If you’re trying to build a brand on LinkedIn without a lot of success, you may be simply using the wrong approach. Why? Because LinkedIn is the best platform to access an audience and win big in business today. It’s reach is unlike that on any other platform, and its actually designed for business. So in this blog post we’ll talk about how to think of approaching LinkedIn and getting the best out of it, the huge benefits of publishing on LinkedIn, and then six tips to build personal brand on LinkedIn.
And just so you know, this blog post can also be found as a YouTube video if you want to save your strength. Here’s a sneak peak:
You can check out the rest here: https://youtu.be/lbyexrBSjhA
Mindset
There are two main reasons that people use LinkedIn. The first is attraction and influence. People using LinkedIn this way are trying to build inbound leads. They’re trying to attract people to their brand to show off the knowledge that they have (and that they have to share) and they’re trying to build more inbound leads, which means less need to do a lot of outbound sales and cold calling. In fact, the idea here isn’t just to influence your customers. It’s also to influence other people in the industry so that they look to you as the person with the ultimate amount of knowledge.
The second reason people are on LinkedIn is to connect and develop. So they’re building a network of connections, and they’re building relationships with people in the industry. It’s not just about connecting and moving on. It’s about having a real relationship with those people so that you can talk to them and understand what their wants and needs are.
Doing so will allow you to qualify them for conversion, build a referral network, or anything else you can do to have a high quality, symbiotic relationship.
Now I do want to point out that none of what I just mentioned involves cat memes or political ranting. That’s because LinkedIn is a professional network. People are not here for dating or Facebook rants or anything like that. Keep it professional.
Now, of course, that doesn’t mean you can’t be funny, just think of it as a virtual office. Anything that you would do when talking to your coworkers in an office environment is acceptable on LinkedIn. Otherwise, avoid it because you’re just going to get called out. That’s right, people will call you out on LinkedIn for being unprofessional. So try to keep that personal brand intact and avoid unprofessional behavior.
Benefits Of Publishing
First, and as somewhat alluded to in the last section, publishing on Linkedin allows you to find new clients, builds that inbound lead source because you have these people who are seeing what you’re posting and they’re interested enough to want to be interested in hiring you or working with you. But here’s the really powerful part of LinkedIn: when someone who IS following you likes or comments on your post, their connections see your post. That doesn’t happen on any other platform.
From a purely brand-building perspective, This kind of exposure naturally expands your brand recognition to people who didn’t know of your before, allowing you to be seen as a knowledge giver on the same level as Gary Vee or Adam Grant. These people are real household names because they have a lot of knowledge in their field and they share that knowledge constantly. As a result, you give value to a lot of people, clients, prospects, people who aren’t even in your prospect wheelhouse, etc. And it allows you to spread that umbrella a little bit wider while focusing on that target niche of people that you actually want to bring in as clients.
And this is the biggest point: the people in your niche, the real target of your social outreach, they’re going to have a lot of gratitude because they’re going to see you as a giver. They’re going to say to themselves, “Oh my God, this person has so much knowledge, and they’re giving it to me completely free… what’s it going to be like when I pay them?” And that’s it. You’ve built a lead. Good job!
A couple other things that are worth noting:
First, published content goes into your profile. It doesn’t just disappear forever or become extremely hard to find. Its always there, waiting for profile visitors to look at it when they visit your profile page.
Which brings me to the second point: People visit profiles on LinkedIn all the time. So having your optimized is key.
Third, LinkedIn also has its own SEO setup. The SEO on LinkedIn is extremely powerful , not least because LinkedIn is indexed on Google and so when you Google, for instance, your name, most of the time, LinkedIn is the first thing to come up. So if you’re putting out a lot of content, you’re getting a lot more exposure to Google too.
6 Tips
Tip 1: Have A Profile
I know this seems stuoid. But I don’t just mean have an account with no picture and just a couple of lines about the tasks that you performed on each job you had. Your profile is a billboard not a resume. So it needs to have customer-centric language. It needs to be keyword heavy. People need to be very interested in what it is that you do based on what’s on your profile. Your content is going to pull them to your profile, the profile is what’s going to sell them.
So, when you’re putting information about your past jobs in here, make sure to talk about the things that you did for them, the way that you solved problems for them, all of the huge accomplishments, etc. Don’t just provide a list of tasks because nobody cares about that.
Tip 2: Target Your Niche With Search
So what we’re talking about here is finding your niche on the platform, not waiting for them to find you. Because if you wait for them to find you, you’ll simply never be found. This is not a build it and they will come situation. That never works online.
So what I suggest is that you use hashtags to identify topics in hot discussion in your industry. Then find the users that have viral content related to those hashtags and try to connect with them. The idea iss that you want to build a network that’s going to allow you to build more recommendations, more inbound leads, and more ways of building more sales into your business. So, if you can start building a relationship with those people who have the most viral content in your industry, that’s going to allow you to boost your overall virality.
Tip 3: Use Video & Text
There are lots of different post types on LinkedIn but video posts and pure text are the highest priority in the algorithm and they’re the most shareable on LinkedIn. People eat these up. They love video and they love stories. And as a result, these are the formats people are going to comment on more, they’re going to like more, and they’re going to share more. So if you focus on these two types of content on LinkedIn, you’re going to see a lot more success.
Tip 4: Join Groups
Joining groups helps you build interaction with people who are in your specific niche. It’s like a curated list of your prospective customers. I do want to caution you though, you need to be very mindful and specific about the groups that you choose. Some of them are just post-heavy with no interaction at all, which isn’t useful.
For instance, if you have a group of 1,300,000 members, and all those people are simply posting content – there’s no likes, no comments, and no shares, you’re just wasting your time. Because you can be guaranteed that when YOU post in that group, you’ll get the exact same treatment.
Tip 5: Content, Content, Content
Your content doesn’t need to be original. Feel free to curate from other sources, just make sure that they mostly stay inside the LinkedIn community because that helps you to increase your ranking on the algorithm (LinkedIn doesn’t like external links and ranks them lower). You want to have as much interaction as you can and the more content you put out, the more interaction you’re going to get back.
Tip 6: Ask For Endorsements
This is what’s known as social proof in the marketing world. The idea here is that if people see, when they’re thinking about buying from you, that other people have already had a lot of success after making a purchase, then they’re going to be more likely to convert. It gives potential customers more confidence in your offer because they’ve now seen that other people have gone through your service without failing.
Tip 7: Use Your Analytics
The analytics on LinkedInwill show you who’s looked at you, your post performance, and even the search terms you’ve appeared for. You can get all sorts of little details from the LinkedIn search, and if they’re not quite right, then you need to adjust what you’re doing to adapt your message and get it right.
Conclusion
If you use the tips in this article, work hard, and focus on your analytics, LinkedIn will reward you (or you’ll reward yourself) with a lot of followers and more business for it.