Here’s How To Build A Personal Brand On LinkedIn
If you’ve ever wondered when the best time to build a personal brand is, now is the best time and LinkedIn is that platform to build it on.
Now, you must have heard people across several platforms throw shade on how LinkedIn is filled with a bunch of noisemakers and pretenders.
However, a platform with over 800 million professional users across several industries and top companies across the world is a platform not to sleep on.
While some people have resorted to posting fake stories on LinkedIn, some others have hacked the LinkedIn personal brand formula and used it as an inbound channel for their businesses, landed deals, made tons of sales, and grown their companies.- even secured jobs.
I will show you how you can build your personal brand on LinkedIn without spending your whole day worrying about what and what not to do. But, let me quickly address what a personal brand is.
What is a personal brand?
A personal brand is an impression you create for yourself by displaying a certain piece of content to show your expertise, experience, or depth in a subject area.
If that sounds confusing, building a personal brand on LinkedIn simply means you pushing out some type of content so people will have a perception of you.
Whatever you dish out and structure your LinkedIn to be will reflect how people relate with you either for opportunities or networking.
Here’s a secret; Companies are on the lookout every day for talents to employ and people with a personal brand in their industry stand a higher chance of being employed. So also it applies to securing deals for your startup from investors or customer-brand relationships.
To cut to the chase, what are the best practices that will help you build a solid personal brand?
Best Practices To Build A Solid Personal Brand
1. Start With Your LinkedIn Profile
The first work is on your LinkedIn profile. Your profile involves your photo, your bio, your featured section, and every first piece of information that people will see when they visit your LinkedIn page.
Here are three major focuses on your profile and how to make them perfect
- Your profile photo;
Your profile photo should be a professional photo or sit between professionalism and casual. A photo like a headshot is the best with a good background in the photo. A lot of people have resorted to using plain backgrounds just like a passport photograph
- Your LinkedIn cover photo;
Your cover photo should be a description of what you do or the service you offer. Some people’s cover photos have been used as sales photos which are good. I will suggest you do the same.
- Your LinkedIn Feature Section;
Your Feature section is another feature where you can display your personal works, links to your portfolio or previous projects or contents
- Your LinkedIn Headline;
Your headline should describe what you do. It doesn’t need to contain too much information. Most importantly, even though you’re a learner, I’ll suggest you write your skill there instead of writing enthusiast.
2. Become a thought leader
A personal brand is all about perception and the moment you are seen as a thought leader in a niche, the higher your chances of building quality connections and also getting more engagement on your content which leads to more visibility.
You can take two approaches here; create long-form quality content or short insightful content pieces.
- Long-form content
Long-form content on LinkedIn is not so common but people want them. If you love writing, then you should try long-form content. It helps you get more visibility if it is an authority topic.
For instance, if you are a content writer with years of experience, lots of writers will engage with a piece of long-form content if it is deep and insightful content.
- Short form content
Short-form content is content pieces that are in form of nuggets or just brief discussions. Short-form content has a high engagement rate if you know how to write catch and engaging content; if you have great copywriting skills.
What should you write about?
- Your personal experiences
- Your daily progress
- Motivation
- Case studies
- Your activities
You’ll need to learn to put yourself out there if you want to create engaging short-form content
3. Interact within your niche
Personal branding is the perception people have about you and one way to get more people to notice you are via engaging other people’s content.
Look, you don’t need to spend all day on LinkedIn, you just need 30–45 minutes daily on LinkedIn and this will work for you.
Follow some influencers in your niche on LinkedIn and engage with their posts. That is networking and it has an influence on how you build your personal brand.
Your comment should be pretty straightforward but insightful enough for visitors to visit your profile
4. Build In Public
Building in public is sure the best move to make when you’re building a personal brand. It gives people an understanding of what you do, and what level you’re at and you become the first thought that comes to their minds when it is related to your subject.
Matter of fact, it makes you an authority in that industry which will help you.
Just like posting content, building in public is just an intentional effort to showcase the different stages of your career journey and impact.
You can use some tools for posting daily like Buffer.com to schedule your content if time management is a big deal.
Now that you’ve learned how to start your personal brand, it is important you understand that consistency is key otherwise you won’t get the results you expect.
Once again, if your goal is to get inbound leads, grow your network, and secure a job or deals via personal branding, then LinkedIn is a sure bet and these strategies will help you.
