This blog article is all about personal branding on LinkedIn. What exactly is personal branding? Who is it suitable for? And how can you build your own personal brand? You will find answers to these and other questions in this blog post. The article focuses primarily on LinkedIn, currently the most successful B2B social media platform (source). However, many of the tips and tricks mentioned can also be applied to other social networks.

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What is personal branding on LinkedIn and who is it suitable for?

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The term personal branding was first used in 1997 by Tom Peters in connection with the new findability (Googlability) of a person in the digital world (source). Personal branding is the targeted staging of a person, often in social media, combined with goals such as building a positive reputation, expert positioning and increased reach. The development of a personal brand is not tied to celebrity, age, industry or career stage. For example, a young professional can use personal branding to improve their market value when starting their career or a salesperson can sell a product or service more successfully with a strong personal brand (social selling).

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Development of a positioning as a personal brand

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To build a personal brand, you should be clear about how you want to position yourself. Your "personal branding sweet spot" is derived from your experience and skills, your personality, goals and the relevance of your messages for your target group.

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Follow a clear line regarding your values and messages. This is the only way to convince your contacts and gain their trust. Always pursue the goal of offering your contacts added value.

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Personal branding content strategy

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All personal brands have one thing in common: a sense of mission. If you want to build a personal brand, you should publish content regularly and frequently. But how can you create your personal content strategy?

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A so-called message house can help you with the implementation. A message house is made up of three levels. At the top level is your personal branding sweet spot, from which you derive everything else. Level two deals with your core messages. These are then converted into content modules at level three. The following example illustrates this approach:

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Before you create or share posts, ask yourself the following questions:

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• Does the content match my positioning?
• Would my target group be grateful for the content?
• Would you send it to a colleague or friend as an e-mail?

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Ideally, you should test different times of day and hours when publishing your posts, as every target group reacts differently. In our experience, working days in the morning hours often work very well as a network that is mainly used in everyday working life.

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For successful personal branding, you should publish at least three posts per week; one post per day is considered a good average. There is no upper limit. However, you should not write irrelevant posts, but only use your reach if you have something relevant to share.

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Building the reach of your content through interactions

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However, creating and publishing content alone is not enough to build a personal brand on LinkedIn. It is just as important to interact with the content of others. The balance between give and take also applies in social networks. Like, comment and share posts from your contacts that they find interesting. Then they will reciprocate with your posts. Only if your content is "clicked" by other people will it receive the necessary reach.

Try to stimulate discussions under your posts and link people who are connected to the post. Your advantage here? LinkedIn measures the interaction rate for each post. The higher the interaction rate of the posts, the higher the distribution outside your own network. For this reason, it is important to respond quickly to questions and other interactions and to stay tuned. This approach increases your own visibility and the visibility of your posts.

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Mini-excursion: Employee advocacy

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Personal branding is not only interesting on an individual level. As a marketing manager in a larger company, you should support the positioning of your employees in social media. With an employee advocacy program, you can develop your employees into brand ambassadors. Colleagues create reach for company messages. Depending on the company's objective, direct business contacts, deals or applications may be generated. Employee advocacy is a win-win situation, as not only the company but also the employees involved benefit from it. You can find out more about employee advocacy in our article: Employee Advocacy - How do you unleash the potential of your employees for marketing and sales?

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Two common mistakes to avoid

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Print to Web

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Do not simply copy content from the web or, even worse, do not simply use printed content such as brochures or flyers just to be able to share posts regularly on LinkedIn. Be sure to adapt the image size, design and text to the respective post format and give posts your personal touch.

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Sales Sales Sales

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Personal branding on LinkedIn should primarily be about offering your contacts added value and building trust in you as a result. So refrain from directly overwhelming your contacts with sales offers. You can find some tips for successful social selling on LinkedIn here.

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Bonus tip: Do you already know the LinkedIn Social Selling Index?

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The Social Selling Index measures your effectiveness on LinkedIn using the following criteria:

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• the development of your professional personal brand
• find the right contacts
• Build relationships
• How intensively you engage with/deal with your insights

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LinkedIn awards 25 points per category, so you can achieve a level of 0 to 100 points. Use this index as a guide and see where you still have room for improvement 😉.

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Click here for the Social Selling Index.