What do you enter as job title on your LinkedIn profile?Any idea how many “managers” there are on LinkedIn? At the time of writing (April 2012) a search on LinkedIn provides more than 23 million managers worldwide (update March 2015: 39,905,632 managers).
Apart from the fact that you are hard to find (what is the probability that you appear in the 1st ten search results?) is the title ‘manager’ also fairly meaningless. Luckily you have 100 characters (including spaces) to write a clear and descriptive job title.
MY BUSINESS CARD JUST STATES ‘MANAGER’
The title on your LinkedIn profile doesn’t need to be literally the title your employer gave you. LinkedIn is not a resume. You can use 100 characters to describe your title. Suppose I am looking for an office manager and I find: “International Sales Manager of Premium Commercial Kitchen Equipment”. Then it’s immediately clear that this is not the person I’m looking for.
DON’T FORGET ABOUT KEYWORDS
If someone does not know you, but is looking for you, what do they search for … I for example want to be found by people looking for “LinkedIn Training” “LinkedIn Coaching ” “LinkedIn Trainer” “LinkedIn Coach” “Social Media Marketing ” “Social Media Marketing Training” and so forth. So these words must appear in my profile. Strategic places for your keywords are your job titles, job descriptions (up to 2000 characters each), your professional headline and your summary. Remember: “The average visitor to a website decides in just 10 seconds to read on or move on”. Your LinkedIn profile is also a website. In those 10 seconds the visitor sees mainly the top of your profile. Here LinkedIn shows the title of your current job and three past positions. So make sure that at least these four are in tip-top order.
Update May 2017: You need to UPDATE your job titles NOW (honestly).