Personal branding 101 for developers {part 2}

How to stand out with LinkedIn as a developer?

Disclaimer : in this article I am focusing on LinkedIn. I will cover personal branding with Github in a following post.

This is the the second part of a series of blog posts I am writing about personal branding for developers telling you what I am doing to improve my personal branding. In the last post, I defined personal branding and I showed how you can improve your Twitter profile for your personal branding strategy. Now we will talk about LinkedIn.

LinkedIn is a professional social networking website among the big 4 and famous social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and obviously LinkedIn)

Why you need to stand out on LinkedIn?

• Better job opportunities
• More clients if your are freelancer
• Raise your credibility in your industry

The most important answer is:

“You want to be a signal in this world full of noise.”

4 steps to build your personal brand on LinkedIn

Step 1: Customize your LinkedIn URL

By customizing your URL, it will be easy for you to share your LinkedIn profile. This is the most obvious thing to do. If you have not yet done it, go ahead and do it. Here is how to do it: https://www.linkedin.com/help/linkedin/answer/87/customizing-your-public-profile-url

This is mine: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mbouenda

Step 2: Turn your work experience in a story

As human, we all like to hear stories to connect with each other.

Let’s turn some work experiences in compelling stories to put in the summary section.

This is how I did it.

I started my Android developer career in 2011. For my Bachelor degree, I taught myself how to develop Android Application using Books and Google Search. Since then I continued to learn and grow.

When I was junior, I helped to improve a home security Android application for almost 2 years. I learned how to QA test an android app, how to debug and How to add features.

For my second experience, I was in the team which crafted an amazing IoT hub in Android: Alyt. I learned how to apply my engineering skills to a real project from scratch. It was an amazing experience where I learned more about Android operating systems, Api rest design and IoT in general.

During my career I mentored and taught Android development for beginners.

I also freelanced for a startup in an android application about card discount menopercento for one year.

Now I am Senior Android Engineer and public speaker. I have a great passion for android and technology, that is why I am always learning and sharing new technologies and services about android development. I love to engage with other developers in the community through conferences, meetups and blogs!

Senior Android Engineer:

I designed and created an Android Application to save favorite bike parkings of the Turin bike sharing service TOBIKE.

Public speaker:

I enjoy speaking at mobile development related conferences. My topics include Android Development, Google API for Android developers and Firebase.

Step 3: craft your headline, photo and cover photo

For this step, we will just use the content of our Twitter profile from the last time.

Consistency is the key

Step 4: put examples of your work

If we did some presentation, some projects or some video, this is the moment to show it and brag a little bit. This step is here to showcase our work as a developer.

This is what I did:

I added my 2 last projects

Projects

I added the slide deck of my past presentations

I added a video of me during a conference

Droidcon Poland 2015

Some bonus work:

Write LinkedIn Recommendations

In order to receive, you have to give in the first place.

I decided to write 4 recommendations.

Publications

Inception: the first part of this guide published in hackernoon website

If you have some tips to improve developer personal brand on Linkedin, you can write it in a comment below.

Conclusion

I think developing a personal brand is an ongoing task and I just began mine. I will make experiments, I will sometimes make mistakes and I will learn along the way.

This is not a blueprint, it is my process. If you don’t have a personal brand, I invite you to create one following my example.

See you for the {part 3}, until then may the {code} be with you my friend!

Personal branding 101 for developers {part 1} ← BEFORE

NEXT → Documenting My Android Adventure

A big thanks to everyone involved in proofreading this post!

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