5 Simple Ways to Spring Clean and Declutter Your LinkedIn Profile

Now that the Spring flow­ers are bloom­ing and weather is warm­ing up it’s only fit­ting that you extend your cleanup efforts into the social sphere. Time to stop neglect­ing your LinkedIn pro­file, think strate­gi­cally and opti­mize your pro­fes­sional iden­tity on the “World’s Largest Pro­fes­sional Net­work.” This way, both you and your employer can receive a fruit­ful return on social invest­ment. Whether you’ve received every LinkedIn endorse­ment imag­in­able or have cho­sen to flood your pro­file with all kinds of key­word lingo, it’s time to declut­ter. Here are 5 sim­ple ways to help you get started:

1.    Keep Score of your Con­tent Marketing

Sick of cre­at­ing use­less posts that flood your LinkedIn page? Can’t seem to write con­tent to encour­age reader engage­ment? Worry no more – LinkedIn recently cre­ated a con­tent mar­ket­ing scor­ing tool that mea­sures user influ­ence.  Tak­ing into con­sid­er­a­tion pro­file spon­sored updates, com­pany pages, per­sonal groups, employee updates and influ­ence posts, LinkedIn’s con­tent mar­ket­ing score pro­vides users with tips on how to improve their con­tent mar­ket­ing strate­gies. Based on a scale rang­ing from 1–1000, LinkedIn pro­vides users with a pri­vate grade, which reflects the impact of your paid and organic con­tent.  With LinkedIn pro­vid­ing you  rec­om­men­da­tions on ways to improve your score, it’s time you start spruc­ing up that pro­file and reach your unique masses.

2.    Take Advan­tage of the New LinkedIn Pub­lish­ing Machine

Sim­i­lar to that of Google’s Author­ship func­tion­al­ity, LinkedIn’s new pub­lish­ing capa­bil­i­ties pro­vide expe­ri­enced blog­gers with yet another chan­nel to share their great con­tent.  LinkedIn has slowly rolled out its pub­lish­ing fea­ture to all 300 mil­lion mem­bers, pro­vid­ing them with a pow­er­ful way to build their pro­fes­sional brand. If you choose to pub­lish a post on LinkedIn, your con­tent is shared within your trusted net­work, pro­vid­ing users the abil­ity to reach the largest group of pro­fes­sion­als imag­in­able. What started as an “influ­encer pro­gram” when celebri­ties like Martha Stew­art and Bill Gates posted thought lead­er­ship arti­cles, has now res­onated into a vehi­cle of com­mu­ni­ca­tion allow­ing every­day users to receive tens of thou­sands of views and hun­dreds of likes based on their con­tent. So, what are you wait­ing for? Get writ­ing and start shar­ing your con­tent, your 300 mil­lion per­son audi­ence is waiting!

3.    Pro­duce Orig­i­nal Con­tent and Watch it Trend

Out of all social plat­forms, here at Spot­light, we pre­dict that LinkedIn will be the hub of sharable con­tent, mak­ing it more impor­tant than ever for com­pa­nies to pro­duce their own orig­i­nal and thought-provoking blog posts, savvy and con­cise whitepa­pers, ebooks, and Info­graph­ics. Sim­i­lar to Twit­ter, LinkedIn now deliv­ers users an oppor­tu­nity to reach their tar­get audi­ences while using LinkedIn’s per­son­al­ized algo­rithm, in which the plat­form eval­u­ates user ‘trends’ and cat­e­go­rizes pieces of user gen­er­ated con­tent into 17,000 top­ics. The out­come? A list of trend­ing top­ics that your fol­low­ers will want to click on and share with their own audience.

4.    Use “Whose Viewed your Updates” to Cre­ate Max­i­mum Visibility

If you’re not already cre­at­ing con­ver­sa­tional buzz each and every day on LinkedIn, now is the time for you to go ahead and get started. Based on its recent “Who’s Viewed Your Updates” func­tion­al­ity, LinkedIn users can see the num­ber of views, shares and com­ments their posts receive, as well as how far those inter­ac­tions were shared beyond their first-degree con­nec­tions. Use this feed­back to help you to become more nar­rowly focused when you post your updates. This will help you deter­mine what type of infor­ma­tion you should share with your audi­ence, as well as the fre­quency of your posts. In sum, this help­ful data will assist your com­pany in cre­at­ing the most effec­tive LinkedIn sta­tus updates. 

5.    Find A New Way To Show­case Your Company’s Offerings

If you’re busy upload­ing your company’s spe­cial­ties onto your LinkedIn “Prod­ucts and Ser­vices” page, stop what you’re doing right now! As of April 14, 2014, these pages have been removed. In lieu of their removal, LinkedIn has launched its “Show­case” pages,” where com­pa­nies can show off their brands and prod­ucts. Busi­nesses now have the abil­ity to cre­ate unique pages for each prod­uct offer­ing, while users will be able to fol­low prod­ucts they’re most inter­ested in.  LinkedIn’s “Show­case” pages make it easy for com­pa­nies to build organic com­mu­ni­ties of brand evan­ge­lists who will start con­ver­sa­tions around their prod­ucts and brands.

So there you have it – the top Spring-cleaning trends to help you dust off your out­dated LinkedIn pro­file and start cre­at­ing con­tent strate­gies that con­vert into com­pany sales.

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