Creating a strong personal brand on LinkedIn is important for building trust and credibility as well as positioning yourself as an industry leader in your sector, but how exactly can you develop and manage your brand on LinkedIn?
Below we’ve detailed ten key steps to follow when building a personal brand on LinkedIn.
1. Optimise your LinkedIn Profile
Your first port of call is an obvious one: your profile.
It is vital to ensure that all sections of your profile are completed and optimised – everything from your bio and career history through to endorsements. Your profile is the first thing someone landing on your page will see, and it should present a snapshot of you and your brand story.
It provides your network with useful information about who you are and what you do. An optimised profile will also help you rank higher in LinkedIn searches, helping to grow your visibility on the platform.
2. Create consistent and compelling content
Creating a consistent and compelling content strategy is key when building your brand presence. If you want to present yourself as a sector leader or the go-to for insight and commentary around a trending topic, you have to publish content regularly. Even if you don’t want to put your head above the parapet, regular content, even if it’s simply sharing an article or congratulating a colleague, can go a long way to feeding the platform’s algorithm and boosting your visibility.
When publishing, it’s important to make sure that your posts are in the right format and that you develop a relevant hashtag strategy to make your content is as discoverable as possible.
3. Building your connections
Increasing your network on LinkedIn is an effective step to building your personal brand reputation and credibility. On LinkedIn, users are numbered with a ‘1’ ‘2’ or ‘3’ icon by their name. This represents the ‘type’ of connection they are to you, whether that is someone in your direct network (1) or whether they are connected to a person you are connected with (2), and so on.
Much like an industry networking event, LinkedIn provides you with the golden opportunity to put your profile in front of people you want to engage with. Stats show that 62% of marketeers successfully generate leads on LinkedIn, so get developing that network!
4. Engaging with your connections
One of the very best ways of building your personal brand on LinkedIn is through engaging with your connections. This includes reacting and commenting on posts by people in your network and relevant industry leaders, as well as making sure you are managing your own feed engagement. You can do this through liking and replying to any comments that your network leave on your posts as well as being active in your direct message inbox. Make sure to curate a consistent tone of voice that represents you and your brand and stick to it.
Why engage in the virtual world that is LinkedIn? Because it helps build positive relationships, it boosts your platform visibility and the algorithm will start to recognise you as a user of value that is worth lending valuable feed real-estate to.
5. Experiment with different post formats
Your network will be likely to engage with your content more if it’s kept fresh and interesting, with varied content formats. One of the best performing content types on LinkedIn is video content, which generates five times more comments than non-video posts. Other content formats to experiment with are carousel posts, infographics, soundbites from webinars or podcasts.
Don’t forget two formats that are unique to LinkedIn: articles, in which you can share long-form commentary and insight around a certain topic for your network to read, engage and discuss; and document-sharing, in which you can share useful reports, whitepapers and other files as a PDF or slideshow for users to digest. The latter might sound a little ‘dry’, but it generates more average likes than any other post format on the platform.
6. Mix up the type of content that you’re sharing
To help keep your content fresh and interesting, as well as experimenting with post formats, it’s also effective to mix up your content strands. Some strong content strands could include thought leadership commentary on news agenda pieces that are relevant to your industry, personal success posts that detail professional milestones or notable moments and insightful content that gives your network a behind-the-scenes look into your day-to-day role and what it entails.
7. Align messaging with PR and other external communications
Another important step for building a brand on LinkedIn is to align your personal messaging with your company’s PR and external communications strategy. If your PR company are working on a major campaign that is likely to go mainstream, as a senior figure within the business, it is useful to use your feed to promote the campaign messaging and drive awareness.
Driving campaign awareness as a senior figure has its advantages – for example, you can be a touch more emotional or opinionated when sharing campaign messaging than a neutral or fact-based press release can be.
8. Inbox management
One of the quickest ways to build your personal brand and expand your network is to network via inbox messages. Inbox messages are private conversations where users can be a little more open and transparent than public conversations, and can lead to business meetings, a call with their wider team, or a referral to someone else at the business of value to you. When interacting with your network via messages, it’s important to explain why you are starting the conversation and why the connection is relevant. Likewise, if any connections reach out through your inbox, replying in a timely manner helps to increase credibility.
9. Promote your business page activity
To help grow your personal brand on LinkedIn, it can be useful to promote your business page activity too. If your company is celebrating milestones, someone new has joined the team or the company has commented on specific industry news, then these are important to reshare. Actively engaging with and promoting your business page activity demonstrates authenticity and helps convey to your network your seniority within the business.
It can work both ways too; your presence on LinkedIn can really benefit your company’s business page: individuals on LinkedIn tend to generate on average 15% more engagement than business pages.
10. Know your values and interests
As a platform, LinkedIn is increasingly becoming a space to share more personal updates as well as business and career focused content. Often, giving your connections an insight to who you are, your interests and values beyond your job role can help to engage audiences. This tends to result in them buying into who you are as a person, which then has a halo effect on your company and what you’re doing as a leader in your industry.
To discuss how our Social Media experts can help you build your personal brand on LinkedIn get in touch today.
