How to Update Your LinkedIn Profile to Match Your Goals in 30 minutes

Okay, so let's go ahead and get started. I'm Sean Smith, welcome. I'm the founder of Illumino.co and the publisher of MedTech Leading Voice. And we're gonna do a special workshop today, how to update your LinkedIn profile to match your goals in 30 minutes or less. So let's get started. Thank you all for joining. So the first thing to keep in mind when you're updating your LinkedIn profile is what are your goals? And that's why this session is called how to align your profile with your goals. If you're looking for a new job or you're looking to be recruited or promoted,

or you're an employer and you're trying to attract top talent or you're an entrepreneur or a business owner who wants to bring in new customers or perhaps you work in sales marketing and you're looking to use LinkedIn as a marketing channel. These are all things to keep in mind or you're starting your own thing or you wanna be a leading voice in your own right. These are all considerations that you need to keep in mind but no matter what you do, you wanna make sure that your profile is clear, specific and likable. And we're gonna get into all of that as we go through the thing. So what we're gonna cover here is in this order,

picture, background, headline, employer, connections, hashtags, who you have in common, and then time permitting, we're gonna get to about activity and jobs. But essentially what you wanna keep in mind is that people are looking at your profile and they're making judgements and rarely are they getting beyond this section. And so you wanna make sure that they're looking at the information right here. And what they're deciding is whether or not they're gonna connect with you, whether or not they're going to take a call with you, whether or not they're going to invite you to speak, whether or not they're going to invite you to interview.

And so all of those things matter and what they're looking for is clues, but they're also looking for red flags. So we're gonna get into clues and we're gonna get into red flags. you know, why they matter. So the first thing is the picture. And if you think about the picture and why the picture matters, then let's start with blank. Blank gives people very little information on which to judge you. And that can be good and bad. That can work to your advantage. There are people who, for a variety of reasons, choose to leave the image blank. There are other people that choose, I've noticed recently, to only make the image available to people that

they're connected with. And I haven't figured out how to do that and nor would I want to because the image that I use currently is this one here. And it's one that I've used for a number of years now. If any of you saw my post today or yesterday, it was about, you know, should I use something less formal? Now that I'm a business owner and not an employee. Then you have the snapshot. The snapshot is something that I don't really care for. First of all, I hate dark glasses on LinkedIn. Second of all, I don't really like it when people use wedding photos or some sort of event that they were at.

And it's really obvious that they've cropped up the person that they were next to. It just feels it feels lazy. And then there's like, the model image, and I've seen this, particularly with with women where they're like wearing shoulder lists or sleeveless tops or whatever. And they just come across looking like an unprofessional. And the thing with the with the model image is that it doesn't really really doesn't make you very likable. So I'm sort of landing somewhere between this and this and saying, you know, depending on who you are, if you're looking for a job, you definitely want to lean more towards the professional.

However, I'm thinking about having a professional photographer do some informal shots because as a business owner, that makes sense. The main thing that we're thinking about here is, does this person look like somebody I'd like to work with? Does this person look like somebody I'd like to hire? Does this person look like somebody I'd get along with? Because a lot of people have skills, but what they don't have is fit. And what a lot of people are looking for is fit. Is this person going to fit? Then we're going to get to the background image. The background image. The background image is often neglected.

It's a lot of times blank, probably 30% of the time, 30 to 40% of the time, people just leave it blank. They don't even realize that this section is here, that they can change this section. Other people change this section like they change their clothing. And they can switch from a variety. And I've been trying a lot of different things recently. But what I've really settled on for me as a... As a business owner is to make it as likable as possible. And so for me, I've gone with the scenic image. But I've also tried the publisher. Are people going to look at my authority? And are they going to say, this is sort of a thing?

So depending on where you are in your career and what it is that you're trying to achieve, that can be something. This is the promotional one. I don't... Some people are of the mindset that you use this space to drive direct response. I don't really believe that. I use this as an example, something that I never actually used. And I just find these kind of pushy and overwhelming. So if you're looking to attract an audience, right? And you're thinking about how attractive is my profile? And you've got this really pushy advertisement. And you've got this really pushy advertisement up here in the upper right-hand corner.

You may want to rethink that. The other thing that I see a lot is people just upload their company logo. But it ends up being really fuzzy and blurry. Or half cut off by their photo or something like that. And it just looks bad. If you have a bad-looking background, you're better off with no background at all. If you're in the business of trying to appear likable, If you're in the business of trying to appear likable, If you're in the business of trying to appear likable, then you might want to consider using sort of a scenic photo somewhere where you live, somewhere where you like. And the other thing that I've seen is quotes.

And so I use a quote here, not a business quote, not having anything to do with anything other than trying to signal to my audience that I'm a likable person. And so that's sort of the background on... This is the main thing here. This is your headline. This is the section, if we go back, where it says B2B content creator, et cetera. And we're going to actually redo mine during this session. And the way that we're going to redo it is we're going to say, you know, founder and publisher. Because you want to let people...

into the ballpark, have them understand immediately what you do. So use your title here if you have the title. You don't need to say the company that you work for, because that's going to automatically appear to the right of the thing. It's also going to appear in your work history. You don't really need that unless you feel like it's really important. The next is to let them know sort of what industry you're in. And you can choose. One. Or more than one area that you work in. And then you want to tell them... You want to jam some keywords into this thing. And the keywords that you want to put into this thing are around what you specialize in.

So I'm a founder and publisher. In what industry? Specializing in this. Oh, and by the way, you know, I run this. And then you have this humanizing element down at the bottom. Which I believe is important. Not everyone does. And what that does is that tells people that you're not all work. Right? You're not all... Well, in this case, it kind of does tell you that you're... But the point is, is that you want... So you might have cat lover. You might have proud mom. You might have all sorts of things written here around your, you know, supporter of a specific cause. Something that indicates your personality above and beyond your work role.

Leading voice program. You might have something that you published. You might have an award that you received. You might have a number of things written there. I find that these three things at the top really help people understand very, very quickly who you are. And whether or not they want to connect with you. And if you nail these three things right at the top, then you're going to have a winning profile that's going to attract people. Now, I've noticed this trend where rather than writing what somebody does, somebody says enthusiastic about technology or something like that. For me, that is not an attractive thing.

That is basically saying, I'm not going to tell you what I do. I'm going to leave you guessing. And I'm probably in sales. And I'm trying to hide that fact from you. So that goes to the question of if you are in sales, how do you indicate that? And I think the best thing to do is just to put your title or your role. And just be clear that you're in sales or business development. You know, that you're a seasoned sales professional, for example. I think that's perfectly justifiable. People are looking at where you work.

But that should, as I say, show up from the work history with the logo of the company right next to where you work. If you don't feel like that's clear, then you can go ahead and put that in your profile. But you don't need to write. You know, Sean Smith is founder and publisher at Illumino.co. Because that should become, or MedTech leading voice, that should become apparent based on the work history. The question that they're asking themselves when they're looking at the company is, do I understand what industry they're in? Do I understand what they do? Am I able to look at the overall profile?

And I'm going to be able to understand all this. And I'm going to be able to understand all this stuff. So what do you do if you're unemployed? You know, there are a number of things that you can do besides writing unemployed. And leaving the employer blank. One thing that you can do is you can just say that you're consulting. And you can, you know, make up a company. Or you can just leave the previous employer listed. And so that's probably what most people do is just leave the previous employer in the previous role.

Connections. So why do connections matter? You know, what connections matter is not because it's a popularity contest. This is not Instagram. This is not TikTok. This is LinkedIn. This is LinkedIn. This is LinkedIn. Actually, you can get punished on LinkedIn for having too many connections. Because what it does is it reduces the number of people that they're actually going to show your stuff to. So you want to connect discriminately. You want to attract the people that you want to attract. And not the people that you don't. However, when people are looking at the number of connections that you have,

they're basically looking at do they have, you know, 100, zero connections, a few hundred connections, a few thousand connections, or do they have like 5,000 plus. And basically the line for me is somewhere around 2,000, which indicates how active the person is. 1,000 to 2,000 is sort of, you know, normal average. And that indicates to me that the person is relatively active. They understand the platform and that sort of thing. Hashtags. You may have noticed that on certain profiles it allows you to have a number of hashtags.

Five is the number to be exact. It's only available in creator mode, which is something that you can turn on on your profile. But I don't recommend turning that on unless you have more than 2,000. So that's a good thing. I think that's a good thing. I think that's a good thing. That's sort of the general recommendation. My dog just arrived. And it will help you attract the right audience. And then what you want to use is a series of big hashtags and small hashtags. And to find the hashtags, you simply go into the search box that's on the top of every LinkedIn screen, and you type in hashtag. And then say medical devices, all one word, all lowercase.

And it will tell you how many followers there are of each one of those hashtags. You want to choose something with, you know, 10,000 plus followers. But you also want to choose one or two that are relatively little, but that you're likely to rank for when you create posts. In terms of connections in common. It will show you the connections that you have in common with a person. And this is going to boost your credibility. It's going to boost your referrals. And it's going to boost your influence. In terms of the about section, what you want to keep in mind is that really they're only going

to see the first two lines of this without clicking on read more. I'm of the mind that very few people actually even make it to the top of the page. And it's actually the about section that they make their decision based on the upper part of the profile. And that unless they're seriously considering hiring you or something like that, they don't necessarily get into this section. So the one sentence opener, I've seen people that are like, let me tell you about my life story. And I'm like, oh, you know, you want a very clear opening sentence. Some people go with a headline. you know i'll make money for you i prefer something that's just sort of um more generic

along the lines of you know seasoned marketing professional with experience in life sciences and publishing something like that um basically get people to understand very quickly who you are and what you do um specializing in such and such and um beyond that what you write in the lower part you can i think there's like 2 000 characters or something like that that they allow you to have um you want to be judicious about that you don't want to present them with a wall of text you want to use bullet points you want to use emojis to um uh not not like ha ha ha emojis but um you know arrows and uh um pointers to try to highlight certain things that are relevant to the audience

and then finally is the activity section and this is a section that i look to um but not very many people do so when i when i gave the star ratings to things i gave a relatively low star rating to activity even though it's one of the most important sections for me and it tells me how active a person is do they simply repost things that are written by other people or they do they create content of their own are they a frequent liker and commenter of other people's stuff or do they simply post their own stuff um do they post their own stuff uh those are important questions to ask and if so with what frequency and looking at those factors is going to help

you understand a lot about the person you know you might occasionally run across things that are um uh political and um uh you know not not necessarily all that helpful uh or or nice um in that case you know then then you're gonna find some warning signs but by and large um what you're looking for is you know are they um uh are they doing are they doing it correctly so this is the four-step profile builder um which i will um make available in the chat

um and let's see i copied the presentation itself as well as the sorry um we'll see um as well as the four-step profile builder in into this section here um and uh excuse me sorry about that um so um those those two things have been copied uh in

into the chat but what i wanted to do now really quickly is just go through and um share my screen and do an update of my own profile which is something um that I haven't done in a while. And so going to LinkedIn and the first thing that I'm going to do. So we talked about the photo for the time being, I'm going to keep the photo the same because I don't have a new photo that I like. But, oh yeah. And I have to send you the video on how

to. So my LinkedIn background, this is the background that I'm going to use. This has a quote from one of my favorite authors. And the goal here is to make me seem like somebody who my audience would want to connect with. Then I'm going to move into this section here. And when you update this section here, updating this section, here is done primarily here in the headline. And this section here. So I'm going to say

that that is done through the, so what we want to do here is we, I find this B2B content creator to be a little bit vague. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to update this with Boundary. So I'm going to say Boundary with my actual job title, job titles. And then I'm going to next say that I am in MedTech, life sciences. And I'm going to get rid of that. And I'm going to say

health tech, right? Then I'm going to, then in this section here is where I want to put the keywords. And so for me, MDR and IVDR are important. Then we want to say QA, RA, QA slash RA.

And I'm going to say QA, RA, QA slash RA. And I'm going to say QA, RA, QA slash RA. And I'm going to say QA, RA, QA slash RA. And I can't remember what the other one that I chose was. So we'll leave that blank for the moment. But the idea here is to put keywords in. Keywords will help people find you. And they're going to help people understand, is this person right for me? So think of this as saying, I am a founder and publisher. I work in this industry and I specialize in these areas. These are the areas that I am most knowledgeable, I'm eligible about and then I use this section here, Leading Voice Program

and Worker B to indicate that those are things that I've accomplished on my own. And then the humanizing element is that that's what I consider myself, but I could put dog lover or I could put something else. So then I'm updating this. And as you can see here, I'm going to say this is what I've accomplished. I'm going to say this is what I've done. This is what I've done. This is what I've done. As you can see, I also have hashtags, which I'm going to update. And you get some links down here, which you can use to go directly to your thing. So that's basically it. My profile is updated. If anybody has any questions, please.

Oh, there is a question. Oh, that I may need to send the document presentation again. I will do that. I will put that in the follow-up email. And let's see. Yes. How can I do that? Putting it in everyone. And now I believe that people should be able to access the presentation as well as the

PowerPoint. We're step profile builder. If everyone is able to see that. Does anybody have any questions about updating their profile? If you have any questions, please feel free to email me. My email is, sorry, chat, Sean, B2B. Please feel free to email me with any questions that you have.

If you would like help understanding how to create a background image or anything like that, please let me know. I am happy to help. And that is about 30 minutes. So unless anybody else has any questions, we're going to go ahead and wrap things up. I hope that was helpful to you. I hope that you have a better understanding of how to update your profile. Again, it doesn't need to be a big deal. The four-step thing is really just help them understand who you are.

And why they should connect with you. If you keep that in mind, you can't go wrong. Thanks for your time. And I look forward to the next workshop. Bye.