On Wednesday last week, LinkedIn quietly released a new feature on your profile, the ability to upload a “banner image” much like you can do on your Facebook and Twitter profile.
Here’s what my LinkedIn profile now looks like.
The image image across the top is one of the shelves from my business book library at home. Basically if the book is standing up, I’ve read it, if it’s horizontal, I’ve not got round to it yet.
This new feature is only available to Premium users at this point and if when you log in and try and edit your profile, it’s not giving you a big “Edit background” button at the top, you can request to be one of the first to try it out at http://specialedition.linkedin.com/custom-backgrounds/?trk=blog. I suspect that this feature will be rolled out to all accounts at some point.
If you cannot be bothered to take your own photo (you should be bothered) then there are a range of stock images that you can use, but they’re a bit naff.
I took the photo of my bookshelf with my iPhone5 and then cropped it to the correct dimensions (1400px wide x 425px high). The resolution of the photo taken in normal mode on an iPhone is higher than that, so it resizes/crops quite happily.
So go ahead, try it out on your profile.