Profile 'Featured' Section Highlights Achievements & More

LinkedIn is nowadays to white collar workers, what Instagram is to Married At First Sight rejects.

A conduit to leveraging and building personal brand equity, of which they can hopefully dine out for many moons to come.

Who knows, maybe get a sweet gig on commercial radio. Or a podcast. Or something.

Strong personal brands lay the foundation for both an individual’s career progression and can if handled sensitively, help drive forward a business.

Especially in a highly commoditised space.

Although, I say, sensitively, because over exposure can bite hard for both. Ask CPA’s former CEO Alex Malley and Tom Waterhouse.

As LinkedIn’s platform engagement continues to soar, it gets better and better for both personal and business brand building.

LinkedIn’s New ‘Featured’ section on personal profiles offers C-Suite members and those who dream of the corner office, an opportunity to put their best foot forward, highlighting key achievements, great work, thought leadership and more.

Mo LinkedIn Engagement Mo Personal Branding

LinkedIn has been on a good run for the past 24 months, ending 2019 on a high, as per parent company Microsoft’s recent quarterly results.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, January 2020

“LinkedIn continues to create economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce. Every seven seconds, someone is hired on LinkedIn.

We saw record levels of member engagement again this quarter. Marketing solutions remains our fastest growing business as marketers leverage the enhanced tools and LinkedIn pages to connect with our nearly 675 million members.

New data validation features in LinkedIn Sales Navigator helps sellers use the power of their LinkedIn network to drive more meaningful customer engagement.”

LinkedIn sessions grew 25% with record levels of engagement again, within the final quarter of 2019.

LinkedIn revenue increased by 24%, with continued strength across all businesses, highlighted by marketing solutions growth of 42%.

The Featured section, which sits between the LinkedIn bio and Activity stream, offers users an excellent opportunity to capitalise on this burgeoning attention.

The Featured section is a new area on your LinkedIn profile where you can showcase work samples that you’re most proud of. For example, you can feature posts that you’ve authored or re-shared, articles you’ve published on LinkedIn, and even external media like images, documents and links.

Curate & Prune Your LinkedIn Image & Persona

By using the Featured section, you can pick and choose content and curate what other members will see. By default, newly featured content will show up first in your Featured section. However, you can always manage how your content is displayed by reordering it.

If you’d like to feature content as you’re posting it on your feed, you’ll have to click the …More icon from the top right of the post to add it to your Featured section.

There is currently no way to automatically pin content that you’ve uploaded to your Featured section.

In contrast, the LinkedIn Activity section highlights all your activity for the past 45 days, ordered by recency. Including your articles, posts, comments and likes on other LinkedIn posts. Your Activity section is located just below the Featured section on your profile if you choose to enable it, or under your Dashboard.

Any media you may have previously had in your About section has been moved to the Featured section.

You can include as many samples of your work as you want in your Featured section, and can manage what you’d like to feature by adding and removing content at any time. If you don’t have any content to feature, your Featured section will be hidden from people who view your profile.

Who can see what, on your LinkedIn profile is, as always, dictated by your overall privacy settings.

For example, if you specify that the visibility of your posts is limited to your connections only, then only your connections will be able to see the content in your Featured section. Likewise, the content included in your Featured section will not be discoverable through search.

At present, the Featured section is only available on individual LinkedIn profiles, not LinkedIn Pages (for businesses).

However, if you use your individual LinkedIn profile to represent your company, you can use the Featured section to highlight your work content.

Keep your eyes peeled over the coming weeks, as LinkedIn is gradually releasing this feature to all LinkedIn members.