Does your LinkedIn profile really matter?

In a recent webinar on personal impact for accountants, someone asked “I’m 48 and busy at work, do I really need to bother with my LinkedIn profile?”.

My answer was a resounding “Yes”, here are my top reasons why:

• LinkedIn works hard for you passively; you never know who could be looking for you/at your profile and the impact no/a poor profile can have.
• If you aren’t present with a decent profile on LinkedIn, this is likely to negatively impact your credibility. It should reinforce who people meet in different professional scenarios e.g. in person, on email, on a video call.
• With more working from home, people including your colleagues use LinkedIn to find out more about you before a meeting, rather than relying upon seeing you/hearing about you from others.
• It’s a great way to keep a professional address book with an amazing search facility. If you connect to people you meet in person/on calls as you go, it can be really useful for looking them up at a later date.
• ?It’s a good way to feel connected to your network if they are active on LinkedIn, even if you haven’t connected with them more personally for a while.

Your profile represents your personal brand.

My key recommendation is to make time to create/update your profile then diarise a review every 3 months, that way it will stay fresh and relevant and won’t feel like such a big job to update it!

To help you with this, you can download my free resource, LinkedIn Profile Checklist to help you have an excellent profile.

You'll find more on LinkedIn including how to raise your visibility without it taking lots of time and many more topics to help you navigate the workplace and progress your career in my book Getting On: Making work work - available from anywhere that sells books - for ease here is the Amazon link and the link for a signed copy.