Most, if not all of us, will benefit from the personal brand-building power of LinkedIn, whether for job search, business or overall healthy career management.
And it works extremely well.
LinkedIn provides all kinds of personal branding opportunities to:
- Connect and expand our network,
- Communicate our personal brand,
- Become more visible to people who may want to hire us or do business with us,
- Uncover job and business leads,
- Research our target companies and employees, and
- Demonstrate our subject matter expertise.
But sometimes we make missteps that sabotage those branding opportunities.
3 Surprising Ways You Let LinkedIn Hurt Your Personal Brand
1. Neglecting to improve your personal brand’s visibility by customizing your LinkedIn profile headline with relevant keywords and phrases.
Increasing the visibility of your LinkedIn profile to become more “findable” is a good thing, right?
This means that when people search on LinkedIn for candidates like you, they’ll see your LinkedIn profile above your competitors, and will probably take a look at your profile before they go to others.
Your profile (and therefore YOU) becomes more visible and findable when you place the right keywords and phrases throughout your profile in the right ways, and pay particular attention to the places ranking high with LinkedIn’s search engine.
This savvy use of keywords and phrases is called Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
LinkedIn allows 220 characters and spaces to fully populate the headline, a prime SEO spot on your profile. You can customize the headline in any way you’d like.
“So what”, you say? “LinkedIn already put a headline on my profile, and it looks fine to me.”
Why you should take the time to customize your profile headline
In general, search engines pay more attention to content that sits higher on any web page, than that which falls lower down on the page.
It must make sense to you then that, since your LinkedIn profile headline shows up at the very top of the web page which is your profile, the LinkedIn search engine will pay more attention to it than the content lower in your profile.
So, a keyword-rich headline should push your profile higher up in search results for the keywords you’ve put there.
But a robust headline is not only about SEO. It will also provide human beings with critical information about you the instant they land on your profile.
They won’t necessarily need to scroll down the page to get a good indication of what your personal brand is all about, and what you have to offer. But an enticing headline will compel them to scroll down and get all the juicy details about your good-fit qualities.
Let me give you an example. The first headline here is the default LinkedIn puts on a profile, using the job title you’ve filled in for your current (or most recent) job in the “Experience” section. Compare this with the second keyword-rich, brand-evident version:
Chief Data Scientist at XYZ Company
OR
Chief Data Scientist for the Fortune 500 | Artificial Intelligence, Data Analytics, Product Development, Thought Leadership | My mantra for business survival in the technology sphere: Unlearn. Transform. Reinvent.
The second headline will have a much bigger impact on both the LinkedIn search engine and any human eyeballs that see it.
I strongly urge you to refrain from fluffing up your headline with words and phrases that won’t be searched like “open to new opportunities” or “results-oriented”. Stick with the keywords and brand messaging you pulled together in your job search research.
More about this in 3 BIG Mistakes That Screw Up SEO for Your LinkedIn Professional Headline.
2. Copying parts of other people’s LinkedIn Profiles (including samples on professional LinkedIn profile writers’ websites)
You’re looking around and you’re impressed by someone’s LinkedIn profile content. It’s compelling and brands that person well. It speaks to you.
He or she has the same kind of qualifications you do. Their profile sounds so much like you.
You want your profile to be as good as that. But you’re not a very good writer.
You see no reason not to use some of that good writing in your own profile. Not the whole thing, just some of it. Somehow, because it’s right in front of you, online for all the world to see, you don’t think of it as stealing.
But it most certainly IS stealing.
I’ve written before about the problems with plagiarizing content from other people’s LinkedIn profiles.
Here are 7 reasons why it’s a bad idea (go to the above article for details):
- Copyright infringement comes with expensive penalties.
- A copycat personal brand takes the “personal” out of the equation.
- It’s not your unique personal brand.
- It may not be appropriate for your situation.
- It may cause you to be shut out by identity confusion and conflicts.
- It tarnishes your personal brand, and puts your reputation and integrity in question.
- Bad SEO (search engine optimization) reduces impact and authority.
How does LinkedIn view duplicate content?
Another problem is that search engines, in general, penalize for duplicate content. I have to assume that the LinkedIn search engine does as well.
And LinkedIn itself states in its User Agreement “Dos” and “Don’ts”, that members agree they will NOT:
“Violate the intellectual property rights of others, including copyrights, patents, trademarks, trade secrets, or other proprietary rights. For example, do not copy or distribute (except through the available sharing functionality) the posts or other content of others without their permission.”
3. Tarnishing your personal brand by allowing typos, misspellings and glaring grammatical errors to be in your profile content.
Such errors will make you look bad as a candidate – unprofessional, lazy for not bothering to proofread and/or lacking strong written communications skill.
But that’s not all.
They can negatively impact your profile’s SEO, especially when they show up towards the top of your profile, where SEO is more potent, as I noted earlier.
LinkedIn and other search engines may not recognize words and phrases that vary from the exact words in any way.
You need to:
- Proofread diligently for typos and misspellings.
- Avoid abbreviations unless those abbreviations are industry-standards (like “CFO”).
For instance, the phrase “CFO, Senior Finance Manager” may be doomed, if it looks like either of these:
CFO, Senior Finance Manger (Manager is misspelled)
CFO, Senior Finance Mgr (Manager is abbreviated)
Bottom Line:
There’s no place like LinkedIn to build your personal brand for job search, career and business, but following best practices for your LinkedIn strategy is critical. Do your best to keep up with the ever-changing ways to best leverage all that LinkedIn has to offer all of us.
More About LinkedIn and Executive Job Search
Essential LinkedIn Guide for Today’s Executive Job Search
How to Connect on LinkedIn with People You Don’t Know . . . and Get Action
Executive Resume – LinkedIn Profile – Biography: What’s the Difference?