How to make your personal brand come alive on LinkedIn

This article is a collaboration between Lynnaire Johnston, Word Wizard and international LinkedIn expert, and strategic marketing specialist Joy Abdullah, of Humanizing Business. It was recorded as a webinar in March 2021 which can be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYwtOGeuimg

What exactly is a personal brand?

We all have one life but we've been conditioned to understand there's a work life, a home life and a personal life. We have these little compartments in our head but just pull back and realise that the self is one. We might be changing clothes and wearing many hats to execute various roles but there are some basics, some commonalities, that are communicated whether we are a husband, father, son, wife, girlfriend, boss, follower, manager etc. This is where three words – strong personal brand – come in.

There are four things to remember about a strong personal brand.

First, it creates an influence. By virtue of interaction with a person, of learning about them, working or engaging with them, we form a perception or a view. This might be that someone is very jovial. That descriptor, jovial, becomes how we see them, is their personal brand. The first thing is that your personal brand is the impact and influence of yourself summed up as a descriptor.

Second, impact creates familiarity. The phrase, "People buy from people" is all about familiarity which influences the perceptions we have. In marketing, we have a catchphrase, "Perception is reality". Across various domains of our life – social, sports, politics, general community – we find our perceptions create what we believe to be real.

Third, a strong personal brand gives you the authority of a subject matter expert. That authority, that expertise, brings out your genuineness. For instance, I am a strategic marketing specialist and personal branding is a very important tool in my toolkit. Without that I can't communicate the right content, which then impacts the business brand or the service brand's perception. So it's very important to develop that personal brand.

Fourth, the reason you create a strong personal brand is to differentiate yourself or stand out. It's always important to differentiate so that the people who come to you, who form your community, are attracted by the values and views that you communicate, which is the service that you give them.

This is a flip from how personal branding was seen five or six years ago and how it was executed. Then, it was all about media celebrities with millions of followers – what we now know as influencer marketing. Today, personal branding is all about being human. It's about standing out from eight billion other people and saying, "I'm human. I'm the same as you, but I'm different. Here's why I'm different. Here's my authority, here's my value, and here's why I can serve you."

Do we need a personal brand?

At any point in time, whether you're a graduate, in university, a young professional, or mid-career, you're likely to be doing a side hustle. Building a personal brand always, always, always helps you.

Building a personal brand happens step by step by step. To take the example of gardening, when you till the soil and put in seeds, you've got to water and nurture for a certain period of time before the veggies grow, the shoots come up or the flower bud comes out. It’s the same for a personal brand – it's a lifelong investment.

In a nutshell, we all need a strong personal brand. You decide the purpose of your brand, be it as an author, sports person, business owner or social community worker. Whatever the objective, there's a reason to have a brand. You create your strategy behind it and feed the strategy by executing it, growing your brand day on day. It's not something that takes nine months and you’re done.

We all have phones. We've all got our apps. We are on social media. We are 24/7 connected online until we make a conscious decision to unplug. And your persona, your brand is still running there. There's your profile, your last tweet, your last comment, your last feed – it’s all still up there. The first reason why it's critical is simply noticeability. Now, if you decide to fade away and be a wallflower, that's fine. That's a decision. You can choose to not build a personal brand. That itself is a decision towards your personal brand. But if you are like most of us, interested in growing your career, you will want to make sure that the work you're doing is noticed. Every one of us loves validation and appreciation. I haven't come across a single individual who does not want to be told, "Thank you, I appreciate you. This is really good. Most kind of you." We all love to hear that.

Now, you don't want to be noticed by seven billion people. You want noticeability with maybe 100,000 people, or maybe 50 people in your community. LinkedIn is ideal for this. You want a core group to grow with you, to share your journey and your lessons that they can use on their own journey.

The second reason a personal brand is crucial is that it delivers opportunities. For collaboration and participation and for learning. Who doesn't want opportunities in our business, life and career? This article is an example of the opportunities that arise when people are active on LinkedIn. Two people with a similar mindset but different areas of expertise are introduced by a mutual colleague and before you know it, collaboration on a webinar benefiting a wider target audience than each might reach individually has been organised and held.

 The 3M Method of Personal Branding

The 3M method consists of meaning, make-up and message.

Meaning is your personal brand. It's all about your purpose, your values, and your goals. It's all about you. You have to get very comfortable with who you are, what you stand for, your values and beliefs, and how are you going to communicate that.

The second M is your make-up. You have to understand your emotional as well as intellectual traits. What are you comfortable with? For instance, often men are very uncomfortable connecting with their emotions. We tend to shy away from recognising our own emotions. Now, when it comes to your personal brand, it's very critical you own who you are from an emotional perspective. For example, displaying vulnerability. Many people find this difficult. But connecting with that vulnerability helps you get to grips with your own emotion. And then, when you write your content, or communicate to somebody in person, you bring that out. It highlights who you are from your heart perspective. Your heart is your emotion, it communicates.

And this is very important because it feeds into the last M – your message. This is your content, your story or whatever you’re communicating. We all have a story even if we don’t know it. And your LinkedIn profile is a great place to tell that story.

When you're creating or working on developing your personal brand, remember under meaning, you've got purpose, value and interests. That's your personal purpose, your personal why. Why do I exist? Why am I here? What's my mission? Ask yourself these questions and you’ll discover a passion or very deep interest.

Once you know that, LinkedIn becomes a communication channel. But to use it well you need to understand why you are on LinkedIn. You may be here for several reasons. One, you simply want to network and increase your social online network using LinkedIn. Two, you may run a small business or be a business owner and want to build your personal brand on LinkedIn so that when you need new contracts, referrals or perhaps a new gig, people will know who you are because you’re on LinkedIn. Third, you're a professional working for a company but have your mind set on a side hustle, which you want to become your full-time gig in a couple of years.

You're taking a year or two to build your persona, your personal brand, on LinkedIn because that's where you think your crowd, prospects, and customers are going to be. Identify the reason you are using LinkedIn. Don’t just jump on with the mindset of it being another social media channel you need to have a presence on. Be very clear why you are using LinkedIn.

There are several areas of LinkedIn that are crucial to your personal brand. The first one is your profile. That needs to be complete and it needs to be compelling. How do you go about doing that and making sure that it connects with your personal brand, your purpose? The first thing is to be very careful about your imagery and the words you use. LinkedIn is no longer just a platform where you put your CV or resumé and forget about it. It is a platform for telling your personal story and sharing the things that are important to you in your life. It is, in fact, your own personal website. Because even if you have an About page on your website, you will never have as much information there as you have on your LinkedIn profile.

It's very important to make sure that everything on your profile matches your personal brand. That is, how you look and dress and connect with people through your profile photo. Your brand also impacts how you write your headline to help people understand what you do, and the benefits you can bring to working with them. It also relates to your cover image and making sure that people understand, again, where you work, what you do and how you help others. Have all aspects of your profile filled out, including your experience. Add in featured items like video, images, articles, blog posts and web pages. Anything that you have that tells people how you can help them and shares your expertise should go on your profile. Everything else you do on LinkedIn is predicated on how well you have put your profile together and how well it reflects your personal brand.

However, it also goes beyond that to encompass connecting, publishing and engaging. Connecting is about creating a strong network of top-quality connections. People who you know, you like and you trust, and who know, like and trust you. Because these are the people who will want to do business with you.

Ensuring that you connect to the right people in the right way is part of your brand. For example, if you just connect to somebody without sending a personal message, you are sending the message that they are not important to you. If you connect to somebody with a personal message that is warm, and welcoming, and uses their name, that sends a positive message about your personal brand. When you publish content on LinkedIn, and that could be an article, a video, posts, or a poll, again you are expressing your personal brand.

Publishing gets you noticed. And a very good way to increase your noticeability is by sharing useful content. Many people think that publishing or posting on LinkedIn is all about promoting themselves, telling everybody how good they are. But it isn’t. It's not about you, it's about your audience and the people who you want to read your material. When you're thinking about what to write and publish, think about the kind of material your audience wants to read. That way, you'll resonate with your audience and this will give you visibility and credibility with those who you want to know you, like you, and trust you.

The third LinkedIn strategy for personal branding is engaging. This is where you write comments on other people's posts. How you go about doing this is a critical part of your personal brand. If, for example, on a post you were just to comment only, "Great post", that's not adding much to the conversation or helping the dialogue. It's not adding any of your expertise. But if you were to write a helpful comment that adds to the debate and helps people understand the issue better, it also helps your personal brand. Find good people who are writing good content that you can engage with well.

If you master these four elements of LinkedIn – your profile, publishing, connecting and engaging – you will develop Link?Ability which is the art of making yourself someone who other people on LinkedIn want to connect to.

By creating a good profile, connecting with the right people, publishing good-quality content and engaging in an appropriate way, and having clearly identified your purpose and personal brand, you will achieve your professional goals on LinkedIn.

 For more content by Lynnaire Johnston visit https://linktr.ee/LynnaireJohnston