How To Make Your LinkedIn Profile an Online Reputation Management Tool

With over 350 million users, Facebook may be the king of general social networking, but when it comes to professional networking, LinkedIn is definitely on top. Since it was launched in 2003, LinkedIn has become one of the most popular professional social networking websites on the Internet, boasting 55 million members in over 200 countries around the world. Best of all, these 55 million users aren’t here to share inane details about their life, but rather to meet other professionals in their field, expand their skill sets, and promote their positive reputations on the web.

If you’re not already using LinkedIn to promote your good name online, you should be. Besides the fact that it will help you expand your professional network, a strong LinkedIn profile can help offset any negative content about you online (or protect you from slander or inaccurate content in the future).

Here are our tips to make your LinkedIn profile a great tool to help manage and promote your positive online reputation.

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Make Your Summary Shine

One of the most important parts of your LinkedIn profile is your summary. It is here that you can tell the world in your own words just why you’re the best accountant/veterinarian/contractor/whatever it is that you do (and why they should want to work with you soon).

In many ways, your LinkedIn summary is like a cover letter that you’re sending to the world. It is an opportunity to explain who you are, what you’ve done during your career, and why you’re good at doing it. In writing your summary, don’t focus too much on specific accomplishments, but on your core skills and experience. You should try to distill your summary into one or two paragraphs so that you don’t bore the reader or sound self-aggrandizing. Also, don’t forget to use strong keywords related to your profession so that recruiters can find you. You can list relevant keywords in the “Specialties” section of your summary.

Use Your Vanity URL

All LinkedIn profiles come with the option of creating a customized vanity url for your public profile. It is important that you use your vanity url so that individuals searching for you on Google can find your information more easily. To create your vanity url, click on the Edit My Profile tab. From here, scroll down to Public Profile and click Edit.

To get the maximum effect out of your vanity profile, you should use whatever name someone would most likely search when looking for information about you. If you have a common name, such as John Smith for example, you can add some other qualifier to your LinkedIn vanity url such as your current city or your primary job function, i.e. JohnSmithTuscon or JohnSmithCPA.

Be Specific About Your Experience

Some people call LinkedIn your online resume, but I don’t think that goes far enough in describing its usefulness. Typically, because of the length and design restraints of most resumes, you don’t have a ton of space to talk about your previous positions. With LinkedIn, you have lots of space to talk about your former jobs, and you should use as much of it as you can.

Under each previous position, make sure to add your specific job function along with specific accomplishments that set you apart from your peers. Also, while this should go without saying, don’t lie or exaggerate your work history to try and sound more experienced than you are. If a past position doesn’t seem like it’s anything worth writing about, consider how your role fit into the greater context of your company and work on crafting a strong sentence or two about that.

Get Recommended

In August, ReputationDefender COO Owen Tripp advised that you need “to get some LinkedIn recommendations” and he was absolutely right. The reputation value of having a strong and honest recommendation from a former manager, co-worker, or client is immeasurable.There are some tricks to getting a good recommendation though.

First, before asking someone for a recommendation, make sure that they’re someone who can speak to your work. It might sound good to have the CEO write you a recommendation, but if they only offer vague praise about being a hard-worker, it’s not as valuable as you think. Seek recommendations from the people who know your skills the best so that they can give you a specific shout-out that clearly demonstrates your value as an employee.

Similarly, if someone asks you to recommend their work, and you are comfortable doing so, give them specific praise. Always remember, however, that you don’t have to give a recommendation if you don’t want to. Your reputation depends not only on who says good things about you, but on who you’re saying good things about. If you give someone a positive recommendation just because they asked, even though you don’t have much knowledge of their work, and they end up messing up somewhere down the road, it could reflect poorly on you.

Connect Your LinkedIn Profile to Your Greater Online Identity

If you’re using LinkedIn, there’s a good chance you have your own blog or that you use other web tools such as Facebook or Twitter as well. LinkedIn makes it very easy to share your other web accounts via its websites section. Here, LinkedIn provides three space for you to add links to your most relevant professional websites. While LinkedIn already offers suggestions such as My Website, My Blog, and My Company as link titles, for the best SEO benefit from your links, use the dropdown menu to select “Other” and write a custom title for whatever it is you’re linking to, i.e. John Smith’s Personal Homepage.

In addition to listing links to your other web properties, LinkedIn recently integrated Twitter accounts into its functionality, allowing users who also use Twitter to share their tweets on LinkedIn. When you integrate your Twitter account onto LinkedIn, you will be asked if you want all of your tweets shared. We recommend avoiding this option so that you don’t accidentally share something inappropriate or irrelevant with your professional connections. Instead, choose the option where you only share Tweets on your LinkedIn profile if you use the hashtag “#in” at the end of your Twitter update.

Join a Group

Unlike Facebook, which is rife with irrelevant, silly, or otherwise non-work appropriate groups, groups on LinkedIn tend to be useful for expanding your professional network. An additional benefit of joining a LinkedIn group is that it expands the number of people you can contact through a direct message. Typically, the only way to send a direct message to someone is if you are a first-degree contact. For second- and third-degree contacts, you typically have to ask for someone to arrange an introduction. However, if you share a group with someone and they have their accounts set to accept messages from other group members, you can connect with them directly.

Often, LinkedIn Groups revolve around geography, so if you’re a member of a regional network (Software Programmers in Silicon Valley, for example) you will frequently find yourself receiving invitations to networking events and meet-ups. Attending these can be useful in helping you take your online brand offline and actually meet some of the people whom you know only digitally.

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Now that you have a world-class LinkedIn profile to help you protect your reputation online, don’t just sit back and relax. To really manage your online reputation, you have to be proactive. Get out there and start connecting with others in your field today to build your professional brand and make yourself an indispensable asset for your company.