Building a Professional Online Presence: Tips for New Graduates

Publié le 17 July 2024 Par Jobillico

For young people stepping into the workforce, building a professional online presence is a simple process with these tips for new graduates.

Are you a new graduate seeking opportunities in the professional world? One of the best ways to do this is by building a professional online presence.

If you do it right, you will likely attract significantly more and better job opportunities. And in this article, we’ll guide you through the process of building a professional online presence to give your career a major boost.

Crafting a Professional Profile

A great professional online profile is like a puzzle with many pieces. One of the most important, however, is having a LinkedIn profile.

As Jeffrey Zhou, CEO and Founder of Fig Loans shares: “One of the most important pieces of your professional profile will be your LinkedIn profile. LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network, with millions of users from all over the globe. As a platform, LinkedIn is an absolute game-changer for working professionals.”

Similarly, Brooke Webber, Head of Marketing at Ninja Patches has this advice for fresh graduates, “A great LinkedIn profile can be the difference between your CV getting lost in a pile of CVs that barely get a 6-second glance or getting headhunted for your dream job.”

So how do you create an effective LinkedIn profile that puts you in front of the right audience and helps to future-proof your job search? We’ve outlined the blueprint every fresh graduate should follow below.

Creating an Optimized LinkedIn profile

Here are the steps to take in building a well-optimized LinkedIn profile:

Create a Compelling Headline and Summary

Other than your profile photo, your headline and summary are among the first things most people will notice about your profile.

According to John Baek, Founder of JSB Digital Works, “Naturally, you should aim to make the best first impression, by making your value proposition clear. Even though young professionals won’t likely have much work experience, you can leverage your talents, interests and any unique things you may have achieved while at college.”

As Axel Lavergne, Founder at ReviewFlowz puts it, one thing that will help you gain attention from the right people is using relevant keywords in your headline and summary. If you’re a counselor providing career counseling for college students or graduates, for example, you could include phrases like “career counseling” or “career counselors.” in choosing keywords, the more specific you are, the better. Remember also that you have a limited number of characters available to you in the headline and summary. A character counter tool can help you keep track of how much you’re typing so that you can better plan the content you want to input.

Once you’ve made a statement about your value proposition in the headline and summary section of your LinkedIn profile, the next step would be to demonstrate the truthfulness of this value statement throughout the rest of your profile, as we’ll discuss next.

Showcasing Relevant Skills, Experiences, and Achievements

Here’s how to do this by optimising the skills, experiences, and achievements sections on LinkedIn:

1. Optimize Your Experience Section:

As a new graduate, you might worry that you do not have much work experience beyond internships or volunteer positions. Don’t let this put you off, as recruiters will likely anticipate and understand this too. Just be sure to offer detailed information about any form of work experience that you do have.

Additionally, presenting this information in quantifiable metrics will strongly help you make your case. For instance, were you able to increase the processing times for new clients by 15%? You should state this clearly.

2. Leverage the Skills Section:

LinkedIn allows you to list specific skills that you have, and to offer explanatory notes to show how you acquired or have demonstrated those skills. For fresh graduates, sometimes having demonstrable skills can be just as important as having work experience.

This is a sentiment that Mark Pierce, CEO at Wyoming Trust reiterates. According to him: “As employers, we absolutely do scout potential talent on LinkedIn. By strategically showcasing your skills, experiences, and achievements on your LinkedIn profile, even the most inexperienced graduates can create a compelling professional narrative that grabs attention.”

Here are more detailed tips on optimising your LinkedIn profile. But LinkedIn isn’t the only social media platform you should have your mind on. Recruiters will often take a look at your other profiles when trying to form an opinion of you and you have to prepare for this too.

Apart from showcasing your skills online, you should also think about some ways to show off your skills and academic achievements. If you work from home or from a co-working space for example, you may consider using diploma frames to cleverly display your credentials to visitors or over video conferences.

In addition to optimising your LinkedIn profile, here are some other steps you can take to build a strong social media profile in general:

1. Reviewing and cleaning up personal accounts

First things first: be sure to review your other social channels such as Facebook and Twitter, to ensure that there is nothing on there that might portray you as being unprofessional.

2. Establishing consistency in branding across platforms

Creating a professional image that cuts across all your social channels is the foundation of your outreach efforts. In doing this, be sure that the messaging across your profiles is uniform, and reflects the same value proposition.

Engaging with Industry Communities

Social platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn offer the opportunity to find and join groups of like-minded professionals. You should aim to join relevant groups and to make valuable contributions that demonstrate thought leadership.

Another thing you can do to grow your network is actively engage with webinars and other irrelevant virtual events in your field. Be sure to participate actively in any discussions as well as to contribute meaningfully to Q&A sessions.

So far, we’ve discussed various ways of optimising your online presence using the power of social media. There are a few more tips you can apply, however, such as creating a personal website and sharing helpful content.

Having a personal website provides additional opportunities to demonstrate your knowledge and expertise through thought leadership. With platforms like WordPress and WebFlow, you can also easily incorporate a blogging strategy into your website, which will allow you to publish helpful content that clearly reinforces your value proposition.

Your blogging strategy doesn’t have to be limited to your website, and you can gain increased visibility and authority by seeking opportunities to share authentic content on other well-established websites that serve your industry.

Getting Started

Building a strong online profile as a young professional takes time, but with the tips we’ve shared above, you’ll be off to a great start. Remember to consistently apply these tips for building a professional online presence for the best results!