Four Reasons Why All Doctors Should Be On LinkedIn

Author: Julia Sinclair-Brown

LinkedIn is the top professional business platform, with over 875 million members (33 million of whom are in the UK). And yet it still remains very under-used by doctors who could be missing out on potential career prospects and the opportunity to make meaningful connections within the healthcare industry.

Here’s four reasons why you should maximise your profile, get active on the platform and be visible to others:

 

1. Networking Opportunity

You are probably familiar with the phrase “It’s not what you know but who you know”. LinkedIn was designed with that purpose in mind. If you are planning to build or increase your network, then you want to ensure your profile is up-to-date on LinkedIn.

It can provide an excellent source of finding your next role as headhunters and recruiters can seek candidates for positions they are trying to fill. Typically, they’ll look for talent in industry groups and search to see who is recommending and endorsing people. 

LinkedIn also offers a great search feature that can help you find people in your industry. There are a multitude of healthcare groups that you can join and start to build up your own community.

Even if you find the notion of networking daunting, recognise that LinkedIn is a platform whereby professionals are open to establishing and building new connections and will refer for professional opportunities. 

Bear in mind though, that networking is a two-way street and think about how you too can support others.

 

2. Demonstrate Your Knowledge And Expertise

Whilst many doctors have a LinkedIn account, often, their profile is incomplete. Do consider that your profile is the first professional impression that people will have of you. 

Therefore, there really isn’t any value in having a half-hearted profile. Instead, you want to use LinkedIn as a way of bringing your CV to life, to tell more of a story about you, your career and your aspirations. 

Optimise your profile by writing a targeted headline with a professional headshot. Maximise your summary section and be aware that only the first two lines of it show up in search results so get your selling points across here. 

Complete your profile through showcasing your skills, experience, academic accomplishments and awards. You can upload reports, articles or link to information online to give more substance to your achievements.

Reach out to your network and ask for endorsement of your skills - it’s also just as important that you endorse others as this shows up on your profile and highlights how you also support others.

 

3. Content Sharing

Creating an outstanding profile and a long list of endorsements is great, but you need to be regularly active on LinkedIn to ensure your profile is kept at the top of searches. 

A good way to do this is to share content which allows you to learn from other industry professionals and teach others yourself. This means writing posts which demonstrate your knowledge and awareness of current topics, trends and news. 

Ideally this should be linked to healthcare subjects, joining and being active in groups, commenting on and sharing others’ posts and actively growing your own network. LinkedIn can also be viewed as a window to track thought leaders so it can be an excellent way of getting your name known.

Publishing high-quality content regularly creates trust with your connections and positions you as an expert within your field. 

 

4. Professional Reputation 

We now live in a world where people expect to have immediate access and knowledge about a topic or person via an Internet search. That means that you can be found easily in a Google search! So it’s important that other industry professionals, recruiters, patients and students can find a professional profile of you online.

As LinkedIn profiles have high authority ranking with Google, your LinkedIn account will appear towards the top of the search results page.

LinkedIn can be an invaluable tool for controlling and managing your professional digital reputation as you have full control over how to present your online identity. Additionally, it means that future and potential patients can find you easily when searching for your name or your speciality.

It can take some time to write a stand-out profile but the pay-off is definitely worth it. Start with getting your basic information across and keep building on it when you can. Once others start reaching out to you, you’ll know that your profile is having an impact. From then on, ‘little and often’ is enough to keep nurturing it.

And don’t forget to connect with me. I look forward to reading all about you! 

 

Julia Sinclair-Brown is a career coach specialising in supporting medical and healthcare professionals through a broad range of services. You can contact her via the website www.juliasinclair-brown.com.