Welcome to episode 206. As the new desktop profile design continues to roll-out to many, I thought it would make sense to cover profiles with you in this episode.

Interesting Stuff I Saw This Week

LinkedIn’s AutoFill plugin could leak user data, secret fix failed

Facebook faces exodus as businesses call time

Facebook's new slogan: 'If you think we're not good for your business, leave'

Always Customise Your LinkedIn Invitation? Better not?

LinkedIn Features

The new mobile ‘Find Nearby’ seems to be broken! The settings have disappeared which renders it useless!

Post of the Week

Following on from last weeks episode on content marketing I thought I would highlight this excellent post from John Espirian. Great advice…and great subtitles too!

Refresh Your Profile

With the new profile design rolling out to many of you I thought it would be a good time to make some changes to your profile.

As a starting point I posted this video this week showing a side by side comparison You might find Andy Foote’s article on the reasons behind the new profile design interesting

A Scientific Explanation Of The NEW LinkedIn Profile

Some of you will have to change your background image because of the new position of the profile picture. It is unlikely to change on mobile where it is still centred. This is not a massive issue as the background image is less important on mobile, but worth considering.

The easiest way to create a background image is to find a suitable free image on Pixabay and upload it to Canva and then create a ‘custom dimension’ of 1584x396 px

It may also be a good time to invest in a new, professionally taken headshot image. This is no longer an expensive thing to do and you should easily be able to find a good local headshot photographer on LinkedIn, just type the following into the searcher at the top of the page; headshot AND title:photographer then select ‘people’ and add your location

Review your headline : Is there clarity to your prospects? Are you using your 120 characters wisely?

Company Logo; The most recently commenced position will be the one that shows a logo at the top of your new profile. Make sure that if you have several concurrent positions that the most important one is at the top (you can move them by dragging the 4 horizontal lines)

Summary: This has increased from 2 to 3 lines (roughly 300 characters) now. A good summary should start with your contact details (only 45 characters are seen on mobile) and the rest should provide an enticing ‘teaser’ to encourage the viewer to click on the now more prominent ‘show more’

Media: As there are now 6 thumbnails that actually show in the preview, it may be a good time to review which media you are using and perhaps designing them so that the thumbnails (which are much smaller) show what the media is.

Skills: If you are into skills (I’m really not!) then you might want to use the new format as an excuse to review what you show (see Greg Coopers post above)

Mentioned in this episode:

This show was created by the original host of the show, Mark Williams.