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 a time 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

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.

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.

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, but having an opinion on how the developments will affect your industry will make the content more engaging and set the grounds for meaningful conversation.

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.

Being active in groups helps you get noticed by other industry experts, allowing you to expand your network and build your audience.

5. Use automation

Automation helps you save time. Manual posting is time-consuming because you have to research a topic, write content, and publish each individual post. 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