How up to date and complete is the contact section on your LinkedIn profile? When I took a screenshot for this post I found out – shock horror – that the 3 links to my website, the information with address, and Skype were all missing. Yikes. Especially since I did something clever with 2 out of those 3 entries.
THERE ARE 8 HIDDEN GEMS IN CONTACT
- Profile URL (make it clean and lean)
- Websites (add description)
- Phone (more on that later)
- Address (here I got real clever)
- Email (more on that later)
- Twitter (remember twitter?)
- IM (I put my Skype name here)
- Birthday (if you like congrats)
LET ME WALK YOU THROUGH
LinkedIn Profile URL
By default, LinkedIn adds some gibberish after your name. Not a pretty sight. Please clean it up by just typing in your name.
Websites
You can add THREE websites to your profile. They can all link to the same website! Link to the home page, the services page and the contact page for example. Make sure to go for “other” instead of “personal” or “company” the other field allows you type a short description that appears after the URL (in brackets).
Phone
If you are happy to be contacted to by phone, do add the number. Now remember: these gems are HIDDEN. The contact bit sits in the right sidebar AND people need to click “show more” double whammy hidden. Add the phone number (with a call to action) to your summary as well.
Address
Sure, you can add your business address. But it is a free text field, so you can just type any message you like here! Whoppaaa… get creative and clever people.
Email
Same story as the phone number. Nuf said.
Twitter
If you are on Twitter, add it here. It becomes a clickable link on your profile AND it is visible ABOVE the contact section as well, without having to click on “show more”
IM
Here you can add ONE messenger service. Options are: AIM, Skype, Yahoo!Messenger (do people use that?), ICQ (whoohoo its back! Born in 1996, 7 years before LinkedIn, WordPress or Skype), Google Hangouts, QQ, WeChat (cannot be serious about Chinese market if you are not on WeChat).
Birthday
This is so cool! You connections send you messages. True, often just the default LinkedIn one, but hey, they DO put in the effort to click that. Or (makes me feel real special) people use the LinkedIn trigger and then replace the default message with a personal birthday wish!
>>> Tell me (in the comments) are you using all 8? Why/why not? <<<