As we enter the final 30 days or so of 2016, your thoughts may turn to the new year, fresh perspectives, new ambitions, and goals. Your professional online presence should be one of those areas that you take a moment to review and ensure you are set for 2017. For many of you, your digital impression is gathered by others from your LinkedIn profile first. As we still await the new user experience and look from LinkedIn there are still some key areas, that are not going to be changing, that you can take a moment to check and take some action on this month.
- Download all your LinkedIn data. You should be doing this on a regular (at least quarterly) basis, and if you never have then now is an opportune time, especially with the upcoming changes. My recent article Do This With Your LinkedIn Profile walks you through the steps you need to take.
- Measure Your Success. You must have a plan with your LinkedIn activity, otherwise, you run the risk of not being effective or worse damaging or diluting your personal brand. Establish what it is that you are using LinkedIn for and importantly put in some metrics that you can monitor on a regular basis. LinkedIn actually has a great free tool to help you with this, the Social Selling Index. You can check what your current SSI score is and then also follow some of the advice LinkedIn offers to raise it using this article What Is Your LinkedIn Score?
- Update Your Information and Maybe Your Headshot. Hopefully, you have had a great year? New accomplishments, perhaps a promotion, some community involvement? There are probably areas of your professional life that can be updated on your profile. Take a moment to also check that areas like contact details are up to date and while you are at it, consider updating your headshot, especially if it has been a while, there is nothing worse than the shock or embarrassment of failing to recognise a new connection because they look nothing like their headshot. My article What Use Is Your Headshot on LinkedIn? has some useful tips and resources.
Finally be sure to remain active and engaged on LinkedIn, the platform rewards you for ‘being interesting’ and that combination of connecting, curating and contributing goes a long way. Be sure you Do Not Make This Profile Damaging Mistake on LinkedIn either by reading my top article of the last year.
As we near the end of another year, this is a perfect time to be asking yourself these questions and start to plan what you want 2017 to be like for you, your career and your personal brand.
In a few weeks, we will be opening registration for our Getting Your Year in Gear program. This is a supported, resource-rich online program to help you get the most out of the next 12 months. To be notified when it’s open and our special reader pricing let us know by completing this form [contact-form to=’businessmanager@charlesb32.sg-host.com’ subject=’Getting Your Year in Gear – Pre Launch’][contact-field label=’Name’ type=’name’ required=’1’/][contact-field label=’Email’ type=’email’ required=’1’/][/contact-form]