Have you made it a personal goal of yours to establish yourself as a thought leader within your space? Are you hoping to share the insights you’ve gained with other people who can benefit from your lessons learned?
When it comes to all things related to your career knowledge and sharing stories, LinkedIn is the ultimate networking platform. Right at your fingertips, you have the ability to reach new audiences from virtually anywhere in the world and spread your expertise far and wide.
As a PR agency that specializes in thought leadership, we cannot overstate the importance of a strong LinkedIn presence. Looking for a place to start? Here are some ways you can take advantage of LinkedIn to its fullest potential:
Start to develop a sense of who you are and how you can add true value to the communities you are involved with. Begin by identifying established thought leaders in your industry and noting what kind of content they post that inspires you. As you search through LinkedIn, ask yourself what topics your network is discussing. Your daily life can often serve as a source of inspiration by way of observing your surroundings, jotting down noteworthy insights, recalling challenging moments and sharing lessons learned. Making note of this information each time something comes to mind is a great tool for helping to capture new content ideas and develop potential areas of expertise and topics to further discuss.
Like any other social platform, spending more time exploring LinkedIn’s features will lead to improvements in the quality of relevant content that comprises your feed. Once you’ve identified thought leaders across your industry, connect with them, as they are often quality individuals whose presence is well-aligned with your goals.
Following people of interest will also set up your account to automatically receive their updates in your feed, and might even spark meaningful conversations that inspire your own thinking. Finding groups and hubs to join is a great way to discover people who are buzzing about topics you care about, and following hashtags can help you to look at content specifically targeted to your interests.
With so much information across different mediums, you want to make sure you save any relevant material you find from outside sources that can serve as inspiration. Using applications such as the Pocket Chrome extension, you can instantly save any interesting articles you come across to revisit and reference again at any point in time.
The Feedly RSS reader is another free and simple resource you can set up to collect and display posts from popular blogs or create feeds for important topics. The platform also allows you to instantly click on any article to read and save directly to Pocket. Collectively, this information can then be reviewed and used to help spark inspiration for your own planned future LinkedIn content posts.
As with beginning anything new, you’ll want to be diligent with your efforts and start to develop a consistent routine with the platform by finding a method that works for you. This can be as simple as checking your feed every morning, saving a few articles of interest and dedicating time to create posts based on your personal experiences and saved content.
Although life gets busy and it can be challenging at first to build out this new habit, you’ll want to be intentional about budgeting a chunk of time with parameters that you find realistic. This can be as simple as engaging with new posts in your news feed for 15 minutes weekly or scheduling one original post per month. Over time, you’ll start to have your own signature method to your activity that mirrors your personal objectives and you will get to enjoy watching your network and platform engagements grow.
If you’re interested in taking your LinkedIn game to the next level, we can help! Jive PR + Digital is a full-service digital marketing agency that can help you to establish your brand by shaping your ideas into stories and advising on opportunities to increase your professional profile. Contact our team today to see how we can help you become a valuable thought leader in your space and elevate an online presence that will help fuel longevity in your career.
