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People join social networking sites for their own personal reasons. Some join them because they want to make new friends while a majority wish to stay connected with their current friends and look for all their long lost friends. Others may simply want to look for long lost friends and try as much as possible to make themselves found. The reason behind joining can affect on how important it is for them to fill up their profile.

LinkedIn is one of those more direct social networking sites that encourage people to fill up their profiles so they can be well connected with others professionally. But before you start looking for the connections you want to hook up with, you should make yourself known and searchable. When you add somebody, you won’t be connected until that person approves you and the person approving you will probably look at your profile first.

It is essential in building your LinkedIn profile so you won’t have much to worry about when you are job searching or finding new connections that you may partner up with in the future. You can start with these basic tips regarding LinkedIn profiles.

Make your Profile Completeness 100%

You can find this in the “Edit My Profile” section. This is fairly easy to do since LinkedIn guides you through the process and tells you which fields need filling. Adding a picture is among the elements that are needed to make the profile complete. When adding a picture, make sure you use a decent or professional photo where your face is emphasized so people can notice you just by looking at the thumbnail.

View and Check Your Profile

Put yourself in another person’s position and be on the lookout for any mistakes or missing information. Spelling errors are indecent and can reflect your personality, which some people can be really cautious of.

Make Sure Your Profile is Updated

When filling other fields, try not to make it exactly like your resume because resumes tend to highlight past information. Be sure to include information like what you are planning to do and what you are looking for to expand your career and major milestones that you accomplished.

Improve Your Profile

One of the ways in improving your profile is inserting keywords that best describe you. This can even include common misspellings of your last name so that people can find you even if they don’t know the exact spelling. Add common answers to questions about yourself too so you can make your profile really stand out in front of others. Remember you want people to find you and connect with you professionally.

Make Use of the Applications

You can also further improve your profile by starting a blog and linking it to LinkedIn using the applications. Other applications are there to allow you to update your LinkedIn profile while working on these other services.

The best thing about filling up your profile is that you only need to do it once and then keep it updated with occasional editing which shouldn’t be very hard. The results are very rewarding and could give you more connections with others.