If you have a business, you definitely want to be found on LinkedIn. So you build your LinkedIn profile to 100{a1e4dbad5b5db674abcd08880e44cddfd507140ecbeb8646296ad08a1acb49a4} completeness with a generic Headline (such as Owner of XYZ Inc.), a couple of paragraphs in your Summary, a handful of Specialties and your Experience. Time goes by and you notice that very few people have checked out your profile.
This "Who's Viewed Your Profile?" section is located on your Edit Profile page. A friend calls it the Stalker Box.
The problem might be that your services, products and areas of expertise are obscure and not much in demand. However, the problem might also be that you aren’t thinking like the people who are trying to find you.
Whenever you create a profile on a social media platform such as LinkedIn, you need to include key words and phrases that people will use to find someone with your skills, products and/or services. That means getting into the minds of the people who are doing the searching. Ask your associates, friends and family what words and pharses they would use in Google, for instance, to look for you and your business. Compile a list; what you see may surprise you. Use the list to flesh out your profile in your Heading, Summary, Specialties and Experience.
It’s also a good practice to add the Skills section to your profile (Click on Add Sections underneath the blue box on your Edit Profile page- you’ll be able to add the Skills section there) and fill it with all of your relevant skills and expertise. The idea is to expand your profile to contain all of the relevant words and phrases that people might use to search for you.
In order to get some more ideas about what terms people might be using to find you, take a look at the Skills beta feature in LinkedIn. It’s located under the More tab. http://www.linkedin.com/skills/?trk=skill-rank When you type in a skill here, you get a new page with information about that skill as well as a large list of related skills on the left of the page. You’ll also see a list of people’s profiles that are related to that skill. Take some time to look at the profiles of those people and see what you might be missing. Hey, there’s nothing wrong with a little reconnaissance!
