SOME TIPS ABOUT PERSONAL BRANDING ON LINKEDIN

LinkedIn is the social network that is mainly involved in professional contacts networks and its aim is to create and maintain online relationships, but on the basis of business contacts.

This social network is critical on two fronts: in the B2B (business to business) as it allows you to create collaborations and participation in working groups between various brands; in personal branding, as it is the alternative digital business card or curriculum: is an online space where you can publish your current professional position, your education and your work experience.

What does personal branding mean?

“Personal branding is the practice of people marketing themselves and their careers as brands. While previous self-help management techniques were about self-improvement, the personal-branding concept suggests instead that success comes from self-packaging.
Personal Branding is essentially the ongoing process of establishing a prescribed image or impression in the mind of others about an individual, group or organization.” (source: Wikipedia)
Among the various ways of promoting yourselves, nowadays the one that stands out more insistently is definitely the effective management of your LinkedIn profile.
LinkedIn is a professional social network that collects millions of users and, for this reason, standing out from the crowd is not so simple: to bring out your presence, you need to update your profile, cultivate your network and promote yourselves in the right way with the skills.

What are the skills on LinkedIn?

The skills in LinkedIn are among the most important things to stand out: beyond your course of study and your work experiences, which are fundamental, the skills are crucial in the context of recruiting, because who will visit your profile will know precisely what you can do and if you are the right person for the job they would like to offer to you.
According to the data published by LinkedIn, in fact, exhibiting your skills increases by 13 times the odds that your profile can be consulted. But to make sure that you appear in search results and to provide a complete description of everything that you can do, you have to include also the niche skills together with those of a high standard.

What is the correct way to insert your skills?

• Try not to be too general: use specific skills (for example, it is better to insert “social media marketing” rather than “marketing” in general).
• Insert only the inherent and relevant skills to the profession to which you aspired.
• Order your skills based on relevance (or on the relevance that you want they have towards those who is watching your profile).
• Do not include too many skills to “make up the numbers”: it’s better to insert a few but those in which you are really competent and where you can be ready during the interview and the subsequent job.

What does skill endorsements mean?

In LinkedIn you can endorse the skills of your links. And the action is reciprocal.
Through alerts that are displayed automatically in the profile or windows that you can find on the social network main page, you can endorse the skills of your connections, and they can do the same to you: this process is a great tool to help you effortlessly to keep your profile updated and validates, especially for those who is consulting your profile, your declared skills.

Another great way to promote your personal branding on LinkedIn is adding your projects.

Adding your projects to your profile is a crucial step. In this way you can demonstrate all your skills and tools necessary for a possible recruitment, through the creation or publication of your projects.
On LinkedIn there is a section dedicated to that. It’s called Project and within it you can add:

• the name of your project
• a job to connect between the ones you have mentioned in your profile (optional)
• a link to your project
• those who participated
• a description (an opportunity to add your job keywords)

Finally, it has recently activated the possibility to write and post articles on LinkedIn.

Thanks to the possibility to upload content directly from your LinkedIn profile, this social network will become the first choice platform on which to put content to prove your worth and to become points of reference in your field, even for those of you who have not the time and the means to build their own blog.
The benefits in terms of personal branding will definitely remarkable, inasmuch as there is the ability to let you be followed and not only to be connected.
Moreover, you can also share the articles you published on social networks (Twitter and Facebook): in this way you will get more visibility, which has always been considered the key to success!

Therefore, it’s essential today to be present in LinkedIn and use it correctly, in order to bring out online your uniqueness and promote your personal branding: be clear and honest in showing your skills and your projects, and insert interesting and professional content. The doors of the job that you dream could open as soon as possible!