SmartPulse — our weekly nonscientific reader poll in SmartBrief on Social Media — tracks feedback from leading marketers about social media practices and issues.
This week, we asked: How often do you revise your LinkedIn profile?
- I do it more than once a year: 47.12%
- I do it once a year or less: 36.09%
- I don’t have a LinkedIn profile: 8.02%
- I don’t revise my profile: 7.52%
- Not sure: 1.25%
LinkedIn tries awfully hard to get its members to check in more often — offering discussion groups, company pages, status updates and more. But the sad truth is that unless you’re actively searching for a job, it’s very easy to treat LinkedIn as a “set-it-and-forget-it” online presence. But LinkedIn is more than collection of a static resumes that happens to be online. It’s a living ecosystem, and if you want to thrive in this environment, you need to do more than the bare minimum.
Even if you’re not actively looking for work and even if you don’t have time for a lot of online networking via LinkedIn, you owe it to yourself to have a well-developed profile page that reflects your current work experience. If your dream job comes a-knocking, you want to be easy to find and ready to put your best foot forward.
I’m relieved to see that almost half of SmartBrief on Social Media readers are tweaking the profiles more than once a year. It’s can be tempting to only update your profile when you formally change job titles, but chances are your job is more fluid than that. I’ve had the same job title at SmartBrief for 2.5 years — but in that time, I’ve had at least three distinct phases, each with different responsibilities. If I’d set up my profile in 2010 and just left it alone, my LinkedIn profile would in no way reflect how I currently spend my workday. If you’ve been in your current position for more than a year, I’m willing to bet the same is true for you.
If you have trouble making time for all your social media efforts, try timing your LinkedIn profile update to coincide with your regular performance review. That way you’ll have your accomplishments and skills fresh in your mind when you update your page — and you won’t let another year slip by without an update.