What Your LinkedIn Profile Says Before You Say Anything

Most agents treat LinkedIn as the page they update when something changes. A new brokerage, a new title, a new photograph every few years. Between those updates the profile simply sits there, and it carries on working the whole time.

Someone you met at a school event looks you up on a Sunday evening. A mortgage broker checks you before returning your call. A professional relocating into your area finds you through a search you never thought about. None of those people meet you first. They meet the page.

The page is working whether you tend to it or not

This is the part worth sitting with. A profile you have not opened in eighteen months is still forming an impression, and it is forming it without you in the room. The question is not whether your profile is doing anything. It is whether it is doing what you would want it to do.

So when did you last read yours from the top, slowly, as though you had never met yourself?

Read your headline the way a stranger would

Your headline travels with you. It sits beside every comment you leave, every post you share, every connection request you send. For a great many agents it reads as a job title and a company name, which tells a reader what you are but very little about who you help.

Cover your name and your photograph, and look at the headline on its own. Could a stranger tell who you work with, what you help them do, and where you do it? If three people in your market ran the same test, would their headlines be distinguishable from yours?

The About section is not a curriculum vitae

The opening lines of your About section are the only part most readers will see before deciding whether to expand it. That makes those lines the most valuable space on the page, and in most profiles they are spent on a history of your career.

Read your first two sentences again. Whose situation do they name? If a reader is sitting with a problem you solve, do they recognise themselves anywhere in those lines, or do they have to keep reading to find out whether this page is for them?

Who is on the other side of the search?

LinkedIn is not where most people browse homes. It is where people are at work, which makes it a different kind of room to the one you are used to. The people in it are accountants, lawyers, lenders, relocation managers, business owners and the professionals your past clients work alongside all day.

Here are the three things a stranger takes in first, before they read a word of your history:

• The headline that appears under your name
• The photograph, and whether it looks like the person they would meet
• The first two lines of your About section

Given who is actually reading, which of those three is currently the weakest on your page? And what would have to be true of your profile for a referral partner to finish reading it and think of a specific person to send you?

A question to sit with this week

If the only thing a potential referral partner ever saw of you was this page, what would they assume you do, and would they be right?

Answer it honestly and the edits tend to write themselves. Answer it quickly and you will probably change your headline and change nothing else.

If it would help to think it through with someone

This is the kind of work that benefits from a second pair of eyes and a few uncomfortable questions. If you would like to have that conversation, you can book a discovery call.