Most professionals understand the importance of networking for career success, but many fail to harness the full power of networking social media platform, LinkedIn. If you’re looking to reach out to other professionals in your industry or establish yourself as a thought leader in your field, having a robust LinkedIn content strategy can help propel you into the spotlight.
With over 254 million users in the Asia-Pacific region alone, LinkedIn has transformed itself from a simple digital business card to a professional branding powerhouse tool in the last 20 years. Savvy CEOs, financial coaches, business leaders and authors across the world have gravitated towards this platform, not only to take advantage of its vast networking opportunities and unlimited access to curated business content but also to bolster their own thought leadership – and you can do it too. LinkedIn is a great platform to spark business conversations, showcase your industry knowledge and prove you're an expert. So, join Wordsmith, as we show you how you can become a thought leader on LinkedIn and help you cultivate a loyal audience of dedicated followers.
Need to open doors with partners? Find out what the competition is saying? Recruit award-winning copywriters to solve creative problems that your in-house talent just can't crack? LinkedIn can be invaluable. However, when used correctly, LinkedIn can not just solve your day-to-day networking and recruiting problems, it can also be a vital tool to help you promote your thought leadership pieces.
Kyle Wycoff, SEO Specialist, warns industry professionals that there’s a vast difference between being a thought leader on LinkedIn and simply using the platform for self-promotion. “What separates true thought leaders from other business professionals is their willingness to give away valuable information. Too many times, an SME claims to have knowledge and wisdom to share, but they don’t offer the gems that we’re looking for. Thought leaders distinguish themselves by sharing their wisdom and offering actionable steps to improving their reader’s life or business.” The main aim of thought leadership should always be to build trust with your audiences. The more your followers trust your word, the better your authority in your industry. So, it stands to reason that establishing your authority by becoming a thought leader on LinkedIn is one of the best ways to interact with your professional community. Follow these five steps below and you’ll be on your way to creating a robust LinkedIn content strategy.
1. Consider How You Can Set Your LinkedIn Page Up For Success
Research shows that LinkedIn is the number one channel that B2B marketers use to distribute content, and with 40% of monthly active users visiting LinkedIn on a daily basis, utilising all of the features on your LinkedIn profile can really help to drive engagement and encourage meaningful conversations with your audience. All of the content on your LinkedIn page needs to be value-led for the audiences you’re trying to connect with – this means showcasing your industry know-how and expertise, without pushing your services/products.
Once you’ve uploaded a professional headshot photo and written a compelling headline and a summary of your skills and accomplishments, a good way to stand out is by using the featured section on LinkedIn – as it’s the perfect spot to emphasise your thought leadership. Authors may use this space to highlight an upcoming book, or readers they’re interested in, while CEOs and business leaders might use this section for promoting current industry articles, keynote speeches, recent Q&As or promote other thought leader’s work they admire. When using this featured tab, it’s important to be strategic about what you choose to post and where you position your most important content. It’s good to continue to change the content you present on a weekly basis, to continue engaging your audiences.
It might also be worth considering adding how you support different causes. This is something every aspiring thought leader should consider. Business is business, but increasingly industry professionals are looking to engage with credible, relatable people who stand for something else outside their 9-to-5 roles. To build authority in your industry, you should make an effort to showcase your shared values and causes you avidly support, as this may spark rewarding collaborations with other non-profit industries in the future, among other things.
2. Spend Time Creating Your LinkedIn Audience Persona
Audience personas are not only helpful when knowing how to create content for every stage of the customer journey in marketing, but they can also be useful when thinking of who you want to connect with professionally on LinkedIn too. Without knowing your ideal LinkedIn audience, you won’t know who you want to spark industry conversations with or who want to potentially collaborate with in the future, which means the content you create and share won’t be as successfully targeted as it could be.
Understanding your ideal audience’s wants, needs and problem points is vital before creating any LinkedIn content. So, it’s important to do some research first by using a combination of, Google Analytics, Google Search Console and Semrush, to create your LinkedIn audience persona. This should include demographics such as age, location, occupation, industry, financial standing, interests, career goals etc.
3. Establish Realistic Performance Goals For Growth
After you’ve filled in all the relevant sections of your LinkedIn profile and created your ideal audience persona, it’s time to think about setting realistic performance goals to help you grow your LinkedIn page. The number of followers you gain and the amount of engagement your posts receive are key indicators of how successful your thought leadership content strategy is. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither will your audience on LinkedIn, but it’s essential to create realistic goals of how many followers you want to reach every quarter, so your audience continues to grow in a healthy trajectory so your reach and online authority broaden.
SEO tools such as Moz, Ahrefs and Semrush are all useful to help monitor your LinkedIn analytics. But, if you aren’t using these tools, you can still track page views, traffic and conversions to your website, unique LinkedIn visitors, and custom button clicks, directly from your LinkedIn analytics. You can even set up your LinkedIn analytics to track nine other competitors, which allows you to compare your total followers, new followers, total engagements and total posts, giving you valuable insight into how your competitors thought leadership content is performing against you and other industry leaders.
4. Keep One Eye On Other Thought Leaders in Your Field
As mentioned above, it’s key to keep updated with what other competitors and established thought leaders are saying in your industry. When you follow relevant thought leader companies on LinkedIn, subscribe to their newsletters and engage with them, you’re keeping yourself primed with the latest ideas in the space you work in. It’s not only essential to stay on top of emerging trends, news and topics of interest, but it’s good to see what your peers are doing, and more importantly, how you could be doing it better. Are there any glaring content gaps? Questions or pivotal research that might have been overlooked? Any additional insight and expertise you can add to the conversation? When conducting a competitor analysis on LinkedIn you should look closely at the type of content they produce (blogs, Q&A videos, newsletters), what particular posts perform well on their channels and how often they are posting.
Taking stock of what your competitors are doing wrong may be useful, but it’s also worth acknowledging aspiring thought leaders who are getting it right, because in the future they may return the favour. Kathy Caprino, Global Career and Leadership Coach, urges professionals on LinkedIn to, “start following experts and leaders from a wide array of fields and industries who are making a positive difference in ways that inspire you. Read their work regularly, and when an article or post strikes a chord in you, repost it. Tag the expert in your share, and offer a few sentences explaining why this article in particular resonated with you, and what you think about the information they’ve shared. In this way, you are curating great content for your current and new followers, and demonstrating your specific “take” on the issue.”
5. Build Your Content Strategy And Thought Leadership Roadmap
By taking the time to research your ideal audience persona and your top competitors you can get a clearer picture of the problem points and questions users are asking on LinkedIn. Key topics and themes in your space will begin to emerge, which will give you great insight when it comes to building your own content strategy and thought leadership roadmap.
To be a thought leader, you need to stand out and offer strong opinions on industry issues, while also providing innovative ideas and insight that could help your audiences get meaningful results. Some of the most successful thought leaders out there, create content that aligns with their core values, passions and expertise – so it’s important to not just hop on the bandwagon to what is trending, but instead add value-led content that gives actionable advice to other professionals in your industry.
A great way to promote your thought leadership content is by using LinkedIn’s Publishing Platform, which allows members and admins of a LinkedIn Page to create, edit, and publish articles on LinkedIn. It’s important to only write articles that present your unique fresh, perspective and “lens” about content areas you are an expert in – otherwise, you’re simply adding more content clutter in an overcrowded platform. It should go without saying that writing is one of the most powerful ways you can promote your thought leadership as it helps you hone your ideas and stimulate further discussion from industry professionals. Research from Semrush shows that 91% of thought leaders prefer to write blogs and thought-provoking industry articles, while 44% use videos to get their messages across, so to reach larger audiences we’d recommend using a combination of the two to promote your ideas.
Alexandru Stan, serial entrepreneur and CEO of Tekpon explains, “It's crucial to regularly update your pages with engaging content that your followers will enjoy, such as product news, industry trends, customer success stories and stimulating articles. On my company's page, I like to keep our audience engaged with us by highlighting our podcasts and articles. I'm delivering everything but discounts, numbers and offers per se. We are selling without telling them to their face that we are selling. I've found this makes people want to follow us.”
There’s no doubt that taking the steps to become a thought leader and sharing your unique perspectives on LinkedIn can enrich your career. If you take the time to research your competitors, share your industry insight and write long-form articles that showcase your deeply-honed expertise, you’ll begin to see that this platform has a lot of untapped potential which could lead you towards exciting new collaborations, help you attract new talent and propel your thought leadership status in ways you never thought possible.