Having a personal brand is all about the image you want to present to your audience. And you can have full control of that image, if you put in the work.
Do you want to be seen as a thought leader or expert in your niche? Do you want to be known for your mission and vision? Do you want to be the go-to person for certain problems?
By developing a personal brand, you are building a social following or a community of people who want to learn from you, share the same beliefs, or will potentially buy from you.
People don’t buy from strangers. Having your own personal brand makes them aware of you, so they can trust you.
Why are people building their personal brands on LinkedIn?
You can build your personal brand on any platform: Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok, or YouTube. While there are no rules saying LinkedIn is the only platform, here are a few reasons why people do so:
1) The audience:
LinkedIn is well known for its professional audience. The platform has around 756 million members in over 200 countries and territories, including 90 million senior-level influencers, 63 million decision makers, and 10 million C-level executives (these stats are from the first half of 2019, so these figures have most likely risen).
This makes it the most optimal platform if your target audience is white collar workers or senior executives.
2) Intent of the platform
Compared to other platforms, members who are coming onto LinkedIn are 2x more intent driven. They are here with an aspirational mindset to learn and improve.
Hence, they would be more receptive to your content if it is relevant and valuable to them.
3) LinkedIn is being seen as the most trusted platform
In Insider Intelligence’s 2020 Digital Trust Report, LinkedIn is ranked as the most trusted platform for 4 years in a row. Digital trust is important because it will impact how or whether social media users would engage or trust the content on social platforms.
Posting on the wrong platform can raise questions about the accuracy of your content and lead to a negative impact to your brand.
4) LinkedIn organic content is underrated
Even with LinkedIn sessions increasing 25% year over year in 2019 and achieving over 358 billion feed updates viewed, still only 1% of LinkedIn’s monthly users share posts on a regular basis.
As demand for content is high, but supply is low, content creators on LinkedIn are having an advantage to get up to 8x more post reach than their follower base.
Below is an example of reaching 28k views with only 2.8K followers.
5) Easy to start
On LinkedIn, you can start building your personal brand with just text posts. In fact, that’s the most common format and performs just as well as image or video posts, if not better.
This is such a low barrier of entry that everyone can begin doing right away.
A list of inspiring LinkedIn personal brand examples
Dave Gerhardt
Currently the CMO at Privy, Dave, is one of the most well known B2B marketing thought leaders who is very active on LinkedIn. Apart from his day job, Dave is also doing tons of other work in doing podcasts and building his own B2B marketing community called DGMG.
He produces a podcast called The DGMG Podcast where he regularly interviews other CMOs, CROs, and other experts on B2B Marketing. He usually repurposes the podcast into a video and publishes on LinkedIn to continue building his own personal brand and following.
By building his own brand mainly through LinkedIn and podcasts, he was able to get more than 2,300 people to pay $10 dollars a month to join his exclusive B2B marketing group on Facebook. And also launched the DGMG University, where B2B marketers pay $200/year to grow their career further.
Chris Walker
CEO of Refine Lab, which is a B2B marketing agency that focuses on demand generation. Chris only began building his personal brand when he started this company back in April of 2019.
He mentioned that he got very few likes from his posts in the beginning. But with his persistence in being active on LinkedIn, adding CMOs to his network, and stacking up content from just text posts to podcasts to video now, the majority of his posts get over 500 reactions and engagement together.
More notably, he purely relied on building his own brand with content to attract inbound requests, growing his company from 1 to 22 people and working with 20+ companies without any outbound activities.
Andreas Jonsson
CEO at Shield, which is the leading analytics platform for LinkedIn. Shield consolidates all the post data from your personal profile so you can further analyze what works and what doesn’t.
As a founder, he leads by example by building his own personal brand and encouraging his team to do so.
By doing this, they do not need to spend tremendous amount of money on ads to build any awareness or educate their audience. And with his own personal brand, he was able to attract multiple business opportunities from jobs, leads to even investment offers.
Sho Dewan
Sho is a career coach, talent trainer, and the founder at Workhap. In 2020, he was also awarded as one of the LinkedIn Top Voices in the job search and career category.
He leverages LinkedIn as his main platform to share content about his clients’ success stories, his own career experiences and different career advice. By building his own brand, he became the go-to person to consult if you want to land your dream job.
More to that, recently he started his own digital course called Get Hired Academy on top of his 1:1 career consultation services. Leveraging his personal brand to the next level and educating his audience about their career in an even more scalable way.
Salina Yeung
As the CEO and co-founder of the[in]academy, Salina provides personal branding consultation and education services to both individual professionals and corporate companies.
Salina uses her own framework to build her personal brand and everything you see on her profile is what you can achieve if working with her.
By showing up and demonstrating her beliefs everyday, she tripled her followers base and attracts various opportunities, such as podcast interviews, workshops, and inbound clients.
We all have to start somewhere!
Remember, Rome wasn’t built in a day. As long as you keep pushing forward and showing up consistently, you can build your personal brand to achieve a large community and see results.
Want to get better results from your content on LinkedIn? Check out our 10 rules for creating engaging LinkedIn posts!
