Building a personal brand on LinkedIn is vital for anyone looking for a job. Whilst it can be easy to fall into the same trap of being repetitive in your style and content, it’s important that you are consciously trying to build a brand that appeals to employers and your audience.
With more power going to the clients than ever before, job seekers need to be selling themselves as much as their services to stand the best chance of attracting and gaining employer trust.
Below are our top tips for building a personal brand on LinkedIn, however, whilst all of these things are a good way to improve your branding, the most important way to improve your branding is through consistency.
You’ll already have some form of personal brand from how you portray yourself on LinkedIn, and it’s worth asking the people around you how they would describe your profile currently.
1. Have an opinion
Whilst it might seem obvious, rather than use your LinkedIn profile to look for jobs, provide your opinion on industry news and write longer pieces of content.
By building your own voice on your LinkedIn profile, you’re able to show that you’re passionate and are much more likely to generate connections with relevant clients and industry voices.
2. Use video
Video is by far the most popular form of content, with its importance across all social platforms increasingly generating strong levels of engagement. With this only set to increase, video is certainly something that LinkedIn favours.
With modern smartphone capabilities, recording and editing a quick video is easier than ever before. You shouldn’t be too picky about how this looks, as long as you come across as approachable and friendly. If you decide not to produce videos which feature you, try to share interesting videos that are relevant and interesting to your connections.
3. Engage with experts
You should begin doing this by making sure that you follow/are connected with the top thought leaders from your industry. Check your industry connections and who appears frequently on your feed as well as popular bloggers and business people.
Once you follow the right people, you can begin to share their content, offer your opinion and comment. This is a very simple way to build a voice within your industry and may potentially lead to further interaction and connections on LinkedIn.
5. Share and comment on relevant news
Whilst it’s good to avoid offering your opinion on contentious issues if you’re reliant on your LinkedIn profile as part of your work, you should always be looking to add your thoughts to what’s happening in the markets and industries you are interested in.
6. Personalise messages – don’t copy and paste
It’s easy to spot a message which has been copied and pasted, regardless of how careful you think you’ve been. Instead, try to personalise each message and give something valuable to the audience. If you’ve committed to writing blogs or sharing articles, offering some free advice and trying to build awareness of your personal brand before you send a message to the audience; this is far more likely to generate a response.
7. Celebrate your past successes
To add even more of a personality to your own brand, you should be sharing your past achievements, endorsements and success stories with your followers. These can come in the form of longer LinkedIn posts, videos or LinkedIn articles.
To increase engagement, you should space this out well, include relevant images, tag people you think would be interested and ask for people to share their own stories with you.
8. Write in the first person
To ensure that you are coming across as personable as possible, always make sure that you are writing in the first person. It’s important to build your own voice, as this will increase your engagement with your audience.
9. Get recommendations
You should always be actively seeking recommendations on LinkedIn, as well as likes and interaction on your content from your peers. Your co-workers and contacts can be a good place to start building up some early engagement.
Also, you should actively try to receive endorsements for your skills and recommendations. You can start by getting these from your contacts and colleagues but you should always be looking to receive these from other people in your audience.