Today, I’m going to share with you five tips for optimizing your LinkedIn profile. First off, why is this important? Well, for a lot of agents and brokers, LinkedIn has kinda become that set it and forget it network where you set it up a while ago, and haven’t done a whole lot with it since. But it’s a really important piece of your social media strategy because whether we like it or not, we get Googled. When you get Googled, LinkedIn is one of the first things that typically comes up. So, if your profile is out of date or there is not a whole lot about you, there’s the perception that maybe you’re not in business. So, I want to share with you five quick tips that you can do today to optimize your LinkedIn profile.
Number one: have an updated photo and update your contact information. That’s really important. Don’t be a secret agent. Make it easy for people to find you with your email, your website, and your phone number.
Tip number two: make sure you update your summary section. At the very top of your LinkedIn profile, you have an opportunity to write a few sentences or couple paragraphs about yourself. So, this is the opportunity to talk about where you work, what your expertise is, what’s your market area. This is kind of the time to brag about yourself. That is really important so make sure you’ve got that filled out.
Tip number three: add keywords. You can add multiple keywords but at a minimum, add three to five keywords. When you scroll down your LinkedIn profile, at the very bottom, there’s an area to add keywords. It also might be called skills or expertise. You can actually change those depending on what it is you really want to focus on. So, if you want to focus on negotiation or the fact that you love working with first-time home buyers, or that you’re a luxury specialist, you can add those skills into your expertise into that keyword section.
My next tip, tip number four is: give and receive recommendations. You know, recommendations are really, really powerful. I know there’s lots of places online that real estate folks can get recommended but when you think about recommendations on LinkedIn, LinkedIn is that business network. It’s not necessarily just a real estate network. So, think about who are the people that you work with that you could give a recommendation to, and perhaps, once a month or once every other month, surprise people. Maybe you give a recommendation to the last agent you worked with, or to your client, or to your lender, or stager. There’s sort of this cast of characters involved in every real estate transaction, and nine times out of 10, when you give a recommendation, you’ll receive one in return.
My last tip for you to optimize your LinkedIn profile is to create blog content. I don’t know if you realize that you could do this but you can actually create blog content right within your LinkedIn profile. Now, I don’t recommend that you start blogging about your listings, but I want you to start creating content that is evergreen; content that is timeless. So you might create content and create a blog post on LinkedIn like The Top 10 Things Every First-Time Home Buyer Asks Me; or The Top Five Things Everyone Needs to Know When Moving to the San Francisco Bay Area.
You want to create content on either a monthly or every other month basis, and the value of doing that is you’re creating really valuable content that not only stays on your LinkedIn profile and really helps to optimize your profile, but you’re also creating a piece of content that you can then share with your email database, you could share over on Facebook, or any of your other social media networks. So, add that to your calendar. Once a month or every other month. It’s a small thing that can make a really, really big difference.
Now, as always, if you have any questions about LinkedIn or social media, put them in the comments below. I would love to connect with you on LinkedIn, so drop your LinkedIn link in the comments below so we can connect. By the way, we actually have a whole course about LinkedIn marketing, so if that’s something you’re interested in, about how to take your LinkedIn profile to the next level, you can check that out here.
Thanks everybody. We’ll see you soon, and I’ll see you on LinkedIn!
