Liz Ryan
Your LinkedIn profile is about a million times more important than your business card.
How many people see your business card? Over three hundred million people have the opportunity to see your LinkedIn profile. Your LinkedIn profile includes a lot of information about you that isn’t available anywhere else.
Anybody who visits your profile page is going to form an impression of you. What do you want that impression to be?
Here are five LinkedIn mistakes that will brand you as unprofessional. These mistakes will keep prospective networking contacts away from you and make people wonder about your judgment. That’s no way to build your network, or your career!
Using LinkedIn’s Name And/Or Headline Field To Broadcast Your Contact Info
In LinkedIn’s user agreement users are reminded that it is a violation of LinkedIn’s terms of service to include your telephone number or email address in your LinkedIn headline field (below your name) or any other part of your LinkedIn profile apart from the email address and telephone number fields. LinkedIn makes its membership available for free and sells premium services like higher levels of membership that come with Inmail (member-to-member messaging) benefits.
Tossing your phone number into your profile to circumvent LinkedIn’s Inmail messaging service is tacky and unprofessional and brands you as a low-rent huckster. Anyone who really wants to get in touch with you can surely scroll down your profile page to find your website, and contact you there. If you don’t have a website but you want people to call you, maybe it’s time to invest in a website!
Trumpeting The Size Of Your Network
Just as bad as adding your telephone number to the Name or Headline field of your LinkedIn profile is broadcasting your first-degree connection count (“Over 8K connections!”) in those fields to let the LinkedIn community know what you think is important. Some people see every human activity as a competition. They have to compete over everything – they have to have the biggest car, the biggest house and the biggest office in their company.
It stands to reason that some people would feel that it’s vital for the rest of the LinkedIn universe to know that they have a huge network of connections — so much so that they make their connection count part of their brand and splash the number across their profile. Don’t do it. If your LinkedIn network is the biggest thing you have going for you, it is time to refocus and get back on your path.
Branding Yourself Guru, Genius Or The World’s Greatest
You are good at what you do –far too good to brand yourself a guru or genius. Real gurus don’t stoop to praise themselves. There are plenty of other people around them happy to tell the world about their gurus’ achievements. Don’t do it for yourself!
It’s bad enough when people call themselves Savvy, Strategic and Visionary in their LinkedIn profiles, but it’s even worse when they do it in the third person, as though it were the New York Times and not the writer him- or herself indulging in embarrassing self-glorification. Don’t do it! Tell your simple human story in a conversational tone, instead.
Spamming Other LinkedIn Users
Don’t spam other LinkedIn users, either by sending them invitations to connect with you out of the clear blue sky when you’ve never met them or by sending them unsolicited business mail. Don’t ask strangers to help you get a job, help you grow your business or buy your products and services. Everybody is hit with far too much spam and too many unwanted sales pitches already — we don’t need more of them to slam us every time we log into LinkedIn.
Choosing The Wrong Profile Photo, Or None At All
Your LinkedIn profile photo is such an important part of your profile that to choose the wrong photo — or none at all — sends a very negative message to the rest of the LinkedIn community. If we can’t see your face clearly in your photo, there are two or more people in the shot so that we can’t tell which one is you, or your photo isn’t appropriate for a professional site (in the sense of being too racy or raucous) it won’t help your professional brand.
If there’s no photo at all in your LinkedIn profile, no one will linger on your profile page for more than a few seconds. They will wonder “Why didn’t this person invest the extra five minutes it would have taken to shoot a quick photo and upload it?” Complete your profile with a great profile photo and show your face proudly. Lots of people are dying to meet you!
Liz Ryan is the CEO and founder of Human Workplace. Follow her on Twitterand read the rest of her Forbes.com columns here.
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