LinkedIn has grown to include personal brand development in addition to its common use cases like job seeking and B2B marketing. Business owners and entrepreneurs from Gary Vaynerchuk to Bill Gates to Richard Branson have invested in LinkedIn personal branding to support their personal goals and business endeavors.
Similar to the way in which influencers utilize platforms like Instagram to develop their brands, entrepreneurs and business professionals from various fields are telling their stories on LinkedIn, raising awareness for themselves and their professional interests, and achieving their personal branding goals. Whether you are trying to build a personal brand in order to start or grow your own business, or are looking to establish yourself as a thought leader in your respective field, LinkedIn is a viable channel. To better tell your own story, consider these content tips for building your personal brand on LinkedIn.
Speaking of brand storytelling, a key element of a personal brand is sharing information about yourself that others might relate to. Your personal brand doesn’t have to be all business, and the odds are adding personal elements will only increase how much people engage with you as they discover commonalities. Gary Vaynerchuk exemplifies this in his personal brand, posting about his passion for the New York Jets NFL football team, and his hobbies like trading cards and flipping garage sale items.
LinkedIn Storytelling Ideas
To tell your own story, try adding these ideas to your LinkedIn content strategy:
One thing thought leaders do is share their future predictions for their industry. Identifying trends, opportunities, or upcoming challenges and sharing them with your audience puts you in a position of being a thought leader. Not only will this content come across as valuable insight for your audience, it also has the chance of sparking conversation.
For the marketing industry, an example would be predicting that SMS, voice, and automated customer experience technologies will grow in popularity among marketers in the next year. Think about parallel predictions like those examples for your own industry, and share them in a LinkedIn post, or a more in-depth LinkedIn Pulse article.
Check out this personal branding tips blog post for more strategies for telling your story.
Regardless if the goal is business growth or personal brand development, providing value to your target audience should be at the core of every LinkedIn content strategy. One way to accomplish this is to help people by answering their questions.
When questions, trends, or controversial topics arise in your industry, it’s an opportunity for you to weigh in and help people to make sense of them. An example for Brand Credential would be explaining the key things to consider when selecting the social channel that is most appropriate for your company.
This technique can be executed within outbound LinkedIn posts by restating a question you’ve read elsewhere, and providing your own answer, or answering questions you see posed in other people’s posts by responding in a post comment.
When trends or controversial topics arise in your industry, there’s an opportunity for industry experts to weigh in and help make sense of it for their audiences. For example, when new social media platforms launch and gain popularity, professionals in the marketing industry share their opinion on the platform’s benefits and downsides, and report on their early experiences with the platform. An example in the food and restaurant industry would be sharing posts that offer commentary on the rising popularity of app-based delivery services.
Keep your ear to the ground for similar topics and news moments in your own industry, and take the opportunity to share your thoughts on them. This will generate conversation among your peers, and well thought out takes on the trends will help to establish your reputation as a thought leader.
Sharing thought leadership content from 3rd party publications and colleagues makes for engaging content that you always have at your disposal when you need an idea for a post, and it also gets people in the habit of coming to you for thought leadership content. That way, when you start working your own blog posts, videos, or other content into your content calendar, it’s natural and on brand.
A consistent cadence of 3rd party articles, videos and infographics can be a strategic pillar for building your personal brand on LinkedIn. It is a strategy you can deploy an unlimited number of times, and represents low hanging fruit in terms of free impressions and engagement, as the only cost associated is your time spent researching content ideas, and writing copy to share them in your posts.
Try sharing articles from your industry that cover industry news, tips, and how-to style content. For Brand Credential, an example of this would be sharing a marketing tips blog from a popular marketing or business publication.
Be sure to credit the publication by mentioning them in the post copy, or tagging their LinkedIn page or account handle. This will give them due credit, and also increases the likelihood that they engage with your post.
A classic LinkedIn marketing strategy among B2B companies, highlighting customers and colleagues is a content technique that also has value for personal brand development.
From a customer perspective, sharing news from your customers, highlighting the success they’re found with your products, and communicating your appreciation has the dual benefit of making them feel valued, and highlighting your own business success.
In terms of highlighting colleagues, try sharing their work, shouting them out and showing appreciation for their insight. This will create dialogue and encourage engagement on their part, while demonstrating the value of your network.
It is no surprise that the best personal brands come across as personal. These individuals communicate tangible value (and in the case of LinkedIn, professional value), and manage to do so in a way that exudes their own personal touch.
A content topic that can help you accomplish this within your own LinkedIn personal branding is behind-the-scenes content. Just as businesses often share an inside look at their day-to-day operations to build brand loyalty with their customers, you can share your own behind-the-scenes updates.
If you are a business owner, you can post videos and written content that shares what it’s like to run and manage your business from your perspective every day.
If you are a professional seeking to build your thought leadership footprint, you can share the daily routines that you find to be most effective, or explain how you’ve overcome common challenges in your industry. An example of this would be a marketing professional explaining the steps that went into a recent product launch, and asking colleagues how they would have approached it, or suggestions they have for future product launches.
Regardless of what content you share with this strategy, the goal is to share a personal perspective that will make you and your personal brand relatable.
Follow these LinkedIn marketing tips to increase engagement on your posts.
LinkedIn posts offer ample opportunity for visual branding. Try creating simple graphics or your own logo to include within your image posts and videos to up your LinkedIn personal branding game.
LinkedIn Visual Branding Opportunities
Try taking advantage of these visual branding opportunities within your LinkedIn content strategy:
Take advantage of these LinkedIn profile SEO tips for increasing your profile’s exposure.
We’re all working in some fashion, and there are common pain points and things we enjoy about work that can be captured in a humorous fashion in memes. For example, 2021 has been full of remote work memes. Kids in the background of Zoom calls, people apologizing for being on mute every call, etc. Find a meme that’s relatable for your niche audience, or create your own that will resonate with them.
Polls are a LinkedIn post type that gives your audience the opportunity to vote from a selection of choices, or input their own response. Try creating a poll related to your industry to engage your audience.
Polls also create the opportunity for follow up content, as you can create another post recapping the results once the poll closes. An example for Brand Credential would be asking people which social channel they would use for their marketing strategy if they could only pick one.
Check out this blog post on the anatomy of a LinkedIn post for more information on LinkedIn polls and poll ideas.
LinkedIn has emerged as a platform for personal brand development that presents users with rich content options for engaging their audiences, and the opportunity to take advantage of the platform's growing professional audience. Take advantage of these tips and content ideas for building your personal brand on LinkedIn.
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Hi, I'm Justin and I write Brand Credential.
I started Brand Credential as a resource to help share expertise from my 10-year brand building journey.
I currently serve as the VP of Marketing for a tech company where I oversee all go-to-market functions. Throughout my career I've helped companies scale revenue to millions of dollars, helped executives build personal brands, and created hundreds of pieces of content since starting to write online in 2012.
As always, thank you so much for reading. If you’d like more personal branding and marketing tips, here are more ways I can help in the meantime:
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