How Is Your LinkedIn Mugshot?

Welcome to episode 145, this week I want to revisit something that so many people ignore or underestimate the importance of….your LinkedIn profile picture!

But first a few interesting things I saw this week;

An open letter to Jeff Weiner by Oleg Vishnepolsky

The main highlights from this were;
Anonymous like and dislike buttons
Managing your feed
Better management of followers/connections
Who is most active
Who engages with you the most
Bookmarking of updates and posts

LinkedIn tell Windows app users it is no longer supported…and then say it was a mistake!

Russia completes LinkedIn ban by demanding Google and Apple remove the app

No Fake news from LinkedIn. Really? These comments are very misleading from Daniel Roth, Editors do not control all published posts and certainly not all updates. That said, fake news is pretty rare on LinkedIn.

New Desktop UI Update:

There are strong rumours that LinkedIn have had to put the roll-out on hold due to problems.
One of the problems seems to be that users are getting their account suspended for no reason, just as I did!
According to this interesting post from Andy Hawkins, it would appear that Boolean does still work in the new UI….despite LinkedIn previously stating it didn’t! It’s hard to know what to believe, my experiments suggested it didn’t but maybe they have changed this since.

Is Your Profile Picture Up To Scratch?

I found an excellent article this week that reminded me of the importance of this subject;
Can an AI perfect your LinkedIn profile picture?

The new service this refers to is a fantastic idea - Snappr Photo Analyzer

Analyse your LinkedIn profile photo here (make sure you are logged into LinkedIn in another tab first)

Unfortunately I didn’t score so well!;

This is a subject I always cover in my training, as does pretty much every LinkedIn or social media trainer in the world - it’s the most obvious thing to get right and yet so many people get it wrong.

As a random experiment I ran a search on LinkedIn with the following criteria;
10 miles radius of my office
3rd tier +

Then I viewed the first 20 profiles and here are the mistakes I found;
Out of focus
Poor lighting
An action shot of 2 men playing football - one might be the profile owner?
Too far away - full torso in view
Two people in the image
Dressed for a night out on the town.
Looking away from the camera
Wearing a safety hat
Wedding photo
The grey ‘thing’ - no photo

So only 10 profiles had decent profile photos and out of those I would only give 4 of them a 8+ out of 10 score.

Other common mistakes I often see;
Holding or standing next to a product
Image includes or is only of their kids
Any obvious selfie, especially ones taken on a train!
Showing too much flesh - especially cleavage!
Looking too serious or miserable
Sunglasses

The 5 simple rules of a great profile photo

Close up - head and shoulders max
In-focus and current
Clothing you would wear for a business meeting
Smiling
Just you

With the new desktop UI design, all profile photos will be circular - across every section and on mobile so it is important to check what your current profile photo looks like in a desktop search result or on the mobile app.
I found this interesting

Question: What’s the verdict on showing other things as well as you in your profile, like famous people, awards, the FA cup you once stood next to in a football museum etc?

Also:
Should I have my LinkedIn profile picture taken by a professional photographer?

I answer both these questions in the podcast and refer to an episode of the winbusinessin podcast where I interviewed ‘The Headshot Guy’ John Cassidy

Season 1 Episode 5. LinkedIn Profile Photo’s with ‘The Headshot Guy’