Taking chances on LinkedIn: A guide to professional branding and success.
How to take chances on LinkedIn: A guide to professional branding and success. I once asked this question as a business or an individual who is very serious about his or her personal branding, if you are not on LinkedIn where are you? Being on LinkedIn is one thing, I would say the very first good step and another thing is taking chances on LinkedIn to partake from the large professional benefits LinkedIn offers to the users of the platform. Back to the question I asked earlier; where else would you be if you are a business or an individual trying to build a personal brand if not LinkedIn?
Your first platform should be the blue app and I will tell you the many reasons you head to my advice. I have listed several of the benefits of LinkedIn below but before proceeding to see the benefits there are other professional platforms that are as good as LinkedIn that you can also take on and maximize their benefits. If you are on any of these platforms I listed below and have mastered the act of using one or more of the platforms, I’m going to tell you how you can maximize anyone of your choosing platform. What I mean here is that if you have gotten used to Quora platform for instead and you can’t stay away from the platform for a day I’m going tell you how to take chances and reap the benefits of Quora
List of Other professional platforms like LinkedIn
There are so many other professional platforms that may offer the same benefits as LinkedIn. I have listed some below but we are not going to dwell much on that.
Reddit: There is so much you can gain from Reddit, a lot of professionals on the Reddit use the platform to connect to other professionals, ask questions and get answers and much more
Quora: on this platform professionals get their issues resolved by asking questions and getting answers or solutions from live experience of other professionals. There is so much to gain from Quora that you may not have known by now. Quora uses space, space on Quora is like a community of professionals or interest community, eg. If you are an educationist and wish to contribute to education issues or you are looking for scholarships, the best place to be is on education space on Quora. As a user you can join a space or create and build a space
GitHub: GitHub is a community for developers. Programmers collaborate, help each other, ask questions, and learn from one another. You can also get a life changing job on GitHub.
Bedance: On Behance professional’s can display their portfolios, show their creativity. This particular professional platform is suitable for UI/UX designers, artists. To present your artistic works or designs Behance is the best platform for you.
ResearchGate. Here is another excellent professional platform built by researchers for researchers. As an academic majoring in research ResearchGate will help to find and collaborate with other researchers in your field.
Stack Overflow. Stack Overflow is like GitHub. It’s built for developers, Programmes to collaborate and solve Programming challenges and other benefits the platform offers
Benefits of LinkedIn
LinkedIn offers several benefits, including:
There are numerous benefits that LinkedIn offers. As a user you may share from the numerous benefits. These benefits includes the following below:
Networking: as a user you can connect with other users in your field, share experiences, share opportunities, collaborate and more
Job offers /Job posts. On LinkedIn you can be offered direct job by your connection or by any users that notices your skills or experience
Personal Branding: this is the main subject of discussion. If you are looking to build a personal brand your first place is LinkedIn. There’s no limit to what you can achieve with LinkedIn. Display your professional achievements, skills and experience.
Gain Knowledge and share knowledge: on LinkedIn you can learn from industry experts. Learn from their journey to success, their mistakes and correction, their experience and more
Mentorship: you can be mentored by industry leaders and you can as well offer mentorship to upcoming.
Gain insight on market trend, company forecasts.
Acquire and develop skills. LinkedIn offers user access to learning platforms and opportunities, free courses and coaching and more.
Sourcing and Recruitment: you can use LinkedIn to source and recruit staff for your business
Promote your business
Gain recommendations
How can I build a personal brand on LinkedIn
Being on LinkedIn does not mean you have automatically achieved a personal branding, you can be on the platform for years without being noticed by other users, companies or businesses that may require your services
Understand how LinkedIn algorithm works
Once you understand how LinkedIn works you are close to taking chances on LinkedIn to enjoy its full benefits. Your next action is to apply some strategies according to your understanding of the working of the blue app.
I will tell you some of the strategies and little explanations here. The full strategies and more explanation will be contained in our next post. The reason is that this post is on LinkedIn and its algorithm.
Post: Post as much as you can. There is no limit to how much and at frequency in which you can post. You can screenshot your post on another platform and make a post out of it on LinkedIn. However you wish to schedule your activities on LinkedIn do so and make sure that in your activities you have room to make posts on LinkedIn
comment: Next is to comment on other people’s posts and on your posts. I’m going to elaborate on this in my next post however the reason you need to commenting a habit is because of how the LinkedIn algorithm works which I have explained below,
Time to post: The time to post would be as your schedule accommodates, however, I would recommend that the best time to comment is first evening between 4pm and 7pm and the second best time would be between 10am and 12 noon. These time frames are the time most engagement are happening on LinkedIn, more people are on the app and the more you engage the more visible you become to other users. You can however choose your time to post notwithstanding my advice on this regard.
Like and share: when you like a post or share the same contrary to your belief that you are doing the author a favor you are actually doing yourself a favor because the more you like or share the more you are making yourself visible. I will explain more on this later in my next post. See below here LinkedIn algorithm works
LinkedIn algorithm and how it works
In LinkedIn algorithm there are two sides and that is two important sides, they are first the
Author: the author is anyone who puts up content on the platform, any kind of contents
Engagement: Engagement is interactions on the posts or contents published by the author.
Engagement can be of different types, they are as follows:
Likes
See more
Repost with thought
Instant repost
Comments without author’s reply(response)
Comments with author’s reply(response)
Comments with in-author’s reply (response)
The type of engagement on your posts determines how much growth the post gets, how viral your post will go. The much growth you get on your posts and how viral your posts go the more visible you would become. So your posts growth and virality determine your LinkedIn visibility.
There are points to each time of engagement
The points however are according to the working of the LinkedIn algorithm. What you need to know is that type of engagement with the highest point. The two type of engagements with the highest point capable of boosting your LinkedIn visibility are the last two on the list above
On LinkedIn the users who published and the others who are engaging on the contents are making themselves visible. So when you like, comments or share posts on LinkedIn you are on the right side and doing yourself a favor and not only to the original author provided of course you are interested in getting noticed and building your personal branding on LinkedIn:
Comments with author’s reply(response)
Comments with in-author’s reply (response)
How to take chances on LinkedIn and benefits from LinkedIn algorithm as a business or person building personal brand
Receiving lots of instant reposts accelerates your reach substantially.
You must post interesting contents on LinkedIn to be able to receive a lot of repost by other users. Your posts must be motivating and inspiring, your post must be actual facts and there is life learned in it.
Responding to comments as an author pays off!
Don’t be proud when you see other users starting to like or comment on your posts because what goes up may come down. When you respond to comments on your posts you are achieving two most important things in personal branding (1) first you are building and strengthening a community of loyal followers that loves to interact with you because you inspire or because your contents resonate with them. (2) you’re making yourself more visible because the LinkedIn algorithm favors authors’ response to posts.
Discussions in the comment section support virality.
On the other hand as the person engaging: that you are commenting or liking or sharing, the more you engage in others posts the more visible or noticed you are becoming.
Commenting is still the best way to curate content and become more visible.
Encourage the author/your network to respond to your comment (trigger, ask questions which can direct open questions or conduct LinkedIn polls, etc.) One of the best and easiest way to do this and truly have your network respond you contents is by making your contents an inspiring and interesting contents