Only 1% of LinkedIn’s 260 million monthly users share posts, and those 3 million or so users net 9 billion impressions. What does that mean? Almost no one is leveraging the power of the network, so those who do have a platform with very little competition for attention.

Establishing your personal brand on LinkedIn means completing your profile with your ideal client in mind, and establishing yourself as a thought leader by sharing valuable content for your network.

Robyn Addis and Lauren Forbes answer your questions about establishing your personal brand on LinkedIn and how to leverage the power of this network on this episode of LISI’s Ask Me Anything.

Robyn:

Hey, everybody, welcome to LISI’s livestream, Ask Me Anything. Today, we’re gonna be talking about building your personal brand. This is me, Robyn Addis. I’m LISI’s Chief Operating Officer and Chief Marketing and Business Development Officer joined by my beautiful and wonderful colleague, Lauren Forbes who is our Social Media…

Lauren:

And Marketing Manager.

Robyn:

Okay, so that’s gonna tell everybody where I’m at. I’ve had a very long week, I’m a little bit punchy and I’m a little bit out of it. So this is probably gonna be funny or a hot mess. We shall see. I was just telling Lauren actually right before we got on the livestream, so if you know LISI and if you know Jason Lisi, you might know Jason as the man with the pants ’cause he wears some very famously flashy pants. Sometimes they’ve got the LISI logo and sometimes they’re Lilly Pulitzer or they’re just very bright plaid. It’s his shtick and he loves it.

Lauren:

And he wears them well.

Robyn:

He wears them well, right, loud and proud. And not too long ago, my husband threw me a birthday party ’cause I’m turning 40 on Monday actually. And I was with some friends last night who were like, “Man, you had such an eclectic group of people “at your birthday. Everybody from the guy with the foot-long biker beard to the dude with the Lilly Pulitzer pants.” So that’s again, that’s just an intro into my life and into this world and today ’cause we’re a little bit punchy. How are you doing, Lauren?

Lauren:

I’m good, sounds like you could use a little coffee over there, huh?

Robyn:

I don’t think there’s enough coffee in the world for me right this very minute. Okay, so thank you, everybody, for tuning in. We’ll actually dive in and stop with a day in the life of Robyn. If you’re joining us for the first time or the hundredth time, we love having you here. We love doing these livestreams almost every week here on LinkedIn. And once a month, we do an Ask Me Anything session. This week, this month, our theme is “Building Your Personal Brand on LinkedIn,” in particular. And so we’ve received a number of questions in advance, probably more questions than we might get to, but if you have a pressing question that you want to share, please put it in the chat. And even just right now, drop us a line, say hi, tell us that you’re here, we’d love to hear from you, share a question, throw us a comment if you hear something you like. We would greatly appreciate it. So Lauren, you ready to dive in?

Lauren:

Let’s go.

Robyn:

Okay, so first question, what is a personal brand? I actually get this question a lot. So a personal brand is how others perceive you and how it’s a clear representation of who you are, what you do, what you’re known for, what it might be like to know you and to work with you. It’s that perception of who you are as a professional in the marketplace. And a lot of people credit Tom Peters for creating the term personal brand. He wrote an article for Fast Company back in 1997 called, The Brand Called You. And here’s the quote, I’m gonna read it verbatim, about personal branding:

“The key to any personal branding campaign is word of mouth marketing. Your network of friends, colleagues, clients and customers is the most important marketing vehicle you’ve got. What they say about you and your contributions is what the market will ultimately gauge as the value of your brand. So the big trick to building your brand is to find ways to nurture your network or colleagues consciously.”

So we work in legal marketing. The number one thing we hear all the time from lawyers about marketing in general is, “I get my clients from word of mouth.” Well, think about the reason you’re getting clients from word of mouth is because you’ve got a personal brand that people are aware of. And using platforms like LinkedIn are a great way to share that about your personal brand and expose more people to who you are and what you do. Wouldn’t you agree?

Lauren:

Agreed. Oh, 100%, yeah.

Robyn:

Yeah, so I’m going to dive into a couple of these hard and heavy questions and then we’re gonna get into some of the lighter easier ones and funnier ones, I guess I should say, in a minute. One question we got that I thought was really interesting is, how do I get followers? How do I find followers? And my response is, you don’t, followers find you. And the way that they find you is by putting content out there that makes them interested in seeing more of what you’ve got to say. And again, it all comes back to being consistent, putting yourself out there as a thought leader, which leads to another question. What types of content should I post?

There’s more about this than I could say in just this quick Ask Me Anything session, which I’ll plug it now. We’re actually doing a master class on August 4th for building your brand and growing your book of business, a deep dive into LinkedIn and more. It’s LinkedIn as a starting point and more. So if you’re interested in that, it’s from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m., Eastern. It will be a private livestream. Go ahead and register on our website. If you go to legaLISI.com/resources, you’ll be able to see it there and register. And I’ll get into a lot about how to build content, yes, ma’am.

Lauren:

And hosted by the one and only you.

Robyn:

Oh yeah, and hosted by moi. True story, but yeah, I’ll get more into how to actually create that content, but just super high level about content creation and how to put content out there. You should be putting content out there that is potentially of value to your target audience. It should not be, the majority of it should not be self-promotional in nature, meaning… And we usually give a 70/30 or 80/20 rule. Ideally, it’s 80/20. That means that 80% of the time, you’re sharing content that is, hey, I saw this article in the New York Times. Here are the key takeaways for you, my audience, and this is why I think you should read it. Hey, so and so just put out this survey. Here are the key takeaways. Always providing value and not necessarily asking anything in return.

The 20% of the time that you are allowed to be self-promotional is you were recognized in Chambers, you won an award, your firm was recognized as Innovation of the Year winner, whatever it was, that kind of stuff. And there’s a whole school of thought on how to write that so you don’t sound overly self-promotional, but you’re still allowed to do it once in awhile. But most of the time, you should just be providing value for the sake of it, which Lauren, I know you help our clients with a lot. What is the biggest I guess challenge that our clients, that you find in working with our clients when it comes to creating that value-driven content consistently?

Lauren:

Just making sure that there’s things that they, for instance, what you were talking about as far as awards they’ve won, other things that they do on a regular basis. If they do blogs, if they have white papers, anything that they do, we consistently try to put out there so that their audience knows that they are what we like to call thought leaders within their industry. And it sets them up as the go-to for certain things. Oh, I think we’ve got a question that just came in actually. You want me to get to that real quick?

Robyn:

Yeah, that’s great.

Lauren:

Let’s see. If you have time, could you reflect on the intersection of personal brand and professionalism? What even is professionalism these days? Do you wanna take a stab at that?

Robyn:

Yeah, it’s such a great question from our friend, Jennifer Forester. Thank you, Jen. It’s a great question because there’s a lot of seemingly overly personal content on LinkedIn these days and I think it falls along the spectrum of what you’re comfortable with. The fact of the matter is from my non-scientific studying of content performance on LinkedIn, personal content is what gets people to pay attention. It’s what gets people engaged with who you are and your personal brand. And so by sharing that personal content, there is a greater likelihood that you will be able to get their eyes on some of the promotional stuff or some other things of your thought leadership, so that you have a chance to expose yourself to a broader audience.

I personally talk a lot about my kids on LinkedIn because as a leader, as a business leader, there is a lot of parallel between figuring out how to lead a small army of Addis’ and lead a team of people. Being empathetic and giving them space to figure things out. Anyway, so I think the intersection of personal and professional is different for everybody. That’s my personal opinion on it. I think the type of content that I see on LinkedIn, I have personally yet to find something on LinkedIn that I look at it and I feel that is so inappropriate, that doesn’t belong on here. There are a lot of people during Pride Month, there were a lot of people sharing on LinkedIn that they were coming out as gay or transgender or whatever. Or they’re sharing about marriages and weddings or losses of children. The fact of the matter is that all of these things are deeply personal experiences that shape who we are. I don’t wanna see LinkedIn be only those things, but I think a healthy mix of that and getting to know people in such a highly digital world is really an okay thing. I don’t know, what do you think, Lauren?

Lauren:

Oh, I completely agree. It helps establish the personal and professional. It gives more insight into who they actually are and it helps connect them with other people that may be going through the same experiences. It’s just in a slightly deeper level, but I enjoy more of the personal stories. I think it helps people connect. I love all your stories. And as a mom myself, I can definitely relate to some of those things.

Robyn:

Yeah, I think it’s interesting, at least from my own experience, sharing that type of content has been community-building for me actually. And I’ve had on more than one occasion somebody reach out to me when I’ve admitted that I’m struggling with something or that I’m really frustrated about something in my personal life. I’ve had people reach out and just really appreciate that somebody else feels the way they do or that they’re not alone. And that is really the highest and best use of any social media. I saw somebody’s… Oh, Trish Lilley recently put out on social media a comment about a news story in Philadelphia and there was a perpetrator and the perp was found essentially through social media. And she said, a lot can be said negatively about social media but this is the type of thing that social media is for, coming together, being a community, and helping one another out. And so, anyway, I know that we’ve probably given more of an answer than Jen was looking for.

Lauren:

Before we move on, I do need to just quote Kristyn, one of our colleagues. As she always says, “People do business with people.” And it’s 100% true.

Robyn:

Yeah, it’s totally true. And yeah, it’s a great line. And it’s so spot on. Okay, so keep the questions coming, friends, because we’d love to answer them. And if you wanna hear us wax poetic about your question, we’re happy to do that. Okay, going back here, is LinkedIn the only network where I should or can build my brand? What do you think, Lauren?

Lauren:

No, I don’t think so at all. I think it depends obviously one, who your audience is. So if your audience is more on Instagram or they’re more TikTok users, I would heavily hone in on those specific platforms, but definitely spread your love throughout all of them ’cause you never know where you’ll find a new connection. So I would never just settle in on one, but definitely pay attention to where your audience is for sure.

Robyn:

Right, and the tone on those platforms is important, too. On TikTok, if you’re really super rigid and, excuse me, buttoned up, that might not land so well. But if you can take some content and make it funny and engaging… I’m not saying be like the comedy lawyer, but just make it engaging in a way and approachable.

Lauren:

Yeah, and even for our own clients, let’s say, we have one specific post and it is more business related. We’ll make sure that goes onto their LinkedIn page and their Twitter, sometimes Facebook if it’s a little bit more soft content, like there was an event they attended. Most of the time, that will end up on Facebook and Instagram. So it just depends on what kind of content that you’re trying to put out there drives where it should actually land on social media.

Robyn:

Yeah, so speaking of tone on a platform, here’s a great question, Lauren, that I want you to tackle. Should you use emojis in your LinkedIn post?

Lauren:

Ooh, yes. So I just put a poll up earlier this week and actually I just had it up on my phone of the results. So let me grab that super quick. And a nice chunk of people responded, which I appreciate. Thank you very much. It was a mixture of yes, sure, emojis can go up on my posts, no, it’s unprofessional or it depends. So as of right now, the sure was 65%. And then it was a split of 18% for each of the no and the it depends. So I think it really caught more traction during the pandemic. And I say that because there was a study done and emojis have increased by 775% over the past three years. Another statistic that I found was emojis in your social media post can increase engagement by 25.4%. So with that, can you include them, absolutely. Do you need to include them, no, I think it’s preference.

At the end of the day, it’s whatever you’re comfortable with. Some posts on the more serious side, obviously, you probably shouldn’t include. On a lighter note, yes, you can include them. And I also think it helps to get the reader to understand what it is that you’re trying to say. You know when you’re reading something, it’s hard to understand what the person who’s writing it, their intention. So by you writing a note or a sentence and ending it with a laughing emoji, that can be taken differently than if there maybe wasn’t an emoji. So I think it all depends. You don’t have to use the firecracker or the smiley face. There’s emojis as arrows or bullets. I think that really helps especially when you have a list of things. It draws people in. Human beings are much better at retaining information when there are graphics or pictures involved. So I think that it just helps. But again, know your audience and it depends on what your post is.

Robyn:

Yeah, the only thing I would add to that is we find that, or I found, again my unscientific research, that I felt like certain emojis were helping trigger the algorithm, the LinkedIn algorithm sometimes and pretty consistently for a couple times and then the next time I would go and I would use that emoji, it didn’t help at all. That could be a complete coincidence. And I think this gets to the heart of what might be frustrating for people who don’t know where to start on a platform like LinkedIn. It could be any social platform, but I just like LinkedIn the best, personally. I think the algorithm’s in a black box. Nobody knows exactly what it is. And yes, there are people who study it and who are putting content out there about what works and what doesn’t and how things perform, but it’s always changing and it’s not something that the public at large is really going to ever understand.

So there is a little bit of trial and error, but especially in our industry, it’s very uncomfortable for our, LISI’s, target market. We work with lawyers. Lawyers they like to know the answer to the question when they ask it. That’s what they’re trained to do. And so it’s a little bit gray and it’s a little bit… Why did this work one time or why isn’t this working or why aren’t I going viral? None of that is gonna happen unless you start somewhere and you just have to put yourself out there, which is the first step. You just have to take a leap of faith.

Lauren:

And I think, too, that the same thing can be said when using images. Sometimes posts do great when there’s images included and then sometimes not. It’s like you said, it’s trial and error. You just don’t know how much traction you’re actually gonna get. So play around with it and see what happens.

Robyn:

Yeah, agreed. Here’s a good related… Well, I think you just actually answered this question. Should I include images in my post or just text? Mix it up, I think–

Lauren:

Yeah, mix it up.

Robyn:

I feel like I do a pretty good job of posting consistently but I’m not getting the number of views that I want. What can I do to increase visibility of my posts? Great question. So there are a number of things that you can do. It goes back to the trial and error piece of it. There’s conversations about what’s the right time of day to post. I think, I’m not the first person to say this, pre-pandemic, everybody tended to favor the commuting hour. Now, with lots of people not commuting, maybe that’s not as important maybe. I still like to post first thing in the morning. First of all because I wanna be consistent, I want it to be out there all day for my people, my connections on the east coast, and to what works for me. Is it the best way to do it? Maybe not, but that’s what works for me and I’m okay with that.

So figuring out what works for you is the first thing and the keyword I said in there is consistency. You have to do it consistently. I have seen several users post on LinkedIn about how they committed to posting every day on LinkedIn for a year and their average impressions, meaning the number of times their post was visible in a user’s feed, increased exponentially over the course of the year. So the consistency part of it is first and foremost the bedrock of being seen on any social platform, LinkedIn especially. Number two, you can read up on and leverage the algorithm. Again, too much for me to go into here today, but you can join the master class if you wanna hear about it. But there are a lot of things that you can do in terms of leveraging the algorithm. One, one, one, oh wow. One tip that I am happy to give you is if you’ve heard this debate about link in comments, when you see people put in their post, link in comments.

So it used to be, a year ago, let’s say, six months ago, people who were in the know wouldn’t put the link in their post and they would instead say, LinkedIn comments and then put the link to that content in their comments of their own post. Then LinkedIn got smart and the algorithm got smart and so now, there’s all sorts of advice out there that you shouldn’t be the first person to comment on your post and you shouldn’t say link in comments. And there are workarounds around it. At the end of the day, ultimately, my advice here is yes, you can share content, you can put the link in comments if you really want people to see, to jump off to that content. You might want to have somebody else post the link as a comment for you. And I know that feels like unnecessary work, but it is a good workaround. But also, I would even go so far as to say leverage what LinkedIn wants you to be doing, which is keeping users on the platform.

So starting conversations with people or creating opportunities for conversations on the platform is what LinkedIn is there to do. So that means if you’ve done some survey, some research, some whatever that you wanna talk about, you can talk about that and maybe just say read the full, download the full survey on my website, whatever the call to action is. And I know we like to make it really easy for people. The whole thing about digital marketing is how to reduce the number of clicks and how to make it as easy as possible for people to get to you and to bring them through the funnel.

That’s great, but if they really wanna engage with your content, if you’re putting really great content out there and it’s really interesting, make it easy for them to find you and open that door for them, but leverage the platform the way they want you to use it, which is to keep users on there. Don’t indicate to the platform, to LinkedIn, that you’re intending to take people off platform. That was a rambling thing, but I think that that’s an easy thing to do if you just change your thinking about what you’re doing when you’re posting on LinkedIn. Does that make sense? Did I just completely speak a foreign language?

Lauren:

No, no, no, it totally makes sense. And actually, the one thing that you did say brought up something that I remember reading. When you were saying about maybe have somebody else post first, I read somewhere it was called, and I’m probably gonna get this completely wrong, but it was your social squad or your posting squad…

Robyn:

Yeah, your social whatever, yep.

Lauren:

Yeah, so basically, it’s a core group of people of your connections that would go into each other’s posts and react to each other’s posts to get the ball rolling, to start the conversations, to get it up higher up on your feeds and their feeds. So it’s something that you might wanna think about, maybe a couple of your connections, couple of times a week, once a week, change it up who responds to whose and see where it goes.

Robyn:

Mm-hm, yeah. Oh, I lost my train of thought. I was gonna go off on a tangent about that, but that’s better for everybody that I don’t. Another question I actually posted about on LinkedIn recently is should I accept connection requests from people I do not know? So a number of years ago in the not too distant past, the rule of thumb on LinkedIn was only accept connections requests from people that you know in real life. And there was a reason for that because again, the way the platform is set up is that people can see people who are connected to you. So salespeople, this is one reason, salespeople for example, if Lauren is my connection, I can go in and search LinkedIn for people that are my connections because they’re connected or they’re second degree connections of mine because they’re connected to Lauren. And then I could ask Lauren to facilitate an intro and all this different stuff.

Okay, that’s all well and good. It basically essentially diluted the digital network that you were curating on LinkedIn. Now, and I don’t think that this is specifically because of COVID, although I do think COVID plays into it to a certain degree. I think that that’s outdated thinking. Nowadays, digital networking is so commonplace and making connections. Jen Forester who asked a question earlier, I met her through LinkedIn. I think she reached out to me or I reached out to her or something. It just was a very organic outreach that made sense. She’s in my industry, we do somewhat similar things to a certain degree and it made sense for us to connect across the country ’cause she was based on the west coast.

Since then, we have gotten to know each other as well as two people can from opposite sides of the country and coming out of pandemic, but we’ve gotten to know each other and we’re friends. We hung out at the LMA conference in Las Vegas in the spring. So it is not always a bad thing to accept a connection request from somebody you might not actually know. I think you just have to develop your own go, no go checklist of whether or not this makes sense. Somebody responded to my post saying, they see if there’s any shared connections, if they have the shared industry, if their company makes sense for them. Whatever your reasons are that make sense, it’s okay. And like I said in my LinkedIn post, no, I am not suggesting you accept all the requests that you get because nobody wants those BS sales connections and immediate outreaches, including me. So I’m on your side about that, don’t worry.

Lauren:

Yeah, there’s not a race to see who can have the most connections. So definitely have your… I can’t even think. Now, I’m lost for words.

Robyn:

Welcome. Welcome to my world, girlfriend. Welcome to Friday afternoon with Robyn.

Lauren:

Yes, have your checklist on who you should connect to.

Robyn:

Yeah, we’re gonna get close to wrapping up ’cause holy cow, it’s already been 30 minutes. I feel like we’ve only been talking for five. So if you have any last questions, please drop them in the chat. I’m going to see ’cause I have a lot of questions here in front of me. There was a question I saw when I was scanning through this about recommendations and is that even still a thing. So they’re two things that might feel similar, but are different. On your profile, on your LinkedIn profile, there’s skills and there’s recommendation. And several years ago, people were asking for endorsements for skills, like digital marketing, leadership, contract negotiation, whatever the thing was.

Robyn:

And I think if I recall correctly you could select a certain number of skills that you wanted to put on your profile, but then other people could endorse you for skills. And that’s fine, it still exists on your profile, but I don’t know that it’s as big of a deal as it was a number of years ago. Separate from that is recommendations. That’s where I can go in proactively or be solicited by Lauren to go and write her a recommendation that shows up on her profile. This can be tricky if there’s ethics rules, but let’s imagine that there’s no ethics rules in play. We know that in financial advisors, for financial advisors and wealth managers, it’s really against I think even SEC regulations. You cannot do that, people cannot do that.

So of course, you can ear muffs and not listen to this part ’cause it doesn’t apply to you. And for lawyers, too, depending on your jurisdiction, it might be a little bit of a sticky wicket. But I can go in and I can write a recommendation for Lauren simply because I want to or she can solicit a recommendation from me. What happens then is my recommendation that I’ve written in either scenario will go to Lauren and she can decide whether or not to post it to her profile. There’s a few reasons why this is a great tool to still use.

One, if you keep it up to date, you don’t just have a couple recommendations from 2007 when you joined LinkedIn. It’s a way for people to continue to have that social proof of the who you are, what you do, what it might be like to know you and to work with you, especially if they don’t actually know you right off the bat. And it also helps to tell the story of who you are a little bit. The key there is that you really again should be if you’re going to focus on recommendations, which I think everybody should if they can, is that you should put a process in place for yourself where you’re reaching out for recommendations with some regular cadence. That’s once a month, if that’s once a week, whatever makes sense. Realistically, if you’re reaching out, you’re not gonna get a recommendation from every single person who writes one, but it is a way to every so often when you do get a recommendation to put on your profile.

And last tip that actually our friend, Samantha McKenna, suggested, I think she has an article on JD Super about this as well and I think it’s a really smart tip, is if you’re reaching out to solicit a recommendation, put a way in your outreach for them to opt-out politely ’cause they just might not want to or they might not have time or whatever. So you might I think she says put in there something like, I understand it might go against company policy for you to do so, so if that’s the case, no worries. Something really simple, so that somebody can save face but just not have to do it and there’s no hard feelings about it. I think that’s a really good piece of advice.

Lauren:

Yeah, I agree, good tips.

Robyn:

Yeah, good tips. Well, thank you, all of you who stayed with us for 30 minutes of crazy talk with Robyn and Lauren. We appreciate you being here today. Remember to sign up for the master class on August 4th if you’re interested in really diving into these a little bit more. I promise I will be far better rested on that day. And we will see you next week. Thanks so much, everybody.

Lauren:

And happy early birthday!

Robyn:

Oh, thanks, yep. 40, woo-hoo! Thanks, bye.

Lauren:

Bye