This Week I Learned: LinkedIn is a Powerful Tool For Personal Branding

This article originally appeared on my Medium publication, This Week I Learned, a collection of skills, tools, news, and realizations that I pick up every week.

Before this past week, I never really thought of LinkedIn as anything more than a public professional profile. Medium articles I posted on there never really did too well, and most of what I saw on my feed were job updates from connections. I just changed my profile details every now and then, and that was the extent of my LinkedIn usage.

Then, as an experiment, I posted an update about myself on LinkedIn.

It got a ton of views. That wasn’t the most unexpected part. What surprised me was the amount of engagement and reach I got from people that I didn’t even know. So I started playing around with the platform a bit more.

This week, I’ll tell you about how I learned about LinkedIn’s usefulness in building my personal brand.

A couple of weeks ago, I posted about getting into Alpha Kappa Psi’s 40 under 40 list.

Within an hour, around 50 people had liked the post. A few had commented. Over 5,000 people had viewed the post. It was pretty impressive, especially given that I had never really been active on LinkedIn to begin with.

What impressed me the most, though, was the nature of the reach of the post. Most of the people who liked the post weren’t my friends, coworkers, and associates, but people I had never even met or connected with. It wasn’t as if I had posted in a bunch of groups about it and redirected them. It was happening organically.

All said and done, the post received just over 100 likes (pretty mediocre by LinkedIn standards, but fantastic by my own) and reached 8,604 people. Of those that had liked my post, 48 of them were non-1st degree connections.

It was pretty cool, but I didn’t think much of it at the time. It wasn’t until last week that I noticed the trend.

Recently, I posted about an annoying trend surrounding humble-brag “rags-to-riches” LinkedIn posts that were broken up into the “optimal format” for social media posts. The post was well-received, but I was surprised by the response yet again.

Just 57 likes this time, plus or minus some comments, and 11,643 people reached. Of those that had liked my post, around 28 of them were non-1st degree connections.

Looking deeper into post analytics, I noticed that the vast majority of the people that had viewed my content were second-degree connections.

Engagement was roughly 50% from 1st degree connections and 50% from non-1st degree connections on both posts.

Even crazier: someone reached out to me after my second LinkedIn post and inquired about my business, Elevate Media. They wanted to talk about content marketing strategy and also asked me for advice on creating some videos for their initial push of their product. After some discussion, we set up a meeting.

It was then I realized that I had stumbled upon something.

LinkedIn is a powerful tool for reach. Not because it has more users, more engaging content, better targeted algorithms, or anything of that sort, but because it allows people to reach people in their 2nd degree network better than anything that I’ve seen yet.

Take Facebook for example. If I had posted on Facebook with those two posts, then I likely would have gotten some engagement and reach out of it. However, the majority of those would be from my 1st degree network, mainly my friends, coworkers, and associates. I wouldn’t get much else past it unless it went viral or something like that (as exciting as my life is, I don’t think I merit virality). That’s one of the main problems of most other social media networks. Getting some likes from friends is great, but if you’re trying to achieve something far bigger than a profile picture post, like reaching potential clients for your business or trying to fill a position for a job opening at your company, then LinkedIn is a fantastic channel.

And the more connections you have on LinkedIn, the better.

I have 553 1st degree connections.

That equals 424,619 2nd degree connections.

That’s 424,619 people outside of my immediate network that could potentially see my content. They could be students, founders, consultants, engineers, CEOs, VCs, and more.

And that’s just the 2nd degree network. But the 2nd degree connections alone are huge, and that’s why I’ll be posting on LinkedIn more in the near future (quality content, of course; I don’t encourage spam unless you want to be plainly ignored). It’s great for my business, but it’s also great to reach people that I normally wouldn’t be able to hit.

That’s it for today. If you ever have any suggestions for what I should write about, just comment below and I’ll check it out.

Look out for the next article in a week!

-Indra

-Atlanta, 2017

If you want to see more of my writing, check out my Medium.