In my previous blog article titled Tips to ensure personal branding success on LinkedIn in 2021 I highlighted tips that I have used to improve the rankings and visibility of my LinkedIn profile. The tips have helped me to connect, learn, enable myself and ultimately find like-minded people to engage and share ideas with on LinkedIn.
LinkedIn can also help promote your personal brand through networking opportunities, connecting with alumni, business partners and potential employers.
However, merely having a LinkedIn profile that is up to date is not enough for you to ensure complete success and increase awareness for your personal brand. The key is to engage with your audience (connections, peers, prospects, partners, potential employers ect.) to position yourself as a thought leader in your industry.
To utilise LinkedIn’s full potential to increase awareness of your personal brand, I recommend the following five strategies:
Strategy 01: Composing posts that drive engagement
Compared to Twitter’s 280 characters, LinkedIn posts have 1300 characters (1020 more characters than twitter). Which is enough space to share as much detail with your audience without worry.
Tactic 01: Write long form posts
From my experience longer posts have always performed better than simple and short ones, with long form receiving twice the level of engagement (views, likes and comments).
When the post is long form, it then becomes a “mini article” which helps draw the attention of your audience towards the main points you are making. If you have just published a LinkedIn article, long form posts will help give your readers context and drive them to read the entire article.
Here is an example of a long form post that summarises a LinkedIn article:
Tactic 02: Don’t be selfish, tag other people
Writing engaging long form post but not tagging people, is like winking at a girl in the dark. You know what you are doing but nobody else does. But when you tag someone, it appears in their notifications, which makes it more likely that they’ll see it, like, comment or even share your post. When the people you have tagged engage with your content, it will be seen by their connections, and hopefully their connections’ connections. But don’t go on annoying people, tagging them on posts that are irrelevant.
Here is an example of a post about Google Analytics where I tagged Google’s Digital marketing Evangelist, Avinash Kaushik and Anil Batra who is a digital analytics expert. Anil Batra liked and commented on the post.
Tactic 03: To be discoverable, use hashtags
Just like in other social media networks, hashtags on LinkedIn also help with discoverability. You can enter your own hashtags and also use the auto-suggested ones by LinkedIn when you post a status update.
To make following a topic easy, LinkedIn maintains a set of Hashtag communities. Which are places you can find posts that share the same hashtag.
When you use a hashtag on your post, there are chances that your post will be added into these hashtag communities and viewed by more people. And such might increase engagement of your post and increase overall awareness of your personal brand.
There is no limit to the number of hashtags to use, however I would suggest keeping to a maximum of 10 or a minimum of 5 hashtags.
When you combine the different tactics for composing posts that drive engagement (write long form, tag people and use hashtags), the engagement of your posts will double thus increasing awareness of your personal brand to your audience and position you as a thought leader in your industry.
Strategy 02: A picture is still worth a thousand words – use images
I think we can all agree that posts without illustrative images will seem less attractive, not only on LinkedIn but across all social media networks. Hence, using images on your posts will allow you to:
– Drive your followers to engage more with your content
– Allow your posts to catch people’s attention when they view their newsfeed, due to their visual impact
– Contextualise and visually transmit the concepts your share in the posts
– Increase awareness of your personal brand
– Allow you to create a visual identity that is associated with your brand, which people can recognise when they see your posts
The following are a few tips that I can share when using image on LinkedIn:
– Try by all means to be professional
– Share infographics
– Avoid inappropriate images
– Always tag people and brand that are pertinent
– Always reference the source
Here is an example of how I use images to share quotes which helps me promote my personal brand, because every image shared has my personal logo at the bottom. which helps people easily recognise my name whenever they come across any of the quotes I share across the web.
Strategy 03: Effectively use native LinkedIn videos
The most effective way to use video on LinkedIn, is native videos because LinkedIn algorithm likes native videos. What native video means is that you uploading a video file (i.e., from your phone, tablet, or laptop) directly onto LinkedIn instead of a video hosted elsewhere (e.g., YouTube).
Just like with images, sharing a video that contextualises your LinkedIn post or article will drive your followers to engage more with your content and visually transmit the concepts you share in the posts.
Video can also get your message across to people who are too occupied to read your long form post or article.
NB! people will actually get to see your face, which will make engaging with you more personal.
Strategy 04: Take advantage of the relevance of LinkedIn articles
If you want to position yourself as a thought leader within your industry, then LinkedIn articles are a must. While LinkedIn posts have a limit of 1300 characters, LinkedIn article body text are limited to a total of 110 000 characters.
LinkedIn Articles will allow you to share content that you wouldn’t typically be able to share on your post such as tips and tricks, book reviews, product reviews and how-to skills due to the limited characters.
A content marketing plan incorporating both LinkedIn blog posts and status updates is a solid strategy. And to increase engagement for your article, you can take snippets from it and share on your long form posts, infographic or even videos and direct your followers to view your full article.
Strategy 05: Share, share, share…
Since sharing is caring, it is best to share your LinkedIn content with other people who are following you from other social media networks to show that you care about them and to ensure that they are not left out. To share posts and articles, copy the link (click on the three dots in the upper right).
You can then share that link on Facebook, Twitter or even via your DMs.
The strategies and tactics I have shared are based on my personal experience, as I continue using LinkedIn and learning more about how its algorithm works – I will keep sharing my experience.
If there’s other strategies and tactics that you have used, leave a comment and lets learn from each other.