A generic LinkedIn profile means missed opportunities to connect with skilled professionals, advance your career, or become one of your industry’s thought leaders.
Despite your best efforts, people scroll by your LinkedIn profile or content.
So, how can you turn your LinkedIn profile into your personal brand?
We’ll explain how to build a personal brand on LinkedIn in weeks with an investment of just 17 minutes daily. Read on to find out more.
Why Build a LinkedIn Personal Brand?
Personal branding helps you build a professional reputation. Connecting with people with similar interests increases your online visibility and improves your chances of being noticed by potential employers and business partners.
And there’s a solid psychological reasoning behind this. People do business with brands they trust. By showcasing your expertise publicly, you’re letting people know they can trust your skills and judgment.
A personal brand increases your chances of being discovered by professionals and businesses needing expert advice or services.
What can LinkedIn help do for your personal brand?
Even though it’s only the seventh largest social media platform in terms of traffic, with 1.4 billion monthly visits, LinkedIn is the largest professional networking site. LinkedIn users rely on the platform’s algorithm to find and connect with others who share similar interests and follow influential businesses in their industry.
Personal branding on LinkedIn helps you improve your reputation and cross-promote your services. It allows you to position yourself as an expert in your field and expand your professional network.
A recent study has shown that using LinkedIn frequently can lead to career benefits such as:
- More employment opportunities
- Career sponsorship
- Increased online visibility across geographical boundaries
- Improved career self-management
How to use LinkedIn for personal branding?
LinkedIn is an excellent platform to build a personal brand on LinkedIn.
First, ensure your profile showcases your expertise by using a professional photo, an explicit headline like “Digital Marketing Specialist,” and a summary that details your unique skills and achievements.
If you want to save hours of manual work and nail your LinkedIn account, we suggest you use:
– Free LinkedIn Headline Generator to craft your best LinkedIn headline,
– Free LinkedIn Summary Generator to craft your best LinkedIn summary.
After you have your LinkedIn headline, account summary, and profile picture, you can start posting. Remember that the content on LinkedIn is everything.
The second tip is to share content regularly that highlights your knowledge, such as detailed articles on digital marketing trends or case studies from your work, to position yourself as an authority.
The best tools to use for creating the best content on LinkedIn are:
– Free LinkedIn Text Formatter to get more reactions and generate a bigger reach,
– Free LinkedIn Carousel Generator to make people engage more in your post,
– Free LinkedIn Post Booster to boost your content on LinkedIn.
Third, you must engage directly with your network by leaving insightful comments on industry leaders’ posts and participating in high-value groups to increase your visibility.
Fourth, it’s crucial to expand your network deliberately by connecting with key figures in your industry, such as potential clients or influential peers. These connections are key to creating opportunities for collaboration.
The pro tip for using LinkedIn to build your personal brand is knowing when to share your posts so they get read, engaged with, and reacted to. There is a bad time to post on LinkedIn and an optimal time, so how do you know? Use this resource to find the best time to post on LinkedIn, depending on your content, audience, time zone, etc.
Using LinkedIn for personal branding relies on a focused and consistent approach that solidifies a presence in your field and builds credibility.
Building a lasting impact on LinkedIn, growing your connections into a big network, and monetizing your LinkedIn brand can take years of practice.
What personalities have been successful with personal branding on LinkedIn?
A lot of people have had success with personal branding on LinkedIn. The most popular posts are found in our Top 100 LinkedIn Posts resource. Notable profile mentions include:
- Fery Kaszoni
- Elizabeth Morgan
- Lou Adler
- Nozomi Morgan
- Simon Sinek
- Ibrahim Precious Bessey
- Andrew Gazdecki
- Gary Vaynerchuk
- Dan Price
- Robynn Storey
The 17-minute strategy – What we’ve learned
Increasing your online visibility is not difficult or time-consuming when you use a proper LinkedIn content strategy for personal branding.
We’ll show you how to build your brand in just a moment, but before that, ensure you are ready to impact your community.
Here are the top LinkedIn personal branding tips that help you position yourself as an industry expert:
1. Optimize your LinkedIn profile:
Your profile is the first thing people see when they encounter you on the social media platform, so you should optimize it to expand your professional network.
How to optimize your LinkedIn profile:
- Set a custom profile URL. Optimizing this URL with keywords related to your career and skills will make it more likely for people to find you.
This custom URL is a small but important hack for building your LinkedIn brand. - Use relevant keywords. Don’t just describe yourself for the sake of describing. Think about what keywords make you stand out from the others, and include them in your summary.
Your profile will drive more organic traffic from people interested in your skills, career, and experience. - Choose a good profile picture. It should be a high-quality photo with good lighting that represents your brand in the best way. Think of little details like background color (you don’t want any clutter and bad cropping!) and your facial expression (the best practice is to smile a little to create a friendly look but not too much to keep it professional).
- Use a LinkedIn banner to represent your brand. This is a golden opportunity to pitch your brand on LinkedIn. The most successful LinkedIn leaders often normally have their banners designed specifically for the platform.
Avoid generic style and cliche format, and make it visually appealing. Imagine that a LinkedIn banner is your personal brand banner, which is a space to promote yourself for free.
Use our guide on Best practices & tips for a great LinkedIn profile to optimize it for the platform’s search algorithm and make it stand out.
2. Share informative content
People in your niche are using LinkedIn to read industry-related news. Share articles from leading publications in your field to add value to your community.
If you want to be one of the first people to break the news on LinkedIn, you can set up Google alerts for specific keywords and receive real-time notifications when something worthwhile is published online.
How to share informative content for better engagement:
- Make your content visual. Use infographics, short videos, visual step-by-step guides and frameworks, carousels, memes, and formatting to highlight specific points in your post.
- Use a long format. Contrary to popular belief, long articles can grow your audience on LinkedIn just as much as short-term content. The best way to share long and informative posts is to turn them into full-length articles on LinkedIn Pulse.
- Make it straight to the point. When sharing the post on LinkedIn feed, always remember the “no fluff” rule. People no longer have time to read, and they normally scan through posts.
- Engage, engage, and engage! Engaging in other people’s posts not only makes you more visible, it’s a great way to connect, have discussions, share your point of view, leave marketing links, ask questions, and stay active.
3. Be authentic
It’s important to express your views and beliefs when building a brand because that helps you connect with like-minded individuals. So put things in perspective when posting or commenting on the platform.
Think of it this way – sharing a news article on recent developments in your industry will help your posts get noticed. However, having an opinion on how the developments will affect your industry will make the content more engaging and set the grounds for meaningful conversation.
Growing on LinkedIn is all about finding your authentic voice and sticking to it in all your content. For this reason, while it’s always a great idea to find inspiration in LinkedIn viral posts, you don’t want to copy them.
Copying others is a no-go in the LinkedIn community, which is based on trust, credibility, and social proof. You will not get far by repeating the content you like, and your connections will find it lazy, unprofessional, or cringe.
4. Use LinkedIn Groups
There are thousands of industry-specific groups on LinkedIn. Join the groups that interest you and interact with the content other people post there.
LinkedIn groups enable networking by connecting you with industry-specific professionals, including local and alumni connections, which can lead to new job opportunities and mentorship.
Participation in group discussions allows for knowledge sharing, offering diverse perspectives, industry trends, and access to valuable resources like webinars and articles.
Engaging actively in groups boosts visibility and credibility, helping to establish you as a thought leader while increasing profile views and audience reach.
Additionally, groups are a rich source of job postings and opportunities for career advancement, and they frequently offer tools for professional development, such as skills enhancement and expert feedback.
5. Use automation
Manual posting is time-consuming because you have to research a topic, write content, and publish each individual post. And even after doing all the work, you can’t be sure your post will be a success.
LinkedIn automation is the best-kept secret in the LinkedIn community, where many leaders are using tools like Taplio to automate their content.
Here’s how automation helps to build your brand on LinkedIn:
- Saves time so you can focus on other tasks
- Makes your posts optimized for the highest reach and engagement
- Posts automatically for you
- Helps you to create the content that has the most potential to go viral
- Analyzes analytics for data-driven decisions that actually work
- Shows you what’s trending on LinkedIn now, so you don’t have to guess
- Prevents you from writer’s block and running out of ideas on what to write about
- Does it all in seconds.
Instead of going through this process on a daily basis, you can prepare multiple pieces of content in a single day and schedule your LinkedIn posts to ensure that they will reach your audience at a specific date and time.
Taplio’s automation and machine learning capabilities help you plan out and write posts for an entire week in minutes instead of hours. This enables you to post regularly, respond to comments, answer questions, and engage with other people’s content in just 14 minutes per day. Here’s how you do it.
How to build a LinkedIn personal branding strategy in just 17 minutes per day – timeline breakdown
- Topic research – 1 hour/month: This one is apart from the 17 minutes a day, and it’s the most time-consuming step, and it normally takes up to two hours or more each week. However, Taplio’s content inspiration layer helps you speed up this process. This feature enables you to find inspiration in a library of over three million posts, so you can see what’s working in your niche and schedule a month’s worth of content in one hour.
- Topic creation – 5 minutes/day: Writing a comprehensive post on a topic can take half an hour or more daily. But you can create amazing posts in less than 5 minutes with Taplio. Our AI uses machine learning to analyze your LinkedIn account and generate posts similar in style and language to what you published in the past. You can edit the content before publishing it, if necessary.
- Staying up to date with industry news – 5 minutes/day: Sifting through industry-specific publications to find something worth sharing can take a lot of time, even if you use Google alerts. Taplio’s AI helps you save time by automatically detecting the latest news in your industry and allowing you to instantly create and share a post that includes your thoughts on the latest developments.
- Queue and draft management – 2 minutes/day: Posting too often can overwhelm your audience, so you have to ensure that your posts go out on time. Taplio helps you manage your queue so your news-related posts and your monthly posts won’t overlap.
- Interacting with the content of others – 5 minutes/day: Browse your feed and check out what other people in your network or groups posted. Interact with relevant content to increase your profile’s visibility. Scrolling through your LinkedIn feed can become counterproductive if you do it for too long, so restrict this activity to just 5 minutes per day.
What to post and how often?
One of the most common questions people ask themselves when trying to increase their online visibility is, “How often should I post to Linkedin for personal branding?”
Now, you should always post things that showcase your expertise.
Let people know about your thoughts on industry news, best practices, corporate culture, business awareness, etc. You’re good as long as you’re genuine and your posts are related to your industry.
As for posting frequency, there’s no definitive answer to this question because different audiences expect different things based on personal taste and industry.
As a rule of thumb, posting frequently will help your profile get noticed and expand your network.
But you should be mindful of your audience and industry.
Some industries, such as tech and marketing, are better suited for daily posts due to their popularity and the frequent developments they witness.
Other industries, such as archaeology or aquaponics, are better suited for less frequent posting, so only one or two weekly posts would do.
Keeping momentum on LinkedIn – What’s the best way?
Consistency is key when using LinkedIn as a personal branding tool. The platform’s algorithm will include your content in other people’s feeds if you post often and your posts are engaging.
If you want to keep your momentum and grow your personal brand, you should
- Post frequently
- Send and accept invitations to connect
- Interact with the content posted by others
- Be helpful and positive
