LinkedIn is an enigma. It’s the home to professional business people with over 20 million users in the UK alone (Source LinkedIn 2016). As a mortgage professional, you need to be on, attracting views and networking.
It's not an online CV – many of us have used it for this purpose only. Here’s what you need to do in five steps:
- Get yourself a head and shoulder’s photo and please no pets or Ironman photos. Keep it business
- Headline. Please, no titles, these are for business cards and pay grades at work. Have a sentence that clearly describes what you do. “I help clients to buy their home by organising all the financial aspects to save them time, money and their sanity.”
- Your summary. Write this in the first person, i.e. I do this; I do that. Keep it light, imagine an ideal client was reading it, what would you say to them about what you do, how you work, your experience and expertise. If you’re too humble, get someone else to write it for you. You don’t need to ramble on about your company; it’s you that people want to connect with.
- Clean up your URL. You can adjust this a little using LinkedIn since their default URL is rather lengthy. Better still buy your personal domain name and have this forward to your LinkedIn profile. Mine is www.paularcher.uk
- Add your experiences, skills and projects. You can follow your company, and this will place the logo in the right section. Add photos and video clips if you can.
Think about how you’re going to react when people start connecting with you. Some people are very precious and will only link in with people they’ve met. This is fine, but it does limit you. If someone connects with me and I’ve no idea who they are, I send them a message (within LinkedIn as people read these) politely asking how they stumbled across me, what led them to connect. It gets a conversation going.
Finally, before you crack on and make these changes, do check your settings to ensure your connections don't receive a message about your profile changes. While you’re there, you can tweak all sorts of aspects of your privacy and so on.
Welcome to LinkedIn heaven.
