know if there is a way that I can in fact get my main one to always sit at the top of my newsletter list? Thanks so much. Keep up the great work. Bye now.

John Espirian: 00:02:56

Well, thank you for those kind words, Lynnaire. Thank you again for contributing last time. No, this is a common question, actually.

I've been asked this more than once recently and no, there seems to be no way of forcing a choice for which newsletter you want to display. Of course, most people don't have more than one newsletter, so it's a bit of an academic thing.

But if you do have more than one, then I assume that LinkedIn will choose the most recent one or perhaps the one that is most popular. But there's no way of saying no, I want this original one or this alternative one to be featured.

So, the only workaround you've really got is to go direct to that newsletter page and maybe bookmark that for your own reference or if you're pointing other people towards it. So, in the past, sometimes I have made a short URL for one of my newsletters and said, look, if you like my content, go and check this out.

Maybe you want to subscribe and it's a handy way of them getting there rather than ask them to trawl through my past activity and try and find it. But not an ideal solution. But I don't believe there is a way of forcing this decision.

If anyone is aware of an alternative to that, please let me know. But again, thank you for your contribution, Lyna.

I wasn't sure what topic to move on to as we start the next block of 500 episodes of the Informed podcast, but I thought I'd just take a quick look at the top card in the profile section. It's the most important bit of your profile to get right, so I thought I'd go over some of the basics of what you need to put into that section.

So, what is the top card? Well, it's the first section that you see whenever you view someone's LinkedIn profile.

So, if you're going to try and put your best foot forward, get anyone's attention on LinkedIn. One of the best places to do that is to build up your home base by getting this top card section right. So, what goes into the top card?

Well, the most obvious things are the things that travel across every part of LinkedIn but are also found in this section. And those are your photograph, first of all, your name, and your professional headline.

We're hopefully past the point where I need to tell anyone on social media that profiles that contain photographs are going to be they're going to receive more attention than those that just have the default silhouette icon in place.

So, just make sure that you've got a well lit, clearly framed photograph that is just of you and where your face takes up, I would say at least half of the image because you don't see a very big image when you look at LinkedIn profiles. So, you want it to be very clear that it is you and it's clear and that it should actually look like a recent version of you.

So, that if you ever meet someone in person or you hop on a Zoom call, then they're not surprised because you look 20 years out of date. The name field is next and I recommend keeping this as simple as possible. Some people like to put titles into their name field.

I find that sometimes that can look a little bit over fussy and also it does put me off a little bit from tagging or mentioning them in posts and comments if I feel that their name drags on, especially if it's got other things in it like emojis and so forth. So, just keep it short and simple and stick to the name that you're known by after your photograph and your name.

The other bit of text that's really important on your profile is your professional headline. So, that's the thing that sits immediately below your name when you look at your profile.

And when you first set up your LinkedIn profile, it probably will have defaulted to whatever your position is at whatever the company is that you work for, and that it doesn't really tell a very good story about what value proposition you're offering to the world. So, your headline can be up to 220 characters long.

I recommend that you don't quite go up to that limit because that ends up being quite long, especially when viewed on a mobile device. But try to get to the point as quickly as you can in as few characters as you can, by saying what is the value that you provide to the world?

And think about the viewer. What kind of things would they be searching for if they were looking for someone like you?

And try to add a little bit of personality to the profile so that when someone reads the headline they might think that's interesting. I actually want to have a conversation with this person. That kind of stuff is hard to get right and it can be difficult.

I always say it's difficult to read the label of the jar you're in. Sometimes you need some external help to try and get to the essence of what you're putting out into the world.

So, do drop me a line if ever you want to have a chat about that.

But that is the professional headline: a very important text field because it appears on pretty much every screen of LinkedIn wherever your profile is found.

Now, I've already mentioned one image which is your personal photograph, but sitting behind that, at the very top of your profile is your banner image or your background image. And this is an image that is wider than it is tall, it's about 4 times wider than it is tall.

And it's kind of digital real estate for you to try and promote or tell a story, if you like, about what you're currently working on or what you might want to have conversations around.

So, I at the moment, at the time of recording this, because I'm only a few weeks away from running my UpLift Live Nano event in Bristol, I've got a banner image that promotes that event with a link to go and buy tickets for 17 September. And if you haven't done that, you absolutely should.

There'll be a link in the show notes – https://jesp.me/nanobristol – but that's an example of something that is something I'm currently interested in and I want anyone who looks at my profile to see that as the very first thing they see. But more generally, this should be something that promotes you aims to try and start a few more conversations if possible.

And if it does contain any text, that text should be pretty large and bold and chunky, because a banner image might look nice and big on a desktop screen, but most people look at LinkedIn on mobile, so you don't have a lot of space to play with there. So, that's your banner image, something to be paid attention to because it's the first thing that people see.

If you've ever used a service such as canva.com, it's fairly easy to create one of these, even if you don't really have any kind of graphic design skills. And it's totally free to use a service like that.

So, make sure that you've got something in place rather than default because again, it's if you don't change the default image, it looks like you're not paying a lot of attention to your LinkedIn profile and that's not a good look to give off. All of those things that I've mentioned so far, pretty much mandatory in my opinion. But there are a few things that are a bit more discretionary.

So, over in the right-hand side of the top card of your profile, LinkedIn will also aim to display the name of your current organisation so where you're working right now. And it will also aim to display your preferred maximum level of education. Now, you don't actually need to display those things.

In my case, I've decided to turn off my education.

I used to have it displayed as University of Nottingham, which is where I studied, but I found that a few people got confused and seemed to think that I was based in Nottingham, which I'm not. I'm in Newport in South Wales.

And so I thought given that education items probably not relevant to whether someone wants to hire me for LinkedIn consultancy. I'll just remove it.

So, when you edit your top card information on your profile, you can, using the drop down menu, you can choose to show whichever organisation you want, whichever education you want from what you've previously filled in, but you can also blank those things out. So, you don't need to show either where you work or where you studied.

If you want a cleaner view of your top card where people focus on the things, other things that are in the top card, then you might want to potentially take out both of these things.

I think I would probably recommend leaving organisation in and possibly education as well, especially if you've studied somewhere really notable, you know, University of Oxford, Harvard and so forth. But if it's not that important, you might want to consider taking the education out.

Another optional thing, although I don't really think it should be optional, is the voice recording that appears next to your name.

You might notice, for example, if you look at my profile, next to my name you will see a speaker symbol and if you click on that, you'll hear about 10 seconds of me in my own voice saying how my name is pronounced and a few other words as well. I think this is a good way of adding a bit of personality to your profile. It's free to do.

You can record your voice recording on the mobile app only, although once you've done it's then you can then listen back to it either on mobile or on desktop. And most profiles I come across don't have this feature enabled. So, it's purely because I think most people don't even know that the feature exists.

So, again, on the mobile device, if you go to your profile, go to edit your profile and look for the section that talks about your audio recording.

You can then hold down a microphone button and record up to 10 seconds of you saying your name and maybe saying something about what you're up to right now. It's a really handy little feature, often a one and done.

You know, you're probably not going to re record this very often at all, but it just adds a bit of personality. So, why not do that? To stand out a little bit from everyone else.

Another optional feature that appears in the top card of your profile is the verification symbol. So, you need to go through a process to verify your identity. It's one of the most common questions I'm asked about LinkedIn.

became available in December: 2023

I haven't really seen any benefits from having done it, so I can't in all good conscience recommend it to anyone as certainly not as a way of getting your profile seen by more people, which is what LinkedIn was implying would happen if you verified and there are understandable privacy concerns about what happens to your data when you use your mobile device and use a passport and try and link your identity to LinkedIn. So, on the whole, at the moment, I'm saying probably don't waste your time doing the verification.

As it happened, my verification process went swimmingly. I got it all done in about 3 minutes and I haven't really, you know, thought about it too much since then.

But I can't in all good conscience say that it offers a lot to add to your profile right now. I'll cover just one more thing for now, which is another optional item.

It's the custom button and this is available only if you have a LinkedIn Premium account, which I do. I actually have the Premium All-in-One package and that lets me add an additional button at the top of my LinkedIn profile.

Mine is set to visit my website and there are a few other options that you can select and then you can add your own web link to that and anyone who visits your profile will see that button and if they click through, then maybe they'll go to your signup page or registration for something or other. And that button is also shown in other places as well, such as in search results on posts and so forth as well. So, it's kind of a useful feature. One of the few real benefits of Premium if you ask me.

But that's a whole different topic and I realise now that there's loads more I could say about optimising your LinkedIn profile, but this is the kind of thing I do as my day to day job in one to one consultations and in training sessions and so forth.

So, if you're unsure about any of those things, please drop me a line if you feel like you need help with your LinkedIn profile, that's what I'm here to do, but that will do for now. I hope you found that useful. The more experienced users probably know all of those things inside out, but it's always good to refresh on the basics.

I'll leave it at that for now. If you have any questions, any feedback, please drop me a voice note if you're able to do so.

Otherwise, drop me a line through direct messages on LinkedIn and I'll speak to you all again next time.