If you’re looking to leverage your personal branding on LinkedIn, we can tell you that it will be a long but worthy the effort. In 2019, the network counts over 600 million members, spanning across 200+ countries and territories.
Furthermore, user engagement is growing with an every day count of millions of posts, videos, and articles going through the LinkedIn feed. Consequently, generating tens of thousands of comments every hour and tens of millions more shares and likes. Moreover, statistics have also estimated that two professionals join LinkedIn every second.
In short, this platform offers many opportunities to network, and grow your business connections. However, you will need to be effective and stand out in the right way.
In this article, we’ve gathered 6 Best Practice to help you productively build your Personal Branding on Linkedin.
1 – Fine-tune your LinkedIn’s profile look
Your profile is the key component of your experience on LinkedIn. It is also the welcome mat to your social presence. Hence, we strongly recommend uploading a professional and friendly profile picture that aligns with your role. Choose a square profile picture, recommended at 400 x 400 pixels, and stay under 10 MB in file size.
Choosing a good quality cover image will also help to enhance your visibility. Try using something that represents you, or the company you work for. Your LinkedIn background photo acts as a cover image for your page. Recommended dimensions are 1584 pixels wide x 396 pixels tall. You may pay attention a the mobile appearance of it by check across both devices, it is recommended not to put key information in the bottom-centre area.
Next, you may want to change your headline. By default, LinkedIn will use your current job title. However, we highly recommend you to customize it. You can highlight your expertise or your titles – this will capture visitors’ attention and make them want to learn more about you.
2 – Make sure all your details are up-to-date
Listing all your previous experiences is not a necessity. Instead, we recommend sharing about previous jobs that benefited you. Don’t forget to add a brief explanation so that visitors can get a better sense of your expertise.
In the meantime, you can also add a brief summary about yourself. On top of your experience and visions, feel free to share about achievements and activities outside of work.
3 – Start connecting with other professionals
Building your network is the second part of expanding your personal branding on LinkedIn. Now that you have a fully optimized your profile, you are ready to connect with many other professionals. You can start by connecting with people you know, such as friends and former colleagues. Then continue to enrich your network by connecting with industry leaders and other professionals.
4 – Join professional groups
LinkedIn is all about networks and connections. Groups provide a place for professionals in the same industry or with similar interests to share and build valuable connections.
5 – Engage with appealing content
According to LinkedIn Marketing Solutions, video is now the fastest-growing type of content and will most likely generate conversations.
Hence, content publishing is beneficial for your personal branding, you will also want to showcase your thought leadership and share what you are interested in with your network. To help you deliver high-quality content, here are a few technical tips to keep in mind:
- Never share only a piece of text or link without any comment
- Tag the article source and/or the companies mentioned in the article
- Use 1 to 3 hashtags to refer to the topic or event you are going to
- Tag in the comment a business friend that could be interested
- Remember to always share about events you are going to
6 – Understand the LinkedIn algorithm to increase your visibility
Understanding the LinkedIn algorithm is the key to improve your profile’s visibility and content reach. In brief, you must bear in mind that each content will first be assigned a “quality score” based on the text or the link attached. Then will be tested on a small sample of your audience and depending on the engagements, LinkedIn will decide whether to push it to more people or to stop showing it in the feed.
Based on Clearview Social massive data collection, they pointed out 5 reasons LinkedIn might give a “low-quality score” to your content:
- Oversharing: Aim for not over 20 posts per month.
- You never add comments or insights: Engagement is the key to your social presence.
- Don’t share enough: One post per month isn’t sufficient to get engagements.
- You don’t tag companies or people: Always tag a company, a person, or a topic using a hashtag with every single post
- Don’t post with no particular reason: If you post content that nobody cares about, you will signal to LinkedIn algorithm that your posts aren’t top quality.
Conclusion:
If you use your LinkedIn account strategically, then it can become an open door to help shape your future. Professionals using LinkedIn are looking to engage, interact, and swap ideas. This network is the perfect place for sharing and publishing professional content. With these best practices listed above, you are now ready to kick-off and optimize your personal branding.
If you are interested in improving your personal branding on LinkedIn, contact us now!
