22 LinkedIn Secrets LinkedIn Won't Tell You

William Arruda
William ArrudaSenior Contributor
Careers
I write about personal branding.
I have written several articles about LinkedIn, and they often generate the most
comments. Here are the highlights of my LinkedIn advice from previous articles,
along with additional tips and tricks, many of which remain unspoken by the people
at LinkedIn. With this checklist in hand, you can make your LinkedIn profile your
best personal branding tool. These little-known, often-overlooked and seemingly
counterintuitive tips deliver big results with minimal effort.

1. Be secretive. When you’re updating your LinkedIn profile, it can annoy your
contacts if they’re alerted to every little change. When you’re in edit mode, head
to your privacy controls. Turn off activity broadcasts and change the setting for
“select who can see your activity feed” to “only you.”

2. Be opportunistic. Join groups that will let you connect with people who are in
your target audience but are not contacts. Being part of the group gives you
permission to reach out to them and invite them to join your network. You don’t
need to upgrade to Premium to do so.

3. Be redundant. Know the top five strengths for which you want to be recognized
and use them in your profile – repeatedly. If your top skill is project management,
describe your project management proficiency in your summary as well as in multiple
experience descriptions. This will help the right audience find you.

4. Be ungrateful. Ask your contacts to endorse you for only your top skills. Having
the highest number of endorsements for your signature strengths will influence
those who are looking at your profile. Have the courage to delete or reject the
endorsements that aren’t central to how you want to be known.

5. Be stingy. Only give recommendations and endorsements to those whom you

genuinely admire. When you recommend other people, their reputation is seen an
extension of your values.

6. Be lazy. Reuse and repurpose the content you already have available. This
amplifies your message and delivers brand consistency. Communicating different
forms of the same content in distinctive ways helps reinforce your messages within
your brand community. Convert your Blog posts into activity updates and embed
whitepapers and articles in your profile.

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7. Be greedy. Don’t follow the LinkedIn formula of creating one experience entry
for each job title you have held. Take the space you need to communicate your
accomplishments by creating multiple entries for every role you have performed
within each job title. It’s OK to have overlapping dates. See how I did it in my
profile.

8. Be a groupie. Don’t limit the number of groups you join. Join groups related to
your area of expertise, industry, alumni, passions, social causes, and other
aspects of your identity. This gives you access to more people who matter to your
brand. Plus, when others look at your profile, they can learn about your brand by
looking at your groups. Always select groups that are highly active and have a lot
of members.
9. Be promiscuous. Ignore LinkedIn’s advice to only accept connection requests from
people you know. That helps sell Premium, but it doesn’t help you get found.
LinkedIn’s search algorithm favors those who are in your network. That means when
people are looking for what you have to offer, the results of their searches are
displayed with 1st level connections first, then 2nd level connections and so on.

10. Be a chameleon. Don’t assume others know how you spell your name or know that
you’ve changed your name. Include all known misspellings, previous names, nicknames
and aliases in your summary. I include this: AKA/Common misspellings: Bill Arruda,
Will Arruda, William Aruda, Will Aruda.

11. Be invisible. Fly under the radar when you’re using LinkedIn to check out your
employees or poach talent. To keep your agenda hidden, change your viewing setting
to “anonymous” in “Select what others see when you've viewed their profile.”

12. Be verbose. Know the character limit for each section and use every character.
This gives you the opportunity to repeat keywords that are critical to being found.
You can find the character limits here.

13. Be opinionated. Integrate your point of view (POV) into your summary and
experience where appropriate. Join groups where you can share your POV as it
relates to your area of expertise. It’s a great way to distinguish yourself from
competitors.

14. Be disorganized. Reorder the content in your profile (yes, LinkedIn made this
possible). This enables you to lead with what’s important and choose which
strengths to focus on. Bonus: it will make your profile stand out from the crowd of
others who do what you do.

15. Be selective. Don’t feel you need to include every detail of every job you have
had – especially if the details dilute your brand message. You can omit the jobs
you had early in your career if they don’t offer insights into how you deliver
value today. Or group those older listings under one heading, such as
“Apprenticeships” or “My Training Ground.”

16. Be square. Direct people to your LinkedIn profile with a QR code on your
business card. The next time you’re at a networking function, the people you meet
can scan your QR code and instantly read your profile and connect with you.

17. Be frugal. If you want to reach out to someone and you can’t reach them any
other way, sign up for Premium by the month. Then, do all the outreach you need to
do to connect with those super-exclusive contacts. Mission accomplished? Cancel
your Premium subscription.

18. Be a thief. Repurpose the great content in your LinkedIn profile for other
social media sites. You’ll increase your digital footprint while ensuring
consistency. VisualizeMe.com, Vizify.com, Re.vu, and ResumUp.com are a few services
to check out.

19. Be personal. Your profile is not a resume or CV. Write as if you are having a
conversation with someone. Inject your personality. Let people know your values and
passions. In your summary, discuss what you do outside of work. You want people to
want to know you.

20. Be in their face. Make sure your headshot is high quality, with good lighting
and ultra-sharp focus. LinkedIn is not the place to run a casual snapshot. Also,
make sure that you’re either facing forward or turned toward your left shoulder, in
the direction of your content. If you’re looking to your right, gazing off the
screen, this sends a subtle message that you don’t believe the content of your own
page.

21. Be a bean counter. Get at least 500 connections. In addition to widening your
target audience, the magic 500+ in your profile has a psychological impact on those
who view your profile.

22. Be a procrastinator. Don’t reach out to contacts until you are thrilled with
your profile. When you reach out the others, they will likely view your profile
before deciding if they want to connect with you.

The LinkedIn Settings Mistakes Most People Still Make

Cheryl Conner
Cheryl ConnerFormer Contributor
Entrepreneurs
I write about small businesses doing innovative PR
This article is more than 6 years old.
Those who read my columns know that I’m a great fan of LinkedIn, especially for its
creative “off-brand” and competitive intelligence uses. But when I saw Donna
Sapolin’s recent post on How LinkedIn is Thwarting Your Job Search, I had to weigh
in.

Yes, the auto emails that inform your entire LinkedIn universe of every tweak you
make to your profile bother me too. But beyond the guffaws and the occasional
embarrassment, as Donna shared so poignantly, they are also an accidental anathema
to anybody who’s seeking a job. Or just lost a job. Imagine the chagrin of an
executive whose trial run at a company didn’t work out, when he changed his job
title back to freelancer and LinkedIn so helpfully sent an email to let everyone
know. Or imagine the anguish of the worker who actually didn’t want to accidentally
alert their current boss to the fact that they’re looking.

LinkedIn expert Wayne Breitbarth

LinkedIn expert Wayne Breitbarth
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So I dug a little further. I also asked one of my favorite LinkedIn sources, Wayne
Breitbarth, to offer his thoughts. His response, in a word: “Stinks.” The situation
actually happened to Wayne himself when he was giving a speech this past week at
the Milwaukee Business Journal. Earlier in the day he’d gotten one of LinkedIn’s
automatic notifications that one of the editors had just taken a job at the
Pittsburgh Biz Journal.

“So when he came to my event I congratulated him in front of all the folks there,”
said Wayne. “Immediately, everybody busted a gut. They’d been teasing him all
morning long. I came to find out all he’d done was attempt to change his company
name from the national Business Journal company’s page to the Milwaukee Journal
page and accidentally grabbed the wrong page. Oops. When he saved the changes, out
went the notification for the world to see.”

In all, it appears the newest auto messages and poor response time from LinkedIn’s
support desk are features on nobody’s hit list. However, despite their intermittent
threats, I don’t see people fleeing the LinkedIn platform in rage, nor should they.
But the issues of auto congratulations and auto updates underscore an important
networking point: You, as a savvy user, must stay on top of the continuing updates
to the primary platforms as they evolve.

For LinkedIn, it turns out, there actually is a way to turn off the automatic
alerts to the email universe of every relative “sneeze”: As Donna also advised, go
to your LinkedIn privacy settings and turn the “notify connections when I make a
profile update” option to "off". It’s highly unfortunate the default is not the
opposite, but it’s not. But, problem solved.

The issue of auto-congrat emails, in contrast, isn’t nearly so easy to fix. On the
LinkedIn community boards I found this question emerge nearly a year ago from
Canadian ecotourism and marketing expert Laura Ell:

″How do you get these anniversary alert emails to stop?″ Laura Ell
"How do you get these anniversary alert emails to stop?" Laura Ell
How do you stop LinkedIn sending out automated messages on my behalf such as
"anniversary in job, say congratulations"?

The question evoked outrage from users. There are 43 responses, but no real answers
until this, just two days ago, tongue in cheek, from LinkedIn user Stephen C.
Armstrong, founder of management firm AMGI Partners:

“A way to stop this is to show in your profile that you have stopped working at a
current employer (say end at January 2014). Then the LinkedIn logic won't be able
to send out these stupid statements. [editor’s note: presumably you have first
changed the default that sends email to notify your connected world that you did
this]. Yes someone might say 'oh, you don't work there anymore', but this is
better than these broadcast messages that go to everyone.”

Thank you, Stephen, for your creative thinking. But still… should users really have
to go to these lengths?

On a related note, I also liked this remark from Debra Donston-Miller, from her
recent InformationWeek article about the most reviled LinkedIn etiquette peeves:
Exaggeration, which is a particular problem when fairly well everyone will see what
you say:

Says Debra: “I can't count the times I've heard someone look at former colleagues'
LinkedIn Profiles and guffaw (yes, guffaw) while saying things like, ‘What!? He did
what at our company?’ ‘Nice of her to take all of the credit for a project that a
whole team worked on!’ ‘Since when did he have that title?’ You get the picture.
Depending on how you look at it, the good and bad thing about LinkedIn is that your
experience is out there for all to see. But unlike the old days, when your resume
was seen by only a few people, usually outside your own company, you could
embellish without too much risk (not that you should have).” It's amazing how many
people continue to miss this nuance as well.

But in the interest of keeping all of us current, here are a few of the LinkedIn
setting features most people still miss, courtesy of Wayne Breitbarth who also
wrote about these points in his PowerFormula blog. (Once again, thank you, Wayne!)
He covers these points and others in the chapter Your Acccount, Your Settings, Your
Way in his newest book, The Power Formula for LinkedIn Success. As it pertains to
privacy and alerts, these are the five issues he continues to hear about most
often:

1. ”I don’t want to be bothered with all those group emails”

Yes, you have full control over which groups you receive email notifications from
and the frequency with which you receive them, says Wayne. Ask yourself “If I miss
something from this group, would I be mad?” Wayne suggests you keep track of a
handful of groups, and let the updates from the other ones go.

2. ”This guy is driving me nuts with his silly status updates”

We all have some people in our networks who are using their LinkedIn status updates
like a Twitter account, or they don’t understand LinkedIn users don’t want to be
sold to on a regular basis. This setting allows you to say “bye-bye” to their
status updates, Wayne says. Here’s how to stop them: When you view one of the
offending status updates on your home page, move the cursor to the top right of the
update and click “Hide.”

3. ”I don’t want to tell my network every time I change my profile this weekend”

Yes, the big case in point. This is especially helpful if you are working on your
profile in a condensed period of time and don’t LinkedIn to report every change
immediately. Be sure to turn the feature back on when you have completed your final
changes, says Wayne. Having your network see your profile changes is a good thing
on the whole, he suggests. But it's smart to turn off the activity broadcasts
while you’re working on multiple changes, or are updating an item you’d rather not
go out in email. In Account Settings > Profile > Turn on/off your activity
broadcasts.

4. ”I don’t want people to see my connections”

The default is that your first-degree connections can see who your other first-
degree connections are. Allowing your friends to know who your other friends are
has always been a valuable step in the networking process, Wayne says, and he finds
its especially cool that LinkedIn takes the concept to another level. “I do
understand certain people may not want this list to be viewable by others,” says
Wayne. "But I know plenty of people who would not play the LinkedIn game at all if
this control did not exist, so I’m thankful it’s available. “

Many people would like this setting to be person-by-person and not all-or-nothing.
Unfortunately, that option is not yet available on LinkedIn. But here's how to
change your current settings: Go to Account Settings > Profile > to select who can
see your connections.

5. ”How do other people get their picture, name, and company name on Who’s Viewed
Your Profile”

The default is that you won’t see this detail, but most individuals who are
interested in growing their brands would actually want this information to show.
But if you’d like to change it – or would like to temporarily change it go to
Account Settings > Profile > Select what others see when you’ve viewed their
profile.

In short, Wayne’s advice is to take a few minutes now, at the start of the year, to
make sure your LinkedIn settings are in line with your business and personal
strategy. It will save you time and will make you more effective on LinkedIn as
well as protect you at least somewhat from the accidental guffaws.

Overall, however, it’s also important to note that updates are not always bad. As a
case in point, when I asked Laura Ell if I could quote her tongue-in-cheek question
about auto anniversary emails, her position had softened:

“Sure you can quote me on that, I don't mind. I was quite upset about the feature
when I wrote the comment. Notwithstanding, I should mention a related conversation
I had with one of my clients yesterday. I didn't realize, but this feature does
actually have positive effects on some. Sam Raphael, owner of Jungle Bay Dominica
actually got a little choked up when he realized how long we had worked together.
He said it was bringing water to his eyes to think about the struggles we all had
as a company when we first opened the business together, and now, 8 years later, we
were honored with two major awards that demonstrate how the hard work paid off and
brought joy to so many visitors and residents of a struggling island community. So
I must admit I'm a little torn about how I now feel about the anniversary
announcements. LinkedIn should have an option to turn the updates off if
individuals desire, but I do see some value.”

Thank you, Laura. Well said.