5 Easy Ways To Build Your Personal Brand On LinkedIn Your LinkedIn profile is one of your most valuable career assets. Boasting over one billion members in more than 200 countries and territories globally, LinkedIn gives you access to unlimited opportunities for every stage of your career. When your profile is optimized and you have built a solid personal brand on the platform, you can use LinkedIn to explore and be headhunted for new career opportunities, gain valuable professional connections to add to your network, upskill, have access to market insights and your potential client base, and most importantly, establish yourself as the leading go-to figure within your industry.
Right now, take a look at your profile and sincerely ask yourself, Am I generating traction to my profile and content—not just any kind of traction—but engagement from the right people? Do I have a solid presence on LinkedIn, where people view me as an authority within my field? Am I attracting and generating opportunities from my profile? Am I making my profile work for me?
If the answer to any of these questions is no, it’s time to give your profile an overhaul so that you can establish your personal brand. Take a look at these five easy steps to get started:
1. Define Your Purpose
What exactly is your goal for using LinkedIn? What persona do you wish to portray? How do you want LinkedIn’s platform to support you towards achieving your career goals? Understanding what you want to get out of LinkedIn will help you use it with intentionality and enable you to clearly articulate your offering and value to users of the platform. It will help you remain focused, on-brand, and ensure that all your LinkedIn activities are consistent with your brand message.
Do you want to coach under-performing sales professionals? Are you looking to target connections to generate B2B sales and revenue? Are you launching your start-up and seeking to attract clients and investors? Perhaps you’re after a promotion or career pivot. Whatever it is, define it clearly and stick to it!
2. Optimize Your Profile
Now that you’ve clarified your goals for your LinkedIn profile, it’s time to either create a profile, or optimize your existing one. The first essential step in optimizing your LinkedIn profile is to ensure all sections are completed, so far as possible. This includes your banner, profile photo, headline, LinkedIn summary/about section, work experience, skills, education, and even additional complementary sections such as projects, awards, and publications.
You should also ask your co-workers and previous professional connections to post recommendations to your profile. These recommendations must be relevant to your overall purpose defined in the previous step. This helps strengthen potential decision-makers’ trust in you, because they can see real people vouching for your area of expertise.
3. Add The Right People
Who you add is just as important as the content you produce or the quality of your profile. Don’t fall into the trap of adding new connections to your network just for the sake of numbers.
When accepting or sending connection requests, think quality over quantity. Having 5,000 random connections is pointless and actually hurts your personal brand, because it tells others that you are not certain of your goals, or who you are as a thought leader. It shows that you lack a clear strategy, and also opens the door for you to receive more spam messages, not to mention the lack of quality of the posts in your news feed.
Additionally, adding the wrong people to your network will only leave you more frustrated, because they will be unresponsive to your engagement efforts, and rightfully so, because they’re not your target audience. Do you see why defining your personal brand’s purpose and brand voice is so important before this stage?
4. Create And Share Quality Content
You’ve decided on what you want your personal brand to represent, what your goals are, and the people you need in your network to make that happen. You’ve given your profile an overhaul and successfully added some meaningful connections to your network. Now it’s time to start creating quality content, because after all, that’s what thought leaders do, right?
How exactly do you get started? Three ways:
- Regularly post a mix of long-form and short-form content to establish yourself as an expert.
- Occasionally, write personal updates so people can take a sneak peek into your life and see that you’re relatable, thus establishing trust.
- Experiment and engage with multiple post formats—LinkedIn polls, photos, photo quotes, LinkedIn carousels, and even videos.
5. Engage With Your Network
Don’t forget to engage your network! The more you interact with your audience, the more your content and profile will be exposed to potential clients and decision-makers, as it will appear in their feed, and you will be recommended across LinkedIn’s as a connection suggestion. You will also appear more in search results. React to posts, share posts that resonate with your brand, comment meaningfully and focus on adding value overall, instead of spamming comments with self-promotion and hashtags (hashtags do not work in comments anyway). Always bear in mind that how you engage is a continual reflection of your brand.