LinkedIn Profile Fields

Posted on July 4, 2008 by Mike O'Neil

Hello,

In the course of conducting my LinkedIn training workshops I often discover useful things that I feel I should share.  Some are simple and some are not.  Below are some interesting things I think you will find helpful in your LinkedIn usage. We've gleaned these "Golden Nuggets" from completing over 100 workshops and webinars. So, here are some LinkedIn Profile tips.

Recently, I showed LinkedIn users how to put special formatting characters (│ ▌ ◊ ► ◄↔ ♦ •) into their profiles to make them more interesting and more readable. Now you see a lot of them. We teach people how to use them in our Integrated Alliances (IA) LinkedIn Hands-On workshops and webinars and include them in the MS Word templates we provide.

So, just how much "Real Estate" do I have to work with on my LinkedIn Profile?

I had a project recently to find out just how much space we have to work with in each field on LinkedIn. It lets you know where the lines are drawn and that can help a lot in making you most visible.  We always suggest that you create and maintain your master LinkedIn profile text in MS Word and then cut and past the text into LinkedIn.

Picture – 85 pixels by 85 pixels (after cropping) using a professional photo
Headline/Header – 110 Characters
Summary – 2,000 Characters (about 2/3 of a printed page)
Specialties – 500 Character
Company Name – 90 Characters
Job Title - 100 Characters
Job Description – 1,000 Characters
Education Activities and Societies – 500 Characters
Education Additional Notes – 1,000 Characters
Custom Web site URL Tag (Other) – 30 Characters
Interests – 1,000 Characters
Groups and Associations – 1,000 Characters
Honors and Awards - 1,000 Characters
Contact Settings – Lots, but no way to effectively tell how many - really

A fully optimized Profile is one of the keys to being found and helps you find new opportunities using LinkedIn.  So, we've developed the IA LinkedIn® 101 Workshops and Webinars to teach you how to craft an extremely effective LinkedIn profile, how to begin building your network, how to avoid the numerous LinkedIn pitfalls, how to search for people and resources and how to BEHAVE on LinkedIn so you don't get in trouble. The IA LinkedIn 201 Workshops and Webinars are mostly focused on getting you to 500+ connections, LinkedIn Answers and LinkedIn toolbars.

INFO and Registration for all

Check out my fully built-out LinkedIn profile for ideas on improving yours

Sincerely,

Michael P. O'Neil
CEO, Integrated Alliances    
303-683-9600 Office | 720-596-5214 FAX | Skype: IntegratedAlliances

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