Virginia Bautista @virginia28 Believe it or not, you already have a personal brand. The question is, are you leveraging your personal brand to monetize your expertise or accelerate your success?
Personal branding is the process of marketing yourself, and your career or business, in order to attract relevant opportunities. Marketing, in this context, means getting people to know, like and trust you, so that they'll eventually want to work with you or buy from you.
Content marketing, on the other hand, is the strategic process of creating and distributing content to attract a targeted audience. And on LinkedIn, your content strategy has a huge role to play in successfully building your personal brand.
So what does this mean for you?
With your expertise, and your drive to create relevant, useful and engaging content, you'll be on your way to building a powerful personal brand that'll give you "permission" to monetize your expertise using LinkedIn features.
In this post, we'll look at seven content marketing strategies and tips that'll help you boost your personal brand on LinkedIn.
Let's get started.
2. Leverage industry influencers
Industry influencers are influencers for a reason: People follow them.
Building relationships with influencers and mentioning them in your posts can help boost your visibility on LinkedIn - here are some examples:
Peter Brace mentions Amy Edmondson and Timothy Clark, among the pioneers in the field of psychological safety
Raymond Domingo mentions Robina Gokongwei-Pe, a highly reputable entrepreneur and President/CEO of one of the largest multi-format retailers in the Philippines
Anda Goseco mentions Marcia Reynolds, an Executive and Leadership Coach based in the US
Peter, Raymond and Anda didn’t really talk about themselves in their posts; instead, they talked about the influencers they mentioned.
So what can we learn from these posts? If you’re making this type of post, remember to make it about them, the influencers, not about you.
3. Help others build their LinkedIn presence
While expanding your reach on LinkedIn by mentioning influencers who engage with your post is a good strategy, another strategy that works is the opposite - this time, if you already have a huge network, why not leverage your network to help others build their LinkedIn presence?
This is a win-win strategy. You win because you expand your reach to other people’s networks, and they win because they also become visible to your network. It also helps you build a strong community on the platform.
I've been using this strategy in one of the longest-running initiatives that I started in 2018 - the ‘Top 100 Filipinos to Follow on LinkedIn for Inspiration and Learning’.
This is not just about recognizing people who are actively sharing content on LinkedIn, but also about encouraging more people who are new to the platform to become more active on LinkedIn.
6. Just be yourself
When was the last time you shared your story on LinkedIn?
One of things I've learned through the years is that people on LinkedIn either know what they want to achieve through the platform, or they don’t know at all what they want to achieve.
Although it may seem like the ones who know what they want to achieve would be more successful on LinkedIn, I've learned that this is not always the case.
Many times, those whose top goal is to generate leads for their businesses are too focused on the goal of ‘selling’ so they end up operating with a wrong mindset, thinking about what they can get in terms of immediate leads or sales.
But LinkedIn is not a place where people want to hear sales pitches all the time - LinkedIn is a place where people engage with other people who provide valuable content, and whose stories resonate with them.
And guess what - the more you share who you are, the more people gravitate towards you. And that means more opportunities for you to start conversations, and build meaningful business relationships.
In this post below, Peter openly shares a part of who he is that makes him different - a lifelong learner who entered university in his 50’s, and finished his Ph. D. in his 60’s:
What most people don’t realize is this - knowing and being yourself is a free, tried-and-tested way to increase your reach and attract like-minded people on LinkedIn.
Peter wasn’t sure at first if this post was "appropriate" on LinkedIn, but posting it anyway led him to the answer:
Being who you are, and sharing what makes you different, indeed, can have a place on LinkedIn.
7. Reshare your top-performing posts
Your top-performing posts performed well for a reason. Maybe they resonate well with your audience, or perhaps you posted it at the right time, when your network needed to read it the most.
Reposting your top-performing posts will not only ensure you get a lot of views and reactions (again), but it can also help you capture a whole new audience. Don't just post and forget, keep a record of your top-performing posts, and when the timing is right, go ahead and repost them.
In my case, I repost my top-performing content at least after 3-6 months. And they work like magic each time.
Below is an all-text post I shared in March 2020. This post reached over 97,500 people, and garnered almost 2,000 reactions and 81 comments.
The same post at the time was trending in #personalbranding:
I shared this post again this year. Here's the same post I just reshared three days ago (March 19, 2021):
And according to LinkedIn, this post garnered Top 1% engagement on the platform:
Read all 7 tips and the complete SocialMediaToday article