LinkedIn can be an extremely useful tool for networking, marketing and building your company/personal brand. It can, however, also prove to be a very reliable way to discredit yourself and/or your company and annoy other users.
There are a certain number actions which you should avoid if you want your profile to remain credible and your brand optimised:
Skills
Listing every skill under the sun is a good way of reducing the impact and credibility of the true skills that you do have. For example, listing ‘Social Media’ is like listing ‘socialising’ on your CV, it doesn’t mean anything, are you skilled at ‘Social Media Marketing’, ‘Social Media Advertising’ or ‘Social Media Network Development’? The more skills you add, the less credible your true qualities become as they will simply be lost among the irrelevant cloud of skills listed on your profile.
Pointless contact collecting
There are those that believe that the more contacts you have on LinkedIn, the better. LinkedIn should not be a popularity contest and obtaining hundreds of contacts that are of no use to you, and will never be contacted, is pointless and simply makes future connections think twice before accepting your invite to connect with them.
Spamming
Sharing information is one of the real benefits of LinkedIn and other networks. Sharing 10’s of stories in one go, multiple times per day, will aggravate those connected to you. As well as clogging up their feed the chances of them actually reading your updates are reduced significantly, conversely, the chances of them ‘hiding’ your updates or removing you as a connection will increase. Similarly, don’t spam all of the groups you belong to with updates, it won’t get you anywhere. Share interesting and relevant information, but keep the frequency sensible.
Profile photo
Using a photo of you down the pub with your mates or in a swimming pool on holiday is not the best impression to give on a professional network. Neither are you a ‘Wizard’, ‘Hero’ or ‘Ninja’. Use your official title (if it’s one of the aforementioned then it might be time to have a chat about job titles with your boss).
