How To Use LinkedIn For Your Personal Brand

Many people think that LinkedIn is a platform just to find professional purposes. But that is not true. LinkedIn is just like any other social media platform which helps to connect with people. It helps you to build your brand and improve your visibility. To present yourself well there are many ways on LinkedIn. Many people won’t even check their LinkedIn profiles every day just like other social media platforms.

If you have a LinkedIn account and not active enough you must know that-:

  • LinkedIn is popular across the world. More than 575 million people use LinkedIn across 200 countries
  • If you are looking for the best platform to deliver B2B content use LinkedIn. it is proven as one of the most effective platforms to deliver such content and deliver more leads.
  • More than 40% of LinkedIn users checks in daily

Promoting personal brand many people use other social media platforms such as Twitter, Instagram etc. But when it comes to presenting you more professionally LinkedIn plays an important role. This is a very good way to meet people, connect with them, share content, and build business connections. If you are looking for a way to build a personal brand this is the best time. Here I am going to help you in building your brand on LinkedIn.

Concentrate on your Profile

Your profile is something that helps others to understand you. A completed profile will help you to stand out among other profiles on LinkedIn. Now you might be thinking about what makes your LinkedIn profile complete. Just adding a profile photo will increase the likeliness of finding your profile. So, here are a few points you can concentrate to make your profile complete and stand out among others

Profile picture-: Add a professional photo of you as your profile picture. It can improve the visibility of your profile. To be clearer 11 times more visibility with a profile picture. If you can upload a picture with your professional dress that would be great. Make sure to upload one with a high-quality resolution. Make eye contact and smile on the picture

Headline -: Headline could be the current designation of your job. add what you are and your area of expertise in this section. If you can focus on adding keywords that will help you to stand out among other profiles. Describe your role as your headline. It can be something catchy. Your role is what many people will look if they want to consider for a position. Then give a small description by highlighting the areas of expertise. Highlight your strength be confident and be clear when you describe yourself.

Catchy background-: Add better background like a cover photo. You can choose something that reflects your brand. It could be something related to your current role.

Give your contact info-: You are using your profile to connect with others. So, the best way to let people know that you are interested in getting connected is to provide your contact info. You can also add your website or URL. There is a way to create LinkedIn URL and it looks like linkedIn.com/in/yourname. Add your full name and this is a good way to get a better ranking

Summary-: Add a summary that describes your skill. Use simple words that explain your work and skills. If you can use keywords that will help you to get featured under top results.

Explain your work-: This is an area where you can highlight your previous work experiences. At least list your last two positions in this part. This can help people to know more about the area you have experienced while considering a position. Some people also add media that showcase your work.

Skills and Achievements-: Add your skills and achievements in this section to let others know about you more. This can also help you to get better visibility among other profiles. Skills can boost 13 times more visibility to your profile.

Additional information and summary-: This is an additional section that allows you to add your achievement, certifications, publications, awards, organizations, and more. You can add things that you feel useful for professional success in this section.

Build Connections

As the name suggests this is a good opportunity to build connections with people you may know. You can be easily getting information about finding a job on LinkedIn. But to build a personal brand is not something you can find easily. LinkedIn gives you suggestions of people you may know. You can connect with these people by sending an invitation by clicking on the Connect button. These connections could be based on your previous work or current work.

There is an option to search with people’s names, or by finding alumni. if the person you want to get connected with doesn’t have a LinkedIn account you can send an invitation via their email address. LinkedIn also provides an option to connect with people by sending a personalized message. There is a default message like ‘I would like to connect with you on LinkedIn”. You can change it as you want by creating a personalized message.

Another way to build connections is through joining groups. You can join groups relevant to your profession to get connected with similar kinds of people. There are open as well as closed groups. Closed groups might have an admin and they need to approve you to join the group. With a free account, you can join up to 50 groups. Or else start a group and make people join in it. This is a time-consuming task but a good way to connect with similar kinds of people.

Share Contents

You can use LinkedIn to share content. To develop a strong brand, you need to have a good following. Sharing valuable content through your profile will help that. Many bloggers use LinkedIn to share their content be it original or curated. Or else you can link it with your website or blog.

Share thoughts-: LinkedIn just like any other social media platform to share your thoughts. You can add an update at any time on LinkedIn or add a video or a picture. You can also control the viewership of your posts. There are options to set the restrictions. Another update is that by adding @symbol you can mention someone from your contacts while sharing an update.

Group discussions-: Group discussion is another way of connecting with people. Participant in group chats whenever you have time and share your thoughts about discussions. This will help to create a better impression of you among your contacts. If you have strong proof to establish your point like articles or videos you can share the links of that while you discuss. If you have questions, ask them, and get suggestions or information from your connections. Also, be active and vigilant for additional questions based on your discussions. Being active on the platform is one way to build your brand.

Go on a chat-: One-on-one chats are also available for you to talk with other users. You can send messages to any user and have a connection with them. Most people like to have good contact with influential people from their profession.

Post-blogs-: For those who like to write blogs or any other types of content LinkedIn is a good platform. Share your blogs and content on LinkedIn and let others know about your skills. It will also help others to learn something you know. You can publish any length of content on LinkedIn. But to stand out among thousands of blogs you have to work extra hard. This is an open platform where everyone can publish their content. So, the competition is higher but once you get a following then nothing can stop you from being popular on LinkedIn

Share Content

There are many ways to share content on LinkedIn. They have some additional tools where you can share content such as LinkedIn Pulse and SlideShare. Sharing meaningful and informative content can help you to grow your brand on LinkedIn. Many bloggers use this platform primarily to publish their content because the reach is very huge compared to any other social media platform.

SlideShare Account 

SlideShare account is a large community where you can share your content. This is a part of LinkedIn and nearly 4 million people visit this platform to view the contents. This is a great way to improve your visibility online. There is nothing you can do to increase the number of visitors because every visitor to SlideShare comes through organic search. It can also increase your SEO rank. The content could be anything like slides, documents, videos, webinars, etc. You can integrate SlideShare with the LinkedIn profile. So, everything you publish on your SlideShare profile can be visible on LinkedIn if you use this feature.

LinkedIn Pulse

LinkedIn Pulse is another platform that delivers content. Mainly news and other content from top professionals. You can add this feature to LinkedIn and use it to share content.

More Features from LinkedIn

LinkedIn allows you to do more. This is a free app and anyone can join for free. But some features let you do pay promotions. You should be aware of these extra features as they are very useful for someone looking for better services from LinkedIn. Be aware of these features to promote your brand if you like

Premium LinkedIn Account

You can promote yourself without having a paid account. But there are a few additional services that LinkedIn offers to premium members. There are features that recruiters, job seekers, and sales professionals can use by paying for a Premium account. Features of premium LinkedIn accounts are-:

Easy search-: Using a premium account you can find anyone with full name. You will get more profiles from you than normal search which helps you in finding the right person for you

More filters-: You can add more filters and find relevant candidates for you. Just use the right filters and this will give you an appropriate result of the people you are searching for.

Search Alert-: Search alert will help you to cover more ground. You don’t have to miss any candidate if you set an alert. It will also give you an alert when someone who satisfied your criteria joins the group.

InMail access-: one can send direct mails from LinkedIn to any candidates they want with a premium account. You can send 25 InMail messages each month.

Easy tracking-: You can track the activity of each candidate using this feature.

Use the project to stay organized-: Project management is something you can do to stay organized on LinkedIn. There is one tool for Recruiters called Recruiter Lite. This will help you to track every candidate and manage the communication better.

LinkedIn Analytics-: This feature helps you to track the number of people who visited your profile.

LinkedIn Advertisement-: Businesses can use this feature to promote their brand on LinkedIn. They can target the right audience on LinkedIn while promoting their brand using this feature

LinkedIn business pages-: Business page is something companies can create on LinkedIn. This is different from a personal account and has many additional features than a personal account. With these features, a business can engage their customers and promote their brand through LinkedIn

Conclusion

LinkedIn is a good way to build your brand. As per experts Word of mouth marketing is the best kind of marketing to build a brand. Just like that, you can get good reviews from your colleagues. This is a good way of marketing yourself on LinkedIn. Many people like to put their appraisals and reviews from their previous work on LinkedIn. This is the best way to promote yourself on LinkedIn. If you are a job seeker You might be familiar with asking LinkedIn account first.

Many professionals consider LinkedIn as a trustable platform and companies do a background check on your LinkedIn profile before considering you for a job. so, make sure to create your account as better as possible by adding every point that is relevant to your experience and expertise. Building your brand takes time and hard work. So, you can start the effort as soon as possible to get a better output.

1 thought on “How To Use LinkedIn For Your Personal Brand”

  1. I think the one element I’m going to take from your article is to focus more on building connections! I plan on spending much more time on the network moving forward in hopes to continue building Blog Engage and our community. I must had been on LinkedIn 10 years or more now but haven’t really put much attention to the network, nothing near the time I spend on Facebook. Thanks for the great post and for sharing it with us on Blog Engage. Happy New Years friend! Wish me luck as I move forward in building my LinkedIn brand!

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