Your LinkedIn profile is either working for you or against you. Tony K Silver shows you how to fix that — fast.
GROWTH PILLAR: Marketing & Branding
WHO THIS IS FOR: SMB owners / Solopreneurs / Corporate escapees / Leaders building systems
WHAT THEY'LL GAIN: Actionable LinkedIn profile strategies, keyword and search tactics, and a clear framework to stop being invisible on the world's largest professional network.
Most LinkedIn profiles are invisible. Not broken. Not offensive. Just invisible. That's the problem Tony K Silver has spent his career solving.
Tony is a LinkedIn trainer and speaker based in the UK. He works with professionals and business owners who've set up their profiles and walked away — not realizing that a static profile is a silent one. In this episode of Knack 4 Business, Tony walks through the exact elements that determine whether your profile gets found, gets read, and gets results.
What's covered in this episode:
Tony doesn't just explain what's broken. He shows you how to fix it — without upgrading to premium.
Connect with Tony K Silver on LinkedIn or visit him at tonyksilver.com. You can also find his speaking and training work at The Silver Voice.
Interested in Tony's LinkedIn Silver Academy? The Learner Level includes a profile ranking report, monthly 30-minute training webinar, a private LinkedIn group, resource library, and weekly LinkedIn updates. £25/month. Reach Tony directly at tony@tonyksilver.com or visit tonyksilver.com.
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Tony (00:05)
the whole presentation I put together earlier for yourself, just to give you an overall view of some of the things, what I will cover, why your profile might be invisible to the right people.
Yeah, it's all to talk about. It's all about time or total lack of time people have these days to do anything. My four pillars. Yeah. So many people set up their LinkedIn profiles and kind of leave it and that doesn't really crack it. We'll advocate some things there you can do and how you can use LinkedIn search, right? Clients, etc. OK, so first question is, and you open your microphones and shout out.
What are LinkedIn claiming is the current figure of number of accounts on the platform?
it's 1.31 billion based upon 200 countries, which is an interesting statistic because there aren't 200 countries in the world. So I don't know whether we're including Mars and Jupiter and a few other planets into this system. Interestingly, there are between five or six people added every second to the platform. So it's still growing at a fair old rate. We're in Canada.
So what's statistics in Canada? 29.2 million LinkedIn are claiming in Canada, which is interesting because my research this morning told me that is about 72 % of the total population of Canada, including all the kids and the grandads and everyone else that's outside working age.
speaker-7 (01:29)
Yeah
Tony (01:29)
But that's also increased by 2.2 million since I last spoke to you, you wonderful people about four months ago. Bottom line is don't believe everything you read that comes out of LinkedIn. They don't always tell you the truth or they forget to word it in a way that is the 1.3, 29.2 is probably accurate number of people that have opened an account in Canada since day one back in 2003, but many have been kicked off for being naughty, which we don't want to be doing.
So yeah, ⁓ it is big, it is still growing. And I often get asked the question, is it gonna be taken over by something else anytime soon? It's owned by Microsoft, I can't see it in my lifetime, but it doesn't say it won't be. So keywords, really important on LinkedIn. Now,
Two ways to look at keywords. So some homework. Think about three keywords where people would put it into the search engine that where you would come up in the results. Okay. I'll give you a clue. It's if you're an accountant, it's not accountant. It's too generic. Okay. Last time I did a search on LinkedIn when they told you the figure accounts were something north of 15 million, something like that.
We don't want to be in that pond. Let's put it that way. We need to be a bit more, a bit more niche on that. And of course we can go search you on LinkedIn as well. Anyone here heard of the Boolean search? Yes, that is probably one of the best tips I give out to people that's got nothing to do with LinkedIn. It's a database one and quite simply look it up.
But generally speaking, as a example, if you were to put business or see what financial director into LinkedIn, you get a number of people come up in the search, quite a lot of people to get a far more targeted, accurate. If you put speech marks either side of those two terms, financial director, LinkedIn and any database will start looking up, looking for those two words together in a sentence.
When I said financial director, LinkedIn's gone off and look for those two words. They don't have to be next to each other. So they're not very accurate results. So do yourself a favor. Apart from using LinkedIn's filters, where it says all filters on there, definitely worth discovering. Can't go through it in the time I've got today. But yeah, keywords are important. Also is this, my seven second syndrome, which actually is a lie. It's a lot less. That is what people are generally giving you of initial attention span.
Now, if you deal with Gen Z, good luck to you if you do, because I do, their initial attention spans about 1.7 seconds. So you need to hook them really quickly or they're off somewhere else. What happens in those alleged seven seconds? Well, yeah, if you get those keywords right, hopefully you're going to come up in a search. Okay. But you're to be in there with lots of other people and we need to understand that. What are they looking at? Well, the banner that goes across your top, your profile. Really important.
Your banner needs to tell people what it is that you can do for them. I've just been through this with a person. That's all they're interested in. know, what can you do for me? And basically, as you go about it, it'd be quite nice to know as well. We have got Headshot deliberately called Headshot because we don't want to spend time looking at something we can't actually see properly because I've got too much of their body in it. We need to consider that a lot of people, about 70 %
are looking up you on their phones screens are a lot smaller, in which case, yeah, they need to see the whites of your eyes and a nice smile doesn't go to miss as well. And the headline sits underneath your name.
Any words in a ballad are not words. They're still images in the form of letters. Bots can't read them, but headlines they can. Sit underneath your name, 220 characters, probably really, really something you should spend a lot of time finessing, looking at, getting down into a nice, something that tells the person what it is you do, something that can be found by the bots. So we're looking at those keywords in there.
If you've engaged them with those items, they might scroll down. Many cases, they won't bother. They haven't got enough information. I haven't got enough time. They're off. So yes, get it really engaging.
So there's my banner. Okay, I'm a premium member. get the scrolling banner. Okay. It's not worth upgrading just for this. It's quite nice to have if you've got it, but it does in the middle, tell people what I am and down the side, it tells them how I deliver my services. That's what they're looking for. They're in the right place. Headshot clearly can be seen on a phone, on the app and it's relatively up to date. Yes, I am a little bit grayer.
but it looks like me so I can get away with it. Yeah, my headline.
Tells people what I am, how I go about it. Ask questions. If you're bold enough, you can ask a question. The question should be aimed at your ideal target and you should be the answer. Okay, quite simple. And the other thing I always say to people strongly suggest, consider as my favorite training word.
Credibility. How, know, if you've got something clear you can put in there. I was speaking to someone earlier who spent 45 years in the industry. Massive credibility statement, you know, tells me when I land on his page that he knows what he's talking about. He wouldn't have lasted that long if he didn't. So that's what I initially see. What we're trying to get him to do, it's a scroll down. So yes, this is what he does. That's how he goes about it. Okay, I'm interested. Let's scroll down. In which case, this about.
section becomes the most important part of LinkedIn.
bar none. But if I don't scroll down from there, they're never going to see it. So that is important. But once we get down to the profile itself, about section, it's split into two sections. Now, I must apologize, I am working with LinkedIn at moment, I am beta testing. For some reason, they put my little dot dot C more at the start of fourth line when it should actually be on the end of the fourth line. But that first four lines, I've got to convince the person reading it.
speaker-8 (06:31)
Good morning, sir.
Tony (06:56)
to open it up, okay? Quite simply, I could go, I am this, I am that, aren't I fantastic, aren't I brilliant? They wouldn't give it. What we look to do is, yes, tell them a bit about what we do, but also talk to them. Maybe ask them questions. Use the word you. So when they get to the end of the fourth line, they're saying they see more, they want to find out more. They want to find out what it is that you can do to help me. You can also, that's the edit button.
When you go into it, you can put your top five skills in there. Quite a nice little thing to do because it is available before. But when they do push to see more. Yeah, this is my current because I do change it quite a bit. My current LinkedIn profile about section. The other ones are keeping a folder on my desktop. So I am putting them in and out, depending on what I'm doing at the time. Obviously, I will do it more often than most people, but it's a good idea.
Same with your headline. If you've got a big workshop coming up or something you're doing, it's maybe nice to have that woven into it as well. Okay. So my about section is lots of white space because I don't want people thinking it's too heavy to read you. There is basically 2600 characters just under. It doesn't look too clunky. You can do it in two or three paragraphs, but it does put people off actually wanting to read it.
not very nice. Bullet points draw people's eye. Good, good, good use of bullet points can draw people's eyes in statistics. People love positive statistics. I help people grow, save and all those wonderful things. LinkedIn does its own social proof. It's cool recommendations. It's a long way down the bottom and not everyone plays the game anyway. So why don't you just stick a testimonial into your about section?
I'll put mine in about halfway to make it slightly disruptive. It's someone else talking about me rather than me talking about me. But it does come from one of the biggest banks in the world. And they do say that I do an absolutely brilliant session. That gives me social proof. The rest of it, you could be and go, well, he's ready. Of course, he's going to big himself up. But this is the confirmation that I do deliver. And then at the bottom, call to action. I've seen so many about sections from
really, really poor to really, really good. But without that call to action, what do you expect the person that's read it to do next? You don't tell them, they probably won't do anything. Now I deliberately do not use DM me or message me LinkedIn or connect with me on LinkedIn. Okay, LinkedIn runs a very rigid first, second and third line connection tier. First line, know I'm Bernie, know, like Percy is, a few of you in here are first-line connections. We can mess each other all day long, no problems at all.
Friends of Bernie that are not connected to me are second line connections. Little bit harder, but totally possible. Third line connections, yeah. They have got to have paid for LinkedIn premium. They got to have some spare emails to send to you. You've got to accept them. Yeah, it's not the best way. you basically, if you ask people to DM you on LinkedIn or connect, you're excluding about 95 % of LinkedIn, which you probably didn't want to do. Put in your...
Email, as you can see, it's not clickable. Bots can't come on and start spamming you. But I'll put a question in there. This is what I like to do. And this is how I like to do it. They're interested. That's exactly what they will do.
So these are my four pillars that I work around that initial engagement. We've looked at it. You know, if you don't grab their attention in those 1.7 to 10 seconds, wherever it is, they're not gonna scroll down. They're not gonna see what you can do. Optimization. Well, I don't particularly like the word, but you need to look at optimizing your profile. The more sections that you've got, the better it is for you. But LinkedIn changes regularly and always forget to tell you what they've done.
So there are subsections of subsections on your LinkedIn profile. Fill as much in as you possibly can that makes sense to do so. It will help your search results as well. I talk to people about activities, not got an awful lot of time in here, other than to say at this moment in time, LinkedIn is not looking for people to over the top. They're getting fed up with it. Once a day is sufficient.
because the thing LinkedIn are really promoting at the moment in time is people doing constructive commenting. So none of this AI generated rubbish, please. And none of this short, sharp, great post Bernie, well done you. In fact, LinkedIn says if it's less than 50 characters, they're going to deem it to be AI regardless if it is or not. But if you're commenting where it proves you've actually read the post, you're adding to the post and maybe adding a bit around your specialty as well.
then LinkedIn's gonna like it. It is probably as powerful as a post at the moment in time. They are promoting it. But if you're posting too much, too much, too much, too much, too much, they're not liking it. And the other big change is, yeah, if you are a LinkedIn profiler like myself, and I post about LinkedIn related subjects, that ticks all the boxes. LinkedIn like it, LinkedIn will promote my posts. I start talking about wellness or AI or things I'm not a specialist in.
LinkedIn will go back to my profile and go, can't find these keywords. That's not what he is. Gonna download it. So all those lovely influences we've had for the last three or four years. Bye bye, you're going, your posts are gonna die a death. Because all you're doing is chasing numbers and you're not gonna get very far by doing that. And then the search elements, yes. That Boolean search is really useful.
The standard LinkedIn search engine is perfectly adequate. As long as you use the all filters button, but it is going to be replaced. I heard someone mentioned earlier by an LLM large language model coming in, which means you can start asking questions and it will give you the results rather than having to filter it. North America got it first. LinkedIn tend to run things in five waves. So we'll all get it eventually, but LinkedIn are saying it is for premium clients only.
I happen to know that's a lie. Initially it will be, but they will roll it out to everybody. So again, don't upgrade just for that because you will get it free and you could be halfway through paying for it. Yeah. So you're about section must belong to the viewer. I've through that live.
let's have a look at the search just very quickly to show you what can be done in there. So at the top of your profile, absolutely, there is a search engine. And we go down the road of finance director as a search. You stick it in there. I haven't Boolean this.
but I could do by putting the question marks, Ali, switch my thing to the side of it. I choose people and then it's giving me a whole load of people. It no longer shows you the number at the top because LinkedIn got found out, been lying, so they removed it. But it does tell me that as a minimum, there are 10 pages of 10 people. There's a lot more than that. This is the button you must all discover. All filters. Let's run for it very quickly and then I will finish. First line, you know them.
Second line, as I say, best bet, like I wouldn't bother. And then actually, yes, I'm gonna go, oh, second line collections. want them to be, I want them to be actually in the United States. Could choose current companies, past companies, certain industry. I want them to actually be a finance director in business consulting. And then down the bottom, I will always use what I know. I don't know his name, but I know that he's a director. And those, well then.
Go away and it'll consider all those options and they come back with a list of people to get it tighter. Yeah, use the Boolean search. United States is a very big country. So go for a locality. I might use New York or part of the Metropolitan New Yorkers thing driving down just by keep using those filters. You can drive it all the way down. This is done in the free version. Ladies and gentlemen, I'm not paying for this privilege and you don't have to as well. So yeah, your search.
is really, really useful. The other thing you can do, go back to, let's come out of that a second, is do something that I was teaching people a while ago because our feeds got to be really rubbish. Yuck, horrible. But if you use others, oh, actually.
I could look at finance directors and other things. I could look for posts in groups, in schools, in courses. It isn't just people. But let's say I want to look at AI, I mentioned it once, can't avoid it. I could put that in there and then rather than look at my feed and see all the different things in my feed, half of it, a third of it is promoted posts from LinkedIn. Don't want to see all that, my time. I'm going look at posts. And now I've got a load of posts about AI, set of filters here I can use.
to actually get far more accurate results. So I do know that your LinkedIn feed has got rubbish. I do know there are a way around it, but actually that last little tip I gave there, going in, putting in what it is you wanna see a post about, and then you just get posts around that subject matter, which I think is really, really useful. Most people don't know about it. Most people don't do it.
actually the experience section has got more about it than people realize. There's at least four main constituent parts of the experience section, of which most people have just got the basic one they had to fit in when they first joined. They haven't added to it, and you can add massive value in there. Certainly if you're in the careers world, it's definitely a section that I work on with the careers people, because they just let, from two in this area, there's so much more you can do in there. But yes, congruency throughout your profile.
is absolutely essential. know, help you get picked up in the search rankings. People are looking at it from the outside. We'll see the thread and understand. Don't be all things to all people. That's a big, big issue in business. You know, find your niche or maybe one or two niches. Own them. Own them. Have it all over your profile. Post all about it. And that you'll do absolutely fine. Don't go chasing the latest trends just because everyone else is because it's not going to work moving forwards.
They want to play that going and they can go back to Facebook.
they don't want you leaving it as a safe person. They want you on all day long. But they built a section where you can do it and they've had to build the section. It's called the feature section on LinkedIn. And in that section, you can put links to wherever you want in the world. You can put what you want in there. It's one of is the best section on LinkedIn that was never there in the beginning. It is undefused. People will put up posts.
speaker-8 (16:24)
you
Tony (16:27)
And then the post is out of dates. You you've got three sections. You can see three things you can see in a feature section. If you go and look at mine today and come back in a week's time, they will not be the same. I'm continually moving things around so people see what's in there. So I've got a workshop. You've got an event coming up. It will be in my first feature section about the event in there. OK, next to it, if it's really important, I might have a link to the events booking page next to it.
When the event's gone, they're gone, they're history, but I might put the next thing that's in there. I'm constantly using that section. And I really, really, really suggest that people, you haven't found the feature section, go and look at all the different things you can do. know, add media is the most important powerful button. Add along with the URL.
So this is where it sits when you've got it. It sits just below services on LinkedIn's rubbish section. This is the feature section and you can see I've got links, I've got articles, I've got media in there. That's how I added it. Absolutely at the top, you've got a button which says add profile section. Mine is wrong because LinkedIn's playing. In there, it's not the core. It's the first recommended as the feature sections there. Do yourself a favor, go and add it.
Add stuff to it. You can move stuff in and out. You can rearrange the order of it. There's so much you can do with it. It's such a valuable section.
I always say to everybody, know, I try and make it entertaining. I try and make it useful.
But if you don't implement what you just heard, the bits that you think are really important to you, then we've just wasted it now. Implementations, what it's all about.