How to Build Your Personal Brand on LinkedIn

Personal branding is nothing new. Professionals around the world know the importance of promoting their qualifications, experience, and skills in a package we know as “personal brand”.

It helps individuals market themselves and their careers as brands. In addition, it helps them tap into their professional community, carve their niche, boost their social proof, and establish credibility.

Not only this, but a personal brand can also help entrepreneurs in building their business’s brand because believe it or not clients and customers look at personal social handles as much as they interact with the company’s social channels.

And if you wish to grow your career or business, personal branding is as important for you too. The best place to start with is the most powerful professional networking tool, LinkedIn. The social network provides one of the best opportunities to increase your visibility and credibility among the members of your professional community.

Let’s see how you can build a strong personal brand on LinkedIn:

Revamp your public profile

It’s a no-brainer. The first step to building your personal brand is strengthening your public profile and presence on LinkedIn. Consider LinkedIn as any other social media channel that you need to develop and nurture, but with its own eccentricities and specific features. Among these features, the most essential ones are photo, headline, summary, recommendations, experience, and skills and endorsements. Make sure that this info is always up-to-date and correct. Other than these, you can also add your contact info, media, and specific URLs if you wish to make your profile stronger.

Here’s a checklist of things you should do on LinkedIn to make your profile stand out:

• Upload a professional headshot. No cheeky selfies, no group photos, no extreme filters, no elaborate background, and please no sunglasses. 
• Go for a powerful headline. Include keywords related to your industry and work profile. Here, you can mention your latest role and company or your generic field of expertise.
• Your summary should be concise and well-drafted. Give a roundup of your skills, experience, and motivation, and don’t forget to mention what makes you unique.
• Ask for recommendations and also, give recommendations. It shows how well you are connected in your industry and what kind of soft and hard skills you are most well known for.
• On that note, also make sure you have the updated list of skills in your profile. Ask people, especially the ones who rank high for those skills in your connection list, to endorse you.

Grow your network

An attractive profile can’t stand on its own; it needs to be shared and promoted. You can do that by connecting with the members of your community. The more interactions you have with your connections, the more visibility you can enjoy on LinkedIn. Even a simple reaction or a comment on your post by your first connections can show in your second and third connections’ feed.

Here’s what you can do to grow your network:

• Search for people from the same background, location, and company as yours
• Check LinkedIn feature of ‘People You May Know’ and see if you’d like to add any to your list
• Find alumni as those will be the people you might work with sometime in your career
• Promote your content and drive engagement on your posts for better visibility

Join groups

There are thousands of LinkedIn groups and these are the network’s one of the most useful features. Join groups that are related to your business and professional interests. Try searching for relevant groups with the help of keywords.

You also need to be active on the groups you join. Here’s how you can do so:

• Post professional content that you think might interest group members
• Take part in conversations or start group discussions
• Get involved in the community by connecting with group members

Share your thoughts

Don’t limit your discussions to groups only. You can start 1:1 conversation with your connections or publish blog posts and your thoughts on a certain topic to kickstart discussions. While making public posts, use relevant hashtags. This way, you can help interested people on LinkedIn find your content and if your post starts trending, LinkedIn will show your post to everyone following the hashtags being used.

Here’s how you can share your thoughts on LinkedIn and kickstart meaningful engagement:

• Share blog posts from your official blog
• Talk about trending topics and raise open-ended questions
• Request expert ideas and professional recommendations
• Use relevant hashtags