Women's Leadership Blog

Managing your online presence via LinkedIn and Viadeo

For my first post as Vice President of Outreach for Future Women Leaders I wanted to write about something that is near and dear to my heart:  professional branding.  It is so very often something that we put off to take care of "some day" when in reality your professional brand should be a constant focus in your career development.  It is critical for:

• Building your network of professional contacts
• Establishing yourself as a thought leader, expert, or enthusiast
• Opening up the expected (and sometimes unexpected) possibilities for your career through your network
• Insulating against job loss or enabling fast recovery
• Remembering the impact that you had on your organization

There are many aspects to professional branding but for this blog series I am going to focus on two professional networking platforms, their optimization, and growing your network:

• LinkedIn – Founded in 2003, LinkedIn has more than 100 million members worldwide, including executives from every Fortune 500 company.  It is considered the largest professional network in the World; with its primary market being North America.
• Viadeo – Founded in 2004, Viadeo is the second largest professional network in the World with over 35 million members.  The network attracts more than 30,000 new members each day; 150,000 new connections are made and over 3 million profiles are viewed.  Viadeo’s primary markets have been outside of the Americas but the company is rapidly expanding its presence in the US with their new San Francisco office.

There are additional sites you may be interested in (Zing, Branchout, etc) but LinkedIn and Viadeo are a good start.

The following are techniques that I have used personally.  Since I am a metrics driven person I'll provide you with what I have found since implementing these changes to my own profile:

• Profile Views: Since March of this year my profile views have increased from 5 a week to 60 per week (that's not a typo!)
• Search: Since early March the number of times my profile appears in searches has increased from 28 to 90 per week

(The above data is from LinkedIn as I am a new Viadeo member and as of the date of this blog post not enough data has been gathered.)

So with that said....let's begin!!!

Optimizing your profiles:

If you have not done so already please be sure to create accounts at both LinkedIn and Viadeo.  I will be referring to areas of your profile within these sites and it will be helpful to have accounts created.

Your headline:

One of the first mistakes new users of professional networks make is to have their job title as their headline.  Regardless of whether or not you are seeking a job, open to new possibilities, or established in your role it is important to utilize the headline area of your profile to reflect a quick snippet of information about you.  Remember that whenever you post comments, appear in news feeds or in community posts this is the information that your network (and those you may like to connect with) are exposed to.  Make the most of the space!  Examples:

Job Seekers:  "Experienced Sr Program Manager seeking a challenging position in IT"

Expert:  "Career Educator & Strategist providing information, ideas and inspiration on a daily basis"

Profile picture:

This is a highly personal choice for most people as some are not comfortable providing their image.  If you are comfortable, here are some mistakes to avoid:

• Image too far away: Your photo should clearly show your face so that people can recognize you.
• Unprofessional setting: This one really doesn't need an explanation!  Remember that your personal setting images should be utilized for Facebook...not a professional networking site.
• Obviously cropped and blurry photo: The object of providing a profile picture is to present yourself in a way that will speak professionalism.  Cropped and blurry photos portray the message that you do not take your profile very seriously.

Dress as though you are going to a job interview and have your picture taken in a well lighted area.  If you need to modify your image there is a free tool called paint.net that will provide you with advanced photo editing features.

Activity Feed:

Your activity feed is how you share news and events that you are passionate about with your network.  The interesting thing about activity feeds is that it provides your network with an ability to interact with you by commenting, and learning aspects about your interests they may not have been familiar with.   This creates a feeling of familiarity and helps your network to identify interests they share in common with you.  Utilize your activity feed by commenting in groups you belong to, posting articles you find interesting, commenting on posts by others, events and classes you are attending.  Just remember that this is a professional network and content should be appropriate for that audience.

Connections:

Professional networks recommend that you only connect with those you know well.  The reason being that your connections in effect make a statement about you due to your affiliation.  I agree that you should review profiles of those you are connecting with for appropriateness, and have some level of familiarity with the person.  That being said....to be truly "found" within search results on the sites you will need to aim for the 500+ connections club.  The reason is that the search results return in two ways:  degrees of separation and relevance.  Sadly they return in exactly that order.  This mean that even though you may have your profile at 100% and optimized with key words...you will either not appear, or appear too many pages in for a user to have the patience to find you.  All simply because of the degrees of separation factor.

Don't take this as advice to randomly reach out to every person you see on professional networks.  Instead, I recommend that you utilize tools to import contacts from your personal as well as work email.  Begin to think about the events, classes, and volunteer positions that can provide you with introductions to new people.  Always carry your business or personal cards with you!

Spruce up your Summary area:

Your summary area has a tremendous amount of character space available and you should use it!  Do not make the mistake of simply copying your summary from your resume into this area.  Here's a simple approach to take when customizing this area of your profile:

• Think of three main bullet points that you would like anyone reading your profile to leave knowing about you (by the time you reach the end of this line a recruiter or professional contact has viewed and left your profile...make those bullets count!)
• Use white space (aka a blank line) under each bullet point, and then add text that explains the bullet point further.  Utilize key words (if you are not familiar with these...no worries.  I will explain this in another post later this month)
• As of this blog post LinkedIn allows you to use special characters in the text of your profile....Viadeo does not.  Separate out bullet points using special characters like: ► or ● .  More options can be found in MS Word and use the highlight/copy/paste procedure to add them to your profile.

Your Job Roles:

For each job role be sure that you provide complete information.  The general rule to follow is that each role should have an accurate title and dates, a description of your role activities as a small summary, and bullet points of your achievements that are measurable.  Do not combine role based activities and achievements together.  How much you add from your resume is up to you but remember that the more content you have the more relevant you become in a search.

In the next blog post in this series I will discuss the use of key words, how to identify those that you should be using in your profiles, and free tools that can help you accomplish this.

About the author: Celeste Paradise is an award-winning Silicon Valley Professional with 10+ years IT experience in media, advertising, operations management/optimization, social media & marketing.  You can connect with her via: