With 630 million professionals using LinkedIn to generate business, strike partnerships, and find jobs or talent, it’s essential that your profile be appealing to relevant viewers.

We’ve analyzed hundreds of LinkedIn profiles and have summarized here five things the very best LinkedIn profiles share — and that you can emulate!

1. Speak to a single audience

At its core, your LinkedIn profile is marketing you, as a professional. Like any good marketing piece, your LinkedIn profile should be tailored to appeal to a specific audience.

If you try to please everyone, you’ll please no one. So think carefully about what your audience needs and wants to know about you.

  • If you’re a professional offering a service, what are prospective clients looking for?
  • If you’re a job seeker, what are hiring managers at the companies you’d like to work for seeking?
  • If you’re a recruiter, what appeals to job candidates and HR teams?

2. Convey authenticity

You’re more than just a plain-vanilla professional — you’re you! Go ahead and showcase some of your personality in your profile.

Revealing your character has the dual benefit of making you more attractive to people and organizations for which you’re a good match, and discouraging those for which you’re not. In other words, showcasing your personality can help ensure you’re spending your time on the best opportunities for you.

3. Build trust

Even if the majority of your sales or job leads come from networking and word-of-mouth referrals, your LinkedIn profile often shows up at the top of search engine results and serves a critical role in building the trust needed for prospects to take the next step and contact you.

Recognizing this, LinkedIn provides numerous opportunities to demonstrate the competency and credibility that create trust, from awards and recognition to endorsements and recommendations. Take advantage of them all!

4. Create affinity

When you meet someone at a cocktail party for the first time, you’re likely to cycle through interests until the two of you find something in common. From attending the same university to sharing hobbies such as biking and gardening, these affinities help us move from strangers to acquaintances.

Your LinkedIn profile should ideally recreate the very human tendency to look for commonalities before building a relationship.

5. Make it easy to read

Your readers will spend a few seconds (yes, seconds!) getting a first impression about you. If they’re interested, they’ll then invest a minute or so scanning the rest of your profile. That’s not a lot of time!

Make your profile easy to scan and ensure the most important information pops off the screen.

💡 WEBSITE INSIGHT: Don’t forget to add a link to your website in your “About” info!