The 10 Areas of Your LinkedIn Profile Where a Majority of You Are Failing | Your Digital Marketing Coach with Neal Schaffer

• Updated on: 2022-11-07
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The 10 Areas of Your LinkedIn Profile Where a Majority of You Are Failing
Working with corporate clients I have developed my own 100-point LinkedIn profile audit score that looks at 20 different areas of a LinkedIn profile. And, year in and year out, most professionals underperform in these 10 areas.
Listen in for some tangible and actionable LinkedIn profile advice!
Key Highlights
[ 04:09 ] What Social Selling Index Does?
[ 05:21 ] My 100 Point System
[ 07:26 ] Searching for People
[ 26:20 ] Write Your Professional Summary in First Person
[ 28:31 ] Publish More Content on Linkedin!
[ 31:09 ] Current Company Experience
[ 33:27 ] Summary
Notable Quotes
I'm finding that a majority of employees, and these are generally primarily sales-focused people, they are falling short, in pretty much the same 10 areas, year in and year out every time I do this.
This proprietary methodology that I think really brings your LinkedIn profile into alignment with the high performers in your industry. And as you all know, all roads on LinkedIn lead to your profile. That's why it's so critical that you get it right.
The LinkedIn profile is almost like your second website. In fact, if you do not have a website, your LinkedIn profile pretty much is your own website. And that's why you want to make sure that your profile is up to par.
I always say claim your personal URL before someone with a similar name does.
I would bet that LinkedIn by limiting you to high five hashtags, it's really saying that you specialize. You're an expert in these areas, and therefore, when you publish content around those areas, it would make sense that maybe it gets a little bit more priority than people that don't have those hashtags that are publishing content with those hashtags.
LinkedIn is an inbound marketing tool, the more data you give it, the more places that you said you worked, the more keywords you can add in those places, the broader the connections you can make with other people.
It was my wife who said, you know, all those past relationships that you have, add up to who you are today. They've made you who you are today, they are a part of you. There's nothing to be embarrassed about. I would say about all your past experiences, add up to who you are. And you never know when that past experience is going to come in handy.
 By putting volunteering/organizations in your profile, you're not only building that potential data point that helps connect with someone. But it's this point of relatability. 
Introduce yourself, like you would, as if you were speaking with someone. And that will make your LinkedIn profile, all the more impactful.
Learn More:
Join My Digital First Mastermind: https://nealschaffer.com/membership/  
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All My Podcast Show Notes: https://podcast.nealschaffer.com
Neal Schaffer:
0:00
Have you ever wondered how your LinkedIn profile compares with your competitors or your peers? Well back with data, I'm going to introduce to you the 10 different areas that a majority of LinkedIn profiles fail in for the first time publicly in this next episode of The your digital marketing coach, podcast. Digital social media content influencer marketing, blogging, podcasting, blogging, tick tocking, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, SEO, SEM, PPC, email marketing, who there's a lot to cover, whether you're a marketing professional entrepreneur, or business owner, you need someone you can rely on for expert advice. Good thing you've got, Neil, on your side, because Neal Schaffer is your digital digital marketing marketing coach, helping you grow your business with digital first marketing one episode at a time. This is your digital marketing coach. And this is Neal Schaffer. Hey, everybody, this is your digital marketing coach Neal Schaffer. And welcome to my podcast. This is episode number 258. And as I did in a recent episode, we are going to go a little deep on LinkedIn here. Now on a recent episode, I also mentioned that I spoke at the Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices annual convention in Louisville, Kentucky, and I actually recorded an episode all about one of the presentations I did. And that presentation was all about a successful simple formula for social media marketing. So hope you enjoyed that episode. And when I talked about that simple formula, I also said, Hey, I also want to bring up the other presentation I did at that convention, which was about LinkedIn. Now, I'm not going to go through everything I talked about, I did when you listen to the previous episode on Lincoln's newest features to focus on for 2022. This is episode 252. I talked in length about creator mode, I'm going to talk a little bit about creator mode in this episode as well. But I really want to get into what I have developed over time. So I have clients, and I have corporate clients that want me to help judge or evaluate their sales team on how well their LinkedIn profiles are. Now, LinkedIn used to have a profile completeness meter, which they no longer have. But that gave us an idea of, hey, you know, you have an all star profile or you know, maybe, maybe they still do have it. I haven't seen it recently. But you may find it. But it used to say, hey, in order to be 100%, profile completeness, or in order to be an all star, you need to add more things, do this, do that, what have you. And I never thought that was really a good way of evaluating how strong a LinkedIn profile was. It was basically LinkedIn saying, hey, we want you to flesh out a minimum of these things. So that you'll have a complete profile. And therefore, recruiters will more easily find you and they can sell more ads. And I mean, you get the picture, right? LinkedIn is in it for the money for advertisers, money for recruiters money from sales, people's money, what have you. LinkedIn also has something and I'll put the link in the show notes, something called the social selling index. And this is more geared towards salespeople, obviously, but any professional can access this for free. And it will say, Hey, this is how well you're doing and a score of one to 100 from this social selling index. Now, the problem with the social selling index, is it does sort of take your account into consideration, supposedly, in the background, it's doing some sort of calculation. But I never thought that that was completely 100% accurate as well. I mean, it's accurate, right? And really, what the social selling index does is it looks at four main characteristics of your profile. And they named them establish your brand. So how well is your personal brand? Find the right people? Are you searching for people, I guess, is maybe how they are, you know, looking this up, engage with insights, or are you actually sort of engaging with other people's content, and then build relationships. So by you connecting with other people. And what I found was, you know, in general, it's a good framework, but I thought that I could improve that framework, improve that framework to the point where I actually created my own way of looking at LinkedIn profiles, and giving them a number, like the social selling index from between zero and 100. Now this is information I've never divulged publicly, I've only done these audits for corporate clients, where they want me to judge, you know, 10s, if not hundreds of employees and compare them and score them so that the underperforming employees can better improve their LinkedIn profiles. And I give them the advice on how to do that as well. If you're interested in that service, please do reach out to me. But I basically created a 100 point system based on 20 different criteria. Because I felt the four point criteria were just not enough and not realistic and didn't cover a lot of different profile features. Let's put it that way. So I went out and said, Well, if I was going to recommend you create an absolute perfect profile, I would want to make sure that it includes these things in for this reason. Now, I bring this up now, because once again, I have a corporate client where I'm working with them on and I'm finding that a majority of employees, and these are generally primarily sales focused people, they are falling short, in pretty much the same 10 areas, year in and year out every time I do this. And this is what I mentioned, without going into detail. At the recent event with Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices was I basically listed these are the 10, underperforming areas that I see all the time. So bringing up my most recent data, I wanted to share that with you all as well. So that you all have an idea of where your LinkedIn profile might be falling short, and therefore where you can improve it without providing you a zero to 100 score. Now, I have thought long about putting this service up on my website. So if you are interested in said, Neil, I would like to compare my profile with the top 10 people in my industry, and what can I do to improve it, this is a special sort of custom service that I do offer, you can feel free to ping me. And I'll definitely give you a quote as to what that cost. But it is this proprietary methodology that I think really brings your LinkedIn profile into alignment with the high performers in your industry. And as you all know, all roads on LinkedIn lead to your profile. That's why it's so critical that you get it right. Every time you invite someone, you comment, you post, there's a link on your name that goes back to your profile. And believe it or not, I forgot where I saw this data. But the number one activity on LinkedIn is searching for people. Obviously there are people searching for people to hire them. But they're also searching for salespeople. They're searching for collaborators, partners, interesting people who knows, right? So the LinkedIn profile is almost like your second website. In fact, if you do not have a website, I have a lot of professional marketers that listen to this podcast. So if you don't have your own website, your LinkedIn profile pretty much is your own website. And that's why you want to make sure that your profile is up to par. So with that in mind, let's take a look at the top 10 areas where year in year out a majority of professionals that I audit, under perform. And I'm going to divide these into five important ones that I think you should immediately address in five, nice to haves not as important their second priority. But you know what, if you were to spend a day, if you were to spend like two hours, you could easily get through all 10 of these, or at least plant the seeds so that you will succeed in all 10 of these, if that makes sense. All right, I actually want to keep you lifting longer. So that start, and this isn't clickbait or anything, but let's start with the five, nice to haves, okay. And these are in no particular order, the only order they're in is sort of the order in which I audit different things when I go through everybody's profiles. So one of the five nice to haves is the personalized URL. So if you were to go to linkedin.com/in/neal Schaffer, you would get to my LinkedIn profile. And when you join LinkedIn, LinkedIn basically gives you a profile URL. In this profile URL is pretty much based on your name fields, literally like first name, dash, you know, middle name, last name, dash, if you have like MBA you put like a title, it basically puts hyphens in lieu of spaces in between every element of your name, and then it adds another hyphen and then it adds like a seven or eight or nine digit number. So the problem with that default URL is it's hard to memorize. And if it's hard to memorize, you're not going to put it in an email signature, you're not going to put it on your business card and you can't sort of yell it off like I was able to do it. So it gets harder to connect with people that you meet as we get out of this pandemic and start doing more in person networking again. So that's why I always recommend plus move bring perspective, it just looks better, you know. And I always say claim your personal URL before someone with a similar name does. So for those of you that read windmill networking, understanding, leveraging and maximizing LinkedIn, which I published back in 2009, I had the exact same advice. So if you were listening to me, more than a decade ago, you would have already had this down. Obviously, the people moderating did not. But it is very, very easy to personalize your URL, I will put this in the show notes as well, there is a link, it's in your settings. And sometimes the settings in LinkedIn are really, really complex, overly complex. And although they're doing a better job at it, you know, there is an area on your profile settings where you are able to do this. And perhaps like I said, I will add that link to the show notes, and help guide you if you download actually, you know what even better download my maximising LinkedIn for business ebook, I'll put a link in the show notes. And there is also a link in my freebies paid. So Neal schaffer.com/freebies. And that will have this and pretty much all the information I'm covering is part of that ebook. So let's just, let's just have you go there, that'll simplify things. Okay. So number one, nice to have personalized URL. Number two, and I referenced this early on, is the episode I did about Lincoln's newest features is creator mode. Now creator mode, actually, LinkedIn has done better at explaining what exactly it is. And it's still, I believe, a roadmap. But some of the cool things it does is number one, it allows you to add hashtags under your bio. So if you go to my bio, linkedin.com/in/neal Schaffer, you'll see that I have you know, talks about and announce these five hashtags. I actually had some people during this recent corporate audit, that we're including hashtags in their profile headline, the profile headline is very, very limited real estate, I think it's only like 210 characters, and you want to use them wisely. So why not use the Creator mode that allows you to include hashtags so that it becomes part of your brand, when people go to your profile, they immediately know what you're bout, after looking at your professional headline, after seeing those hashtags. What crater mode also does is it gives you access to LinkedIn live. Now, whether you live stream or not, having access is better than not having access, right, and this is completely free. Another interesting thing it does is if you were to go to my profile, and we are not connected, it does not have a connect button, it has a Follow button. Now this is a ninja trick that a lot of LinkedIn experts have, while I've never talked about it on my podcast, but it's a setting that LinkedIn has always had that says follow before connect. So I get more followers than connections, meaning that when I publish content in my feed, it goes up to people that are number greater than my connections. So it allows you to get more exposure for your content, because not everybody is going to actually go to the process of connecting with you. Because the default is follow. If you were to press like the right, the downward arrow to the right of follow, it would give you the ability to connect. But not everybody does that. So that is the default, when you go on creator mode that connect immediately translates in the follow. Now, I've had a question about this in my digital first mastermind. But another feature that creator mode gives you is the ability to send a newsletter on LinkedIn. Now, I don't know why you'd want to do this. If you're a Gary Vaynerchuk, I get it. For most of us, we want to build our newsletter on our own land, right, we want to build it using our own email marketing software, and have direct access without having to go through any algorithm or any anything that LinkedIn throws in our way. But if you're already doing a newsletter, and you have a lot of connections, and you say, Hey, I'm going to do a newsletter here on LinkedIn you promoted on LinkedIn, I don't know, you might get some results or like, if you're already blogged, you could try to syndicate that blog content on LinkedIn. And you might be able to reach a few more people. So to me, the newsletter is still the verdict is out. It's interesting, I might experiment with it at some point. But I think these other points, just give enough importance to say, You know what, I'm just going to turn creator mode on. And there's the feeling that because you have hashtags associated with your profile, when you publish content, that includes those hashtags, there's a feeling that maybe you're going to get a little bit more visibility for that content in the algorithm than if you didn't. Now, that's just my pure conjecture. I do not have any data to back that up. But I would bet that, you know, LinkedIn by limiting you to high five hashtags, it's really saying that you specialize. You're an expert in these areas, and therefore, when you publish content around those areas, it would make sense that maybe it gets a little bit more priority than people that don't have those hashtags that are publishing content with those hashtags. So creator mode is really easy to turn on. Just, you know, download my free book maximizing LinkedIn for business, and the instructions will be there. Now another nice to have, we're at number three now write the personalized URL, the creator mode. The third nice to have is the featured section. So if you are a new subscriber, please, please, please go back. Just about a month ago, I published episode number 252. On LinkedIn newest features to focus on for 2022. And this included the featured section, the featured section allows you to promote lead magnets, YouTube videos, LinkedIn blog posts, status updates, websites, you know, corporate videos, corporate presentations, and it features at pretty prominently and visually on your profile. So it is something I'm recommending everybody takes advantage of, you can have as many featured visuals are there, they sort of look like thumbnails as you want, there are three that are displayed. And if you have more than three, you need to sort of scroll through to see the remainder of them. So I would say, hey, try to get three featured posts up. And if you have lead magnets, this is a no brainer. But even if you don't, if you have a question you want people to answer, and you ask it in a status update, you can link to that status update, for instance, in the featured so you should have something that you want to draw attention to. And that is the content you should have in that featured section. So it's a nice to have, but it's a pretty important nice to have as as the creator mode actually. Number four, past company experience, I'm really passionate about this one. Because if you just have your current company experience there, and you don't talk about your past at all, I get it right? Well, I don't want people to discriminate me, I don't want people to discriminate against me, because my age, you know, if I'm looking for a job, I don't want people to see like irrelevant things about my past. Here's the thing. LinkedIn is an inbound marketing tool, the more data you give it, the more places that you said you worked, the more keywords you can add in those places, the broader the connections you can make with other people, right. So perhaps you have someone that you have worked with in the past, and they are now the CEO of a company you're trying to sell to but you didn't know that, because you did not put in your profile, that you worked at this company in the past. And therefore when they went looking, and they uploaded their database, and they said, Hey, introduce me to people that used to work at this company, they might not find you. That's just one example. It could be that, you know, 10 years ago, 20 years ago, it doesn't matter how long ago that might have been. The fact of the matter is you want to connect with as many people in your past as possible. And when you don't put up those past company experiences, you lose out on the opportunity. But you know, your past company experience also, this is, you know, I the example I gave right here is all about the connection aspect, right? It also is about the fact that you never know, when your past experience is going to come in handy. I like to give the example of when I was working with a local branch or Farmers Insurance. And I gave a presentation to the salespeople. And one guy comes up and he goes, Neil, you know, what do I put on my LinkedIn profile? Because I'm new at insurance sales. And I don't know like what I should talk about in my past. I'm like, Well, what did you do before becoming an insurance salesperson. And by the way, this happens to a lot of real estate agents as well. And in fact, I got asked this question at Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices event. He goes well, before I was an insurance salesperson, I specialize in it. And I helped a lot of small businesses with their networks, their computers, what have you. And I said, Oh my gosh, that is amazing. Because now not only can you sell insurance to small businesses, but you can help them with their IT problems. What an amazing, killer, hybrid skill set that you have. And that's the thing. You know, when I spoke in Louisville, I sort of mentioned that when I was dating my wife, we would talk about past relationships and it was my wife who said, you know, all those past relationships that you have, add up to who you are today. They've made you who you are today, they are a part of you. There's nothing to be embarrassed about. And I would say the same thing about your past isn't that amazing? But I would say I you know, I married this woman but that is the same thing I would say about all your past experiences, they add up to who you are. And you never know when that past experience is going to come in handy. If you listen to my previous LinkedIn episode about LinkedIn for high school students, yes, I recommend high school students get on LinkedIn, I'm like, hey, you know, and if you're a college student, you might have, you know, worked at like Domino's Pizza for six months. But you never know when that experience resonates when that CEO said, You know what I started out my professional career, you know, at Domino's Pizza as well, you never know, when these touch points help us connect with another person. So I would rather you have more than less, embrace your past, put it up there. Now there is a concept of waiting, meaning that for your current experience, I would want you to go really deep, right, use all the real estate that LinkedIn gives you go to my profile, if you're in doubt of how deep you can go for your experiences. Before that, I would not want you to go as deep so that it's weighted on your current experience. But you should at least have a few sentences. Sometimes when I do this audit, I look for five sentences for each past experience. Or sometimes I just look for five lines on a desktop that talk about each of their past experiences. So no matter which guideline you want to use, I highly recommend that you go in and flesh out a little bit more, or at least include your previous experiences. But I wish you flesh out a little bit more and focus on those areas that have added to who you are today, especially if it's still relevant for what you are currently doing. As you see, I call these nice to haves. But some of these nice to haves are I think they're pretty critical. But in terms of priority, right? These are the things that you can do later. So we continue now with looking at the fifth of the nice to haves quote unquote, air quotes, if you could see me. And the fifth nice to have is volunteering slash organizations. So there is part of my 20 piece system or algorithm for judging LinkedIn profiles, is looking at relatability, I think relatability has become more and more important, with millennials now comprising the majority of the workforce. But I think it's just a general social trend that we want to do business with, we want to hire we want to buy from those people that we can relate to. And LinkedIn has actually overtime, given us more sections that we can add this information that go above and beyond just, you know, the information as to where we are working out where we've worked at. And there's two different sections. One is a volunteer section. Another is an organization section. There are some people who put volunteering information in volunteer, like where I put it, and there are others that put it under organizations that they have volunteered with, it doesn't matter where you put it, you want to put it in there. Most of the salespeople that I work with, are have actually some volunteer experience. They've mentored, you know, a Boy Scout troop, they've like me, I was manager for my son's soccer team, or I was on the PTA board of my son's Elementary School, and actually helped them create a new website using Wix, right, whatever it is, there's probably some way in which you've contributed to your community. And once again, by putting that on your profile, you're not only building that potential data point that helps connect with someone. But it's this point of relatability. And you never know when someone can relate to that, that can become extremely valuable to whatever objective you might have for being on LinkedIn. Alright, so we covered the five nice to haves. Before we go on to what I would consider the must haves. Just to recap, we have the personalized URL, the creator mode, the featured section, the past company experience, and then the volunteer slash organizations. Like I said, a majority of the sales people's LinkedIn profiles, I audit across industries and companies more than 50% either don't have, or these are incomplete sections on their profile. So if that's the same with you don't feel bad, you're actually in the majority. So let's go now to the five what I would consider important areas, first priority areas, these are not in any order. They're just an order in which I audit these LinkedIn profiles. But I think you should know what they are obviously. So without further ado, number one is the professional summary. The professional summary, when people go to your profile on LinkedIn, they're going to look at your headline, and they're going to keep scrolling down. And they're going to see your featured section. I believe it actually comes before the professional summary now, but then they're going to see a summary. The summary is your summary. And it is squeezed in between your headline that you know you claim that you are an expert or you do this or that and then your actual professional experience. This gives you the ability to pitch yourself pitch what you do create a relationship with others because once you get into the professional experience, you're really talking about what you do at a company, this is who you are as a person, what your strengths are, what your experiences are across your entire career. This allows you to help brand yourself and set the record straight as to who you are and what you want people to know about you. So, when I see people that either don't have anything for their professional summary, or they just have one or two sentences, when you can have, I believe, like 2000 characters, it is a waste of an opportunity. So yes, for keywords to feed the LinkedIn search engine, it's important, but just there is so much information you can be putting in there, I want you to make sure, as I talked about the past company experience, at least five lines, if not five sentences that you should absolutely have, in your professional summary. If you can't describe yourself using more than five sentences, I think you need to think a little bit more deeper about what you can provide what value you bring to your clients to your employers, or like I said, whatever objective you have for being on LinkedIn. So that's an area where a majority of people fail on, they either don't write anything, or it's just one or two sentences. And that's it, and they miss out on the whole value, the impact that that area can have on your entire LinkedIn profile. The second important point is related to the first one, and that a lot of people write their professional summary in third person, Neal Schaffer is an expert on digital and social media marketing and host of the or digital marketing coach podcast. Imagine if I wrote that on my own profile. Versus and in fact, you know what, I'm actually going to tell you what happened, my profile, so you can hear the difference, because a lot of people do what I just said. And if you were to go to my profile, it would read, I help businesses do their digital transformation of sales and marketing through consulting, training, and helping enterprises large and small, develop and execute on social media marketing strategy, influencer marketing, and social selling initiatives. When you write in a third person, it sort of makes you look big, right? It's like a PR agency, or like on the news, Neal Schaffer is this, this and this, but at the end of the day, when people go to your LinkedIn profile, I firmly believe that that third person voice is going to turn them off, they want to know more about you. And when they see that third person, it's a little bit cold, it's a little bit formal, which is why if you really want to make a connection with someone, and hopefully that example, you know, resonated with you that you're going to connect more when it's written in the first person you want to write in the first person, it's a conversation, I should be able to close my eyes. And imagine that we're in the same room together. And you are telling me about yourself, like we're meeting at a networking event, and you're introducing yourself, and you would never introduce yourself in the third person. So why on social media, would you introduce yourself in the third person, it makes no sense, right? So I know like in the past, maybe you saw in a profile, and it made sense, maybe you're still thinking of a LinkedIn profile like a resume, let's get that all out of our head, first person, make relationships, right? Introduce yourself, like you would, as if you were speaking with someone. And that will make your LinkedIn profile, all the more impactful. Now, the third area is an interesting one, which is that I look and see, for every LinkedIn profile. Before I get on with this, you can go in and look at their activity, you could actually see if they've published status updates, if you have liked a post, if you've commented on a post, this is all available for public viewing. You know, I don't know of any other social network that actually allows you to do that. But you can go to anyone's profile. So you have the professional headline, then you're going to see the featured in right underneath the featured before the professional summary, which is called about or as the title about is a section that says activity. And you can see all of the activity of anyone on LinkedIn, whether you're connected with them or not. I wonder if you knew that. So this is where I go and I do a little bit of digging, and I see hey, has this person even published a status update in the last 30 days? Guess what a majority of salespeople have not published a status update in the last 30 days. Are you kidding? So if you're active on Instagram or on Facebook and Twitter, why wouldn't you publish on LinkedIn? Right? So hopefully, because I have probably a lot more marketers and salespeople on this call, you're probably publishing and this is to your personal profile. You're probably publishing once every 30 days, at least, this is my assumption. But if not, you're missing out on the value of LinkedIn, there is more and more action. There's more more activity in the newsfeed there is more and more visibility in the newsfeed. In fact, I'd say now to Instagram, LinkedIn might just give you the most visibility for your content. And obviously link based content can do okay on LinkedIn versus an Instagram where you can post a link. So you definitely want to try to publish content, if you haven't done so recently. And this is something that once again, I look at and make sure you're doing, most people just give up on LinkedIn, I don't know why they think they just create a profile. And that's it. And yes, you can use LinkedIn for prospecting. But guess what, every LinkedIn post gives you the ability to be seen, not just by people in your network, but when they engage with your content. It does go, quote, unquote, viral. Look at your newsfeed, you might see content from other people. And you see it because someone in your network liked it or commented on it. This used to be by the way, the way that Facebook work doesn't work that way anymore. So LinkedIn really does have this viral component that if you're not publishing content, you're not taking advantage of and if you're in sales and marketing, I mean, holy smokes, you know, you have a business reason for wanting your content to be seen by a lot of people, why wouldn't you be publishing content? Number four, on this list of must haves, and it is very similar to this past company experience, but it's your current company experience, it's only writing down the fact that you work at your current company, whether it's your company, or your employer's company, and you have no description, or you only have one or two sentences. Come on, what are you thinking, right? Describe, and here's where you could go into third person. But this also gives you the ability to talk more about the company specific role you have, and even go more in depth about your company, which you're not going to do probably in your summary area or that about section. So this is another no brainer that a majority people neglect, or they don't really fill it out to the degree that I believe they should be filling it out, which is either five lines or five sentences. Now, the fifth one is an interesting one. Because LinkedIn is also unique in that you have the ability to gain recommendations. And if you're a sales professional, you know, the recommendations are gold. You know, I work with a lot of real estate agents, they try to get the Google reviews, right? Or they try to aggregate these reviews, maybe Facebook page reviews, what about LinkedIn profile reviews. And what's amazing is if you work in a niche industry, a lot of people might know the people that actually recommended you. Or in fact, somebody that recommended you, like 10 years ago might be the CEO of a company now. So when people go into your profile, and they look at who recommended you, they're seeing all these executives, right, that recommended you like, wow, this person's for real. There's, you know, fake profiles on LinkedIn. But more importantly, the recommendations prove that you're real, and they give you credibility, they give you social proof. LinkedIn, when they had this 100% profile completed this meter, they wanted you to have at least three recommendations. And that's all I'm asking for too. But more than 50% of the profiles that I review, every year, have less than 50% of LinkedIn, users have at least three recommendations. If you already have three, congratulations, if you don't download maximizing LinkedIn for business, and there's advice there on how you can go about getting those recommendations. But it really is important, it doesn't take a lot of time to do. And as you know, I went through now all 10 of these items that you should be doing. And if you were to spend, like I said, an hour or two, you can get through these, you can revise your professional summary and that's you know, I important items number are must haves, number one and two, you can revise your past company experience, that's the nice to have number four, you can add a few featured areas, that's nice to have number three, turn creator mode on, read my ebook, maximizing LinkedIn for business, but that allows you to do that in a minute. That's nice to have number two, create a personalized URL only takes a minute nice to have number one, add one or two volunteering or organizations that you volunteer with. That's nice. Step number five, publish a piece of content. That's important. Number three, write and then add or ask for three recommendations. And once those start to come in, you will have completed everything I talked about. That's the beauty of this, right? Your LinkedIn profile, you don't need to look at every day. It's a once a year, once every six months, maybe once every three months. But listen to this episode again. Read the transcript, read the show notes and follow my advice. And I guarantee you you're going to get more profile views because you have more keywords you have more ways of connecting with other people and I do believe your profile will have more impact by going through this exercise. So if you are curious, like I said as to how you perform on this one to 100 scale, or you have a number of salespeople or marketers and you want to know how you compare with people peers in your industry. Please reach out to me. And we'll put together something where I can offer this service to your company as well. Alright, I hope you enjoyed this episode where we went really deep on LinkedIn profiles. It is a deep area, but I'm hoping with focus on these 10 areas that you can have a rock star, or as LinkedIn used to call it an all star profile in no time. As always, if you enjoyed the show, hey, I mean, I always ask you for review, but you can easily share this on social media as well. If you think there is someone that might get some value from it, make sure when you do so you tag me I am at Neal Schaffer on almost every social media platform. And I'd love to hear from you, podcasting can be quite damn lonely. In all honesty, I'm sort of staring at my computer screen, staring at the wall, staring at the blinds that are on the window on my home office, looking around, keeping my eyes engaged while I'm recording this. And I'd love to know who is on the other side listening. So if that's you, hey, tag me on social media. let other people know about this podcast, I'd really appreciate it. It would really make my day. And that's it. Thank you so much for being a loyal subscriber. If you're new to this episode, please make sure you hit the subscribe button. I'm coming back at you real soon. We have half solo episodes that I hope are very, very educational to you as your digital marketing coach. And then I bring in expert guests half the time as well, who I hope also become your quasi digital marketing coach. Alright, I'll stop there, everybody. So it isn't my voice as well. But hey, thank you so much for listening. This is your digital marketing coach Neal Schaffer signing off. You've been listening to your digital marketing coach, questions, comments, requests, links, go to podcast dot Neal schaffer.com. Get the show notes to this and 200 plus podcast episodes and Neal schaffer.com to tap into the 400 Plus blog posts that Neil has published to support your business. While you're there, check out Neil's Digital First group coaching membership community if you or your business needs a little helping hand. See you next time on your digital marketing coach.
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