LinkedIn is all about making professional connections, from individuals you know to individuals you wish to get to know. The platform has over half a billion users from over 200 countries, making it the clear leader among social media sites to connect with B2B prospects, businesses, and potential candidates for new positions. Many marketers tap into their LinkedIn profile to maximize sales.

But like other social media platforms and search engines, LinkedIn has its own set of rules and best practices that you should follow to maximize your profile’s reach.

So why aren’t you getting flooded with new LinkedIn requests already? We have identified seven essential reasons that you can work on to optimize your LinkedIn profile.

1. Your Headline and Summaries Need Work

Here’s a big deal, since your friends and colleagues already know about you in one capacity or another, it won’t be too hard to get connection requests from them. Things become very different when dealing with people outside of your network who don’t know much about you. In this case, your profile must speak to them about who you are and what makes your business stand out.

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Think of your LinkedIn profile as the suit you’re wearing to big meetings or elevator pitches to potential investors. For obvious reasons, you should put your best foot forward to create a great first impression. It is known as LinkedIn profile optimization.

When someone lands on your profile, your business goals should instantly become clear to them.

Here are a few things you should take care of:

• Talk about experience
• List your relevant skills
• Summarize your skills
• List your credentials
• Write a captivating headline and additional information

2. Your Profile Picture Leaves a Lot to be Desired

People will judge you based on your LinkedIn picture. They will already have made their minds about you within the first few seconds of glancing at your profile picture. We do this all the time to protect ourselves, choose the right friends, and make the right business decisions.

It is why this is essential to reflect your business personality with a =good overall picture on LinkedIn.
Here are a few dos and don’ts of profile pictures you should know about:

• Don’t take an amateur selfie
• Don’t use filters to optimize the picture
• Don’t crop a group picture
• The background should not distract users from the picture
• The image shouldn’t show your hobby (don’t show them a snapshot of you playing basketball!)
• Remember, this is not Instagram!

Many tools let you optimize your profile picture for different social media platforms, including LinkedIn. One such tool is Landscape. It enables you to create images that are just the right size for LinkedIn.

3. It’s not Instantly Clear What Your Business is All About

What you do, who you are, and what sets you apart from the crowd won’t become clear from the offset. It would be best if you still created a robust professional headline that is succinct and to the point. When you leave things to your visitor’s imaginations, they will leave your profile. It’s not fun trying to connect with someone who you have zero to no clues about.

Put yourself in your viewer’s shoes: will you try connecting with someone who’s profile is devoid of information?

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4. You’re Not Posting Often

Here’s a big deal; people only tend to send request notifications to users they are familiar with. It’s not enough to merely put together a professional profile and hope others discover you by having created an account. No, the best way to get their attention is to post on LinkedIn frequently. Make sure these posts are helpful and relevant to users.

Here’s the idea: when your connection shares, comments, or likes your status updates, all of their connections are likely to see your original post appear in their feed. If they find the content relevant to their goals, there is a chance they may take the first step to send an invitation to connect with you. LinkedIn describes these connections as ‘2nd-degree connections’; that is, they are in the network of your immediate contacts.

The more you post, the more opportunities you create for engagement, thus sending your content across home feeds in different parts of LinkedIn. The general rule of thumb when writing posts is not to overthink it. The more you think, the more time you will ultimately waste. If someone doesn’t like your post, they’ll move on.

Besides, there’s no point in wasting your lead generation efforts on prospects who aren’t interested. Your goal instead is to attract like-minded prospects who share the same business goals as you. LinkedIn’s algorithms seem to have a mind of their own, and your network isn’t likely to see your post unless you publish articles natively with LinkedIn’s article tool.

Don’t have time to write LinkedIn posts and want a professional to do it for you? Most professionals use a LinkedIn profile writing service to stand out from the crowd.

5. You’re Not Using Images

A picture can tell a thousand words, as the old saying goes. And this makes a lot of sense. You can double your LinkedIn engagement rates by using high quality, relevant images. Bonus points if you publish infographics. They can instantly improve the engagement rates of your LinkedIn posts. The key is to use a higher ratio of visuals to help users digest information quickly.

Images can result in an increase in your comment rate by about 98% on LinkedIn.

6. You’re Not Engaging with Your Existing Connections

One of the best ways to promote your profile is to engage with existing connections in your network. All they have to do is like or comment on your posts to get your original status featured on their home pages. Engage in friendly debates and reach out to other people. It is quite honestly the easiest way to reach more people.

Try to comment with your insights and questions to increase engagement and gain more exposure.

7. You’re Not Leveraging Other Social Media Platforms

One proven way to send traffic back to your LinkedIn profile is to promote your URL on other social media channels. It turns your profile into a connection-driving machine and encourages viewers to connect with you on LinkedIn.

This tactic proves particularly useful if you have a significant following on a platform. If you’ve got thousands of followers on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter, don’t be afraid to insert your LinkedIn URL to get promoted.

More importantly, there’s no shame in promoting your LinkedIn profile by posting the link in status, tweet, video, pin, etc. Quite simply, this is a great way to take advantage of your presence on other platforms. It is worth noting that this process works best if you use a customized LinkedIn URL. By default, your LinkedIn URL will look like a bunch of random numbers that don’t make sense to humans.

But you can customize your public profile URL to allow others to remember the link for future visits easily. You can learn more about customizing your public profile URL on the official LinkedIn page here.

So there you have it, the complete breakdown of reasons for low activity on your LinkedIn profile.

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