Improving my LinkedIn

Photo by Souvik Banerjee on Unsplash

In the last few months, I decided to participate a bit more on LinkedIn as part of my journey on building the 12 startups. I started to follow people that interests me and also actually comment on posts that I find relevant instead of just hitting the “Like” button. Just doing this I started to receive either reactions or responses on my comments, but I did not see many invites to connect or follow from there. So this got me thinking, can I make someone curious about my profile and if so, how do I do that?

So, I started sending messages to people outside of my network, when either of the following occurs:

• Someone reacted or replied to a comment or post but did not open my profile
• Someone visits my profile but did not send a connection request or send me a message

Now, what was the message I sent? I adjusted the message depending on their own profile, or what they did. But the gist is basically to ask the following:

• What sparked your interest in my post, comment or profile?
• Why didn’t you click on my profile based on that post? What put you off, or what normally piques your curiousity?
• Any other feedback or questions about what I’m doing?

Obviously not everyone responds to these questions, but surprisingly most do. Because of this, I’ve had some interesting talks with different people and also received some great suggestions on how to make my profile better. Here are some of the things that I’ve learned:

1. Your headline is what attracts most people. It is kinda like a billboard when you are commenting on other people’s posts. So make it as interesting as possible. I changed mine from the generic: “I work at X” to “Currently attempting the 12 startups in 12 months challenge”.
2. Write a summary and shape that summary for people you want to attract, e.g. If you’re looking to get hired, shape it into a more concise list of your experience, if you wanted to hire people, talk about your company and why it’s cool and so on.
3. Use the “Featured” section to showcase projects and posts that you want people to check out.

My LinkedIn profile is nowhere near perfect and someone that’s more of an expert might have more ideas on how to improve it. But it’s been an interesting experiment for me and I learned a bit more about how LinkedIn works as a social platform. I encourage you to do something similar, especially since LinkedIn gives you a free month of premium that you can use to message people not in your network.

Originally published at https://justindra.com.