Make Your Interior Design Firm Stand Out on LinkedIn

LinkedIn for interior design? You tweet. You post engaging Instagram stories regularly. You’ve even braved a handful of Facebook lives. But—have you paid much attention to your LinkedIn profile lately?

When you think about LinkedIn you likely think of it as a platform to find new jobs and new designers for your firm—though it is SO much more than that. LinkedIn is an ideal place to increase your online presence and establish your interior design business in the online world.

LinkedIn has over 575+ million users and more than 260 million active monthly users. With an optimized LinkedIn profile and strategic posting, you have the potential to reach every single one of them.

Think of LinkedIn as an online version of your design business network. You can connect with business contacts that you already have, you can use it to keep track of your competitors—and more importantly, you can use LinkedIn to connect with potential interior design clients. Commercial interior design clients, especially.

Step One: Optimize Your Personal LinkedIn Profile

Your profile picture and background picture

These two features quite literally put a face to the name.

When choosing your profile photo use a professional headshot sized to 400×400 pixels. Once you upload your profile photo be sure to make it visible to everyone on LinkedIn. Click “edit public profile and URL” in the upper right-hand corner. A column will pop up on the right side where you will see a display of your current visibility options. From here you can choose who will see your profile photo: your contacts, your network, all LinkedIn Members or “Public”.

Choosing “Public” will enhance your ability to be found by those who look for you via search engines or other networks.

Your background photo should be a reflection of who you are and what type of interior design business you are. It could be a room you’ve designed, a collection of your favorite fabrics, or even a flat lay of your favorite paint colors. Whichever image you choose, the optimal sizing for your LinkedIn Profile cover image is 1584×396 pixels. We highly recommend Canva for both creating and sizing images.

Your headline and summary

This section of your LinkedIn profile is the first glimpse onlookers will receive of both your profession and skillset. Your headline should be short and sweet, but original and creative, including the most relevant keywords to make it easier for people to find you in the search.

Ie., John Snow | King, strong-willed swordsman and defeater of white walkers

Your summary, on the other hand, should have more detail while still being brief and interesting using as many keywords as possible, since this area is searchable. Your summary also gives you the opportunity to add images, videos, documents, and links. This can be a great way to introduce visitors to your portfolio, website, or even influencer pieces such as articles you’ve been featured in. Keep this section updated regularly to ensure accuracy. Include your email or contact info in this section.

Highlight Your Work History

This section does not have to include every job you’ve ever had (unless they ALL relate to your current position). Instead, focus on specific work experiences that you benefited from the most—zone in on these particular positions listing your achievements and gained skills from each.

Like with every section of your profile, update and refresh as your position changes. New responsibilities? New projects? Add them to your lists of achievements especially if they relate to your current experiences.

Showcase Your Greatest Skills

Add skills that are relevant to your position, as well as skills that you would like to hone in on and ask friends and colleagues to endorse you for them. Though, do not go overboard in this section. It’s better to list a few key skills and gain endorsements on them, rather than to have a grocery list of skills with no one endorsing them.

Update this section at least every year, and don’t be afraid to “remove” skills if you feel they are no longer relevant to your career interests.

Don’t forget to list your certifications, too! Another great way to showcase your experience and skillset. (But with a document to back it up!)

Edit Your URL

When you first create your LinkedIn profile a generic URL is given to your profile page. But—you don’t have to keep it that way! There is a quick and easy way to clean up your URL and remove the random set of letters and numbers.

Simply go to your profile, click “edit public profile and URL” in the upper-right corner, and you’ll see the option to edit your URL. If you have a common name and the URL of your choice is already in use, simply add your title to the end separated by hyphens.

Ask for Recommendations

Having recommendations on your LinkedIn profile is always a good idea. Recommendations are long-form testimonials that people provide about you and your work. They give you credibility and allow potential interior design clients an insight into what it might be like to work with you.

There are two ways to request a recommendation on LinkedIn: from your own profile and from a connection’s profile.

To request a recommendation from a connection’s profile:

1. Navigate to the profile of the 1st-degree connection you’d like to request a recommendation from.
2. Click the More icon in the top section of the profile.
3. Select  Request a recommendation.
4. Fill out the Relationship and Position at the time fields of the recommendations pop-up window, and click Next.
5. You can include a personalized message with your request by changing the text in the message field.
6. Click Send.

To request a recommendation from your profile:

1. Click the Me icon at the top of your LinkedIn homepage.
2. Select View profile.
3. Scroll down to the Recommendations section and click Ask to be recommended.
4. Type the name of the connection you’d like to ask for a recommendation in the Who do you want to ask? field.
5. Select the name from the dropdown that appears.
6. Fill out the Relationship and Position at the time fields of the recommendations pop-up window, and click Next.
7. You can include a personalized message with your request by changing the text in the message field.
8. Click Send.

Step 2: Post Valuable Content

What to Post on LinkedIn

The audience on LinkedIn is very unique; they aren’t looking for the funniest memes or the prettiest pictures. What they’re looking for is content that will add value to their business, or content that will address a current issue they are facing for which your services could assist with. Tips and tricks, facts, key information that relates to a problem they’re having—that you can solve.

When planning your LinkedIn content focus on your target audience. Do a little competitor research to see what others in your industry are posting about, and always post with the purpose of adding value. Share a range of content types including image, videos, and articles. Studies show that posts with images receive 200% more engagement than those without.

When to Post on LinkedIn

With the majority of users being working professionals, it’s no surprise that LinkedIn’s most active timeframes are during working hours.

The best times to post to Linkedin are Wednesday at 9–10 a.m. and 12 p.m.

The best day to post on LinkedIn is Wednesday.

The safest times to post are Tuesday through Friday from 8 a.m.–2 p.m.

The least engagement per day occurs on Sunday and the least popular times to post are every day from 9 p.m. to 3 a.m.

Step 3: Create a Company Profile on LinkedIn

Having a company page on LinkedIn helps members learn more about your design firm and your brand. It can help increase your searchability by giving your business extra visibility on both LinkedIn and search engines—and by sharing rich content and compelling updates, it can help to establish your brand as a leader in your industry, too!

Add your Company

Visit the LinkedIn Marketing Solutions portal for creating Company Pages and click Create your Page.

Next, you will select your business size from the options available.

Now it’s time for the fun part—filling in your company details!

Add your company name, URL and a few specific details—then you’ll add your tagline, logo. The tagline for your company page is similar to the “summary” on your personal page—it should be a brief but creative statement about what your business does. Refer to the headline and summary section above.

Since LinkedIn is a professional network, your company logo takes the place of your profile picture on other social networks. Your logo also appears on your employees’ LinkedIn profiles. Use a square logo sized to 300 x 300 pixels.

Don’t skip this step! LinkedIn data shows that companies with logos get six times more traffic to their Company Pages.

With everything filled in accordingly, click the Create Page button.

Optimize your Page

Once your Company’s LinkedIn page is created you’ll need to optimize it by adding a description.

You have 2,000 characters to describe what your company does and why potential followers should be interested. This is important text, so think carefully about your messaging and be sure to use as many keywords as you can. The first 156 characters in your description are particularly important as these are the words that will appear in the Google preview of your company page.

Underneath your company description, you can add up to 20 company specialties. These act as tags or keywords that will help people find your business on LinkedIn, so don’t skip this detail. Make sure your company’s various products, services, and strengths are well represented here.

Post Quality Content

Your company’s LinkedIn page is ready to be shown off—exciting! But, don’t scare off potential followers by posting content that does not interest them or add value to their day. Here are a few great content ideas to get you started:

-Short videos inspiring actionable advice

-Infographics (people love stats!)

-Thought leadership blog posts

-Company wins and milestones

See above section for more information on what (and when!) to post on LinkedIn.

Need help setting up, optimizing and utilizing your LinkedIn pages? We’d love to help!