My article on inc.com has been enthusiastically received so I think more detailed discussion than what I outlined, on each of the 8 ideas, is in order.
Ensure your Summary and Experience sections talk about you, not your company, even if you are the company.
This is your personal profile. LinkedIn provides company profile pages elsewhere to describe and market the business in another place.Don’t intermix and mistake personal with company profiles narratives.
Ask Yourself: Whose Summary Is It Anyway?
A client sent me 2 drafts of her LinkedIn profile summary to look over and give my opinions to help her choose which version was best.
Ok, she asked for it. I replied (intended politely):
Neither. I insisted she call me so I could explain why she confused the company profile with her personal profile. This will only confuse the reader too.
Why tout the firm she works for in her personal profile summary? Better, she needs to use the personal profile summary to speak about herself: her business journey from her past experience to who she is today and where she expects to go.
If her current passion is about working for that firm, it’s ok to mention the firm briefly, but make the point of why working there or in the industry is relevant to her own personal value proposition.
In her case, she is not the firm. She may be strongly influenced by it, proud of it, but in her drafts of the Summary she was not telling me why her; instead, she is telling why the company, in what should have been written as her place. She needed to spend more time and effort making us “buy into” her as a colleague. Please, as you write your Summary, don’t confuse the two.
The same can be said for the Experience section.
My advice as her LinkedIn coach: let the firm she works for talk about why the company vs. the competition, best done in the company profile page.
