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Now that you know how LinkedIn can help you and your small business, we’ll jump right into building an interesting and effective user profile and a business profile.

Building a personal profile

To build a complete profile, LinkedIn recommends:

Your current position

• Two past positions
• Your education
• A profile summary
• A profile photo
• Your business specialties
• At least three recommendations from your connections

LinkedIn states that “users with complete profiles are 40 times more likely to receive opportunities through LinkedIn,” so there’s no reason not to!

While LinkedIn is a place where you can share your work experience, it isn’t a place to post your résumé as it appears on paper. Since users and businesses can search for you, your profile must include search keywords that describe you and your work. It also needs to be interesting! The more engaging you are, the more other users will feel that they know you and the more likely they will be to connect with you.

To make your descriptions readable, focus on a one- to two-sentence description of how you helped each company reach its goals instead of listing your responsibilities, and do it in active voice. Do the same in your personal summary. It’s the first thing people will see when they view your profile, so it needs to be incredibly descriptive but short and to the point.

For your profile photo, stick with close-up head shots with no other people in the shot. Informal photos are ok (depending on the level of formality required in your job), but if the photo is of you with your best friend, how will we know which one is you?

Get connected by auto-importing your Outlook and Gmail contacts. LinkedIn will scour its database for people with those e-mail addresses, and you can invite them to connect with you with a single click. You can also use the People You May Know tool on your LinkedIn home page, and use People Search to find other acquaintances.

For more tips, check out 10 LinkedIn profile tips, LinkedIn Tips and Tweaks, and 5 tips from MarketingSavant.

Building a business profile

Compared to your user profile, making a company profile is a piece of cake. Simply enter as much information as you have (or are willing to disclose) about your company into the appropriate fields, and you’re ready to go!

Points to remember:

• Building a complete LinkedIn profile helps people help you (and your business)
• Succinctly describe how you reached goals for your jobs instead of listing responsibilities in your profile
• Use active voice in all descriptions
• LinkedIn provides tools that help you connect to other users easily
• Business profiles are incredibly simple to set up

Did this article help you? What other social media networks would you like us to cover? Let us know in the comments!