What I've Learned from 12 Months Sharing More on LinkedIn - Part 1

I posted almost daily on LinkedIn beginning early last year. This is a multi-part series on what I've seen, heard, discovered, and learned -- for better and for worse.

Notable Activities, Events, and Statistics

This is what happened over the past 12 months:

• Actively posted and engaged on LinkedIn most days of the week.
• Posted more than 350 times, across nearly as many calendar days. The vast majority of these posts were my own original content, ideas, reflections, techniques, and observations.
• Shared more than 70 original videos, video tutorials, and instructional walkthroughs.
• Posts generated nearly 6 million impressions.
• Followers of my activity increased notably.
• Engaged with colleagues, former coworkers, friends, influencers, strangers, and company reps many more times in the past.
• Connected in person, over the phone, and through Zoom with dozens of people first met on LinkedIn.
• Nearly one-third of my prior-year business revenue was at least in some way driven by my activity on LinkedIn -- nearly all with existing relationships.

LinkedIn Has Changed

When it was introduced to the world nearly two decades ago, I was an early adopter of LinkedIn. I've witnessed its evolution from a basic site for hosting a résumé to a global professional network connecting nearly a billion people.

For the first decade-and-a-half, I viewed it primarily as a social network for keeping in touch with current and former colleagues, current and former clients, friends, and other direct or indirect acquaintances. When I decided to dive in deeper in late December 2021, I did so for little reason other than my wife telling me I should. My main motivation for posting more was to show up more frequently and more deliberately in front of my existing network.?

But what started as a basic effort to stay in touch, rapidly within about 2 months, turned into a dissemination of my writing, ideas, innovations, bits of more than a dozen of my courses, and candid conversations with a global audience of interested professionals. I've found it relatively easy to share fresh as I have years of content, videos, experiences, and stories that span nearly two decades -- some of which are sitting in my digital library having never been shared publicly before.

At the outset of my activity, I was hesitant to add noise to an already loud forum but concluded that my career has been so rich that it would be a disservice not to share it with others. What was once a plain vanilla site for hosting a virtual résumé has morphed into a dynamic network and billboard where character and reputation are on display constantly. This isn't just in real-time through posts and video, but also through searches of prior posts, articles, and activity. It’s a cached index of a person’s online expression of who they are or what they do in their business and life.

It's Not Only LinkedIn That's Changed -- The Digital World Has

But this isn't unique to LinkedIn. This is the Internet now. It's a giant web of our activities -- authored articles, podcast interviews, pictures, videos, white papers, events, and awards from many years ago can still be discovered through a search engine. LinkedIn just allows us to do it with a lot more intentionality, stitching together the profile and billboard we want others to see.

Search engines like Google, Bing, YouTube, and LinkedIn offer searchers a means of finding information and insights they may be looking for. This is what makes Alphabet (parent of Google and YouTube) and Microsoft (parent of Bing and LinkedIn) among the most valuable and powerful companies in the world. But what LinkedIn and YouTube offer that web-scraping engines don't, is the connection between information, insights, and brand. In other words, Google and Bing can retrieve information from relevant sites, but they can lack a personal connection and credibility. YouTube and LinkedIn offer a glimpse, whether genuine or not, into the persona of the creator. Thus, these platforms offer an opportunity to all parties involved -- the participants and the companies -- for higher engagement and trust (or distrust).

You're Building a Brand Whether You Realize it or Not

I never intended to create a brand or category; I set out to be more active. But what's clearly happened is a personal brand and category were built beyond what I ever would have envisioned. It's led to connections I didn't foresee, relationships I didn't expect, and opportunities I wasn't looking for.

According to ChatGPT, personal branding is "the process of creating and promoting a particular image or identity for oneself, in order to establish a reputation and credibility in a particular field or industry. It involves developing a unique personal style, message, and reputation and then communicating that to others through various channels, such as social media, networking, and personal interactions. The goal of personal branding is to differentiate oneself from others in the market and to establish oneself as an authority or leader in one's field."

According to Sam Richter CSP, CPAE -- a friend, sales intelligence expert, and Hall of Fame speaker -- a personal brand is made up of two core components:

1. Your character
2. Your reputation

Your character is who you are -- your values, ethics, behavior, and how you show up in the world. It's the demonstration of consistency in these core?elements. Can you be trusted? How do you put yourself out into the world? You have 100% control over your character.

The second core component is your reputation. Your reputation is how do others perceive and experience you. What do others say about you when you're not around? You have little control over your reputation because you cannot instruct others to experience you in a certain way.

What I've come to acknowledge is that, regardless of whether you're seeking to build a brand or not, you are building one every time you do something. That's true off LinkedIn but it's particularly true on the platform, whether you're creating content or just liking and commenting on others' posts. Every action and reaction is tracked and broadcast to connections, connections of connections, clients, customers, prospects, and total strangers. These actions and reactions create neurological impressions, judgments, or perceptions of what others think about you. It also refines how you show up in the world and in front of your network. Everyone knows it takes a lifetime to build a reputation and mere seconds to rip it apart. I've shared multiple times the importance of showing up being authentic and being thoughtful in what you do for this very reason -- everything creates an impression.

Even if people are not watching right now, technology and AI are. This means creators and companies alike can build brands however they may choose, connecting great content, insights, and actions with their character and reputation. Or they may damage their image and reputation through their misdeeds, compromised values, insults to their audiences, plagiarism of content, and more. Everyone's watching.

The 1% Write the Narrative. The 99% Create the Culture.

It's estimated that around 1% of LinkedIn users are creating content regularly. This means many of them are the ones starting the daily conversations. But the 99% of people who are interacting with them through various forms of engagement -- likes, comments, shares, watching videos, and live streams -- are responsible for how words, ideas, information, and insights spread. Just as on other social media platforms, people vote with their eyeballs and fingertips.

Whether we like to admit it or not, human behavior is easily hackable, and social media companies have become experts at this. They increase their value in the market and influence society when people spend more time on the platform and engage more often. The intangible power of the algorithms is that they offer cheers and applause for certain sharing. They create feelings of adding value, even when it's not clear what value is actually being created.

While many would agree that LinkedIn is different from other social platforms because it's seen as a business networking and educational platform, remember that its parent company is a for-profit enterprise, with stockholders, earnings per share expectations, and global influence. Just as 1% of the population creates and shares for reasons that go beyond the altruistic -- "I share because I care" -- the always-changing algorithm prods the 1% to create content that drives a certain response so that the 99% can build the culture of the platform and keep people active.

Having spoken with many of the 1% off the platform, whether in person, on Zoom or on Microsoft Teams, it's evident that no one is creating for the sake of creating. Everyone has ulterior motives whether that's getting followers, attracting sponsorships, selling courses, or merely establishing a virtual presence. On Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube products and eyeballs are pushed for marketing, branding, and money. On LinkedIn, people are usually the products.

It's been an interesting journey and I'm still not entirely sure what to make of it. What started 12 months ago, simply as a desire to share more with colleagues, current and former clients, and others who know me, transformed into a different dynamic altogether. Sharing attracted a much larger, unintended audience, and publishing content has introduced a wide range of connections and opportunities, many that I wasn't looking for.

A Reckoning in Online Influence and Stewardship

For the past decade, colleagues and clients have looked for insights and advice through in a direct and unbiased manner. Offline, senior-level professionals at client companies would share how much they enjoyed what was being shared. They'd say to me in front of their colleagues, "you've got to follow Carl on LinkedIn." It seemed my goal of getting in front of the people who knew me and doing it more frequently by sharing insights they ordinarily wouldn't encounter, was being realized. Nearly all of the one-third of revenue I credit to LinkedIn, over the past twelve months, came from existing relationships.

But online, interesting developments started to take shape, mostly unintended. Other content creators took notice and because of the increasingly more frequent interactions between us, some of their followers took notice of me and mine of them. We'd converse offline and get acquainted. Engagement in each other's content started to become more regular.

The number of random followers from all over the world increased exponentially, with most people residing in countries I've never visited or worked in. The number of direct messages increased substantially, from one every couple of weeks to a daily lot. Few of them were from colleagues and clients and far more were from complete strangers from across the globe looking for advice, calls, and free copies of my files. The messages were less pointed to what I was sharing and instead were inquiries about the basics of:

• "Can you help me get a job?"
• "What are the most important skills I should get?"
• "Can I come work for you?"

Some people would even share with me vulnerabilities in their personal lives, completely unsolicited. The more assertive followers would comb through my website and land on my calendar scheduling link, then proceed to book calls with me to talk about their career aspirations. This was all quite unexpected.

But perhaps the most surprising connections were the inbound inquiries from companies. It was company reps with active accounts who were becoming increasingly aware of who I was and what I was sharing. Almost none of them ever engaged with my content and while I didn't go searching for them, they started presenting interesting new opportunities to partner together. I'll share what some of these opportunities have been in a future post.

Sharing my thoughts, ideas, techniques, and content regularly has illuminated a spotlight. The combination of character and reputation has led to the development of a brand representing nearly two decades of lessons from experience in management consulting and FP&A, running a diversified entrepreneurial business, and trials from the field that others would never hear about or learn from otherwise. Generally, I am grateful to be seen as someone with a strong voice worth listening to.

But with all this talk about personal branding, it's not a personal brand that connects. It's how a personal brand plays within a category or domain. While there are many people who play in the corporate finance and FP&A space, each person shows up and expresses themself in a particular way. The way I show up has long been intentionally unique and it's been a core reason for my differentiated success as an entrepreneur on and off the platform.

How Opportunities Driven by LinkedIn Arise

Activity on LinkedIn has skyrocketed with more people working from home, the fallout from the Twitter debacle, the realization of the importance of a digital footprint, and so many more factors. People are finding success monetizing their networks and content, realizing greater scale and efficiency in digital marketing than in traditional mediums. The clamoring for attention has increased the noise on the platform as content creators come up with new ways to get eyeballs from scrolling past.

Formulas and recipes for getting more engagement and followers aren't secrets anymore as LinkedIn consultants and influencers have monetized sharing the recipes through video courses and coaching that have made them very wealthy. Content creators emulate each other's strategies, borrow from each others' content topics, repurpose others' copy, and in extreme cases blatantly plagiarize it and tweak a few words. I've avoided falling into these seductive traps because I've always seen my presence on LinkedIn differently, knowing that my business benefits more from deeper relationships and connections off the platform.

"How are you monetizing your network," a content creator asked me offline. "I don't," I explained. I've never sold my consulting services and I've never marketed my dozen courses on LinkedIn. It's never been my intention to build a network for the sake of monetizing it. "Carl, you're leaving money on the table," I was told. He's probably right.

My conversations with companies about partnering and sponsorship validated this. "Carl, we've been looking for someone like you." There were two notable developments. One, was being seen as one of the 1% in the corporate finance creator domain. But two, and most importantly, was being seen as a leader and true authority within that 1%. Conversations with companies confirmed what I was doing was different -- it was thought-provoking and dense, demonstrating that I know what I'm talking about. Nothing was being sold. And the content was generally intended to appeal to a more advanced, senior-level audience.

The aforementioned goal of personal branding and category niching isn't to get a huge reach with a bunch of followers around the world -- "The goal of personal branding is to differentiate oneself from others in the market and to establish oneself as an authority or leader in one's field" -- I've long viewed myself as a category of one with a unique business model.

What's Next in Part 2?

In Part 2 of this article series, I'll share with you more of my journey in business, my digital strategies, why they're different from (and similar to) some of the known formulas and recipes people use to grow their audiences and more. I'll comment on some of my observations of and insights into other content creators and thought leaders on the platform. And finally, I'll also share some of the common and less common reasons why you should be positioning yourself as a thought leader and sharing your ideas.

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About Me

Carl Seidman is the Founder and Principal of Seidman Financial , the operating division of Seidman Global LLC.

?? Supporting Fortune 500 corporations, midmarket companies, and entrepreneurial businesses company in strategic finance and advanced FP&A.

???Providing FP&A masterminds, courses, advisory services, and keynotes globally. For a list of current and prior clients you know, visit Seidman Financial.

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