Personal Branding on LinkedIn with Louise Brogan

How We Met

LAURA: I absolutely will do that Louise. Don’t forget to tell everybody how we met.

LOUISE: How could I Laura? We met up online in a Business Group. You just pop out of the screen! How could anybody not befriend you with your lovely friendly face? We connected in Messenger and we’ve taken it from there, which is awesome.

Personal Branding on LinkedIn

LAURA: So, I want to talk to you about personal branding on Linkedin. Now, I know you have a few top tips that you’re going to share with us. I want to get started if you’re a business owner who has a personal brand. How should your bio look when we land on that profile page?

As an Entrepreneur who is Pesonal Branding on LinkedIn

LOUISE: So, personal branding on LinkedIn is really important. The tips that I would give Laura – when you are using LinkedIn as a personal brand… You should be using it to raise your visibility. It’s about really
attracting your ideal customer or client to you. My big tip is…

Don’t make the bio or the about section about you. Instead, make it about the person that’s reading it. This way, when users read it, they will feel a connection to you. That makes them want to send you a connection request.

Where a lot of people possibly fall down a little bit on their LinkedIn, is that they use it as their online resume or CV.

What we really want to do is to highlight why people should work with you as opposed to your career history and your life career history on there instead.

LinkedIn Personal Branding Tips For Employees

LAURA: And this leads me on really well to my next question.

So we’re all quite aware that personal branding as an approach is becoming quite trendy in large organisations. They’re trying to impart responsibility across the workforce and encouraging each employee to “take a personal brand approach” in the way that they develop their career.

Changing As An Employee

How then does a LinkedIn bio change when you’re trying to take this approach as an employee in a large organisation?

LOUISE: So, it is completely different. If you are approaching LinkedIn as somebody who wants to raise their personal brand within the organisation, maybe you want to find a mentor, maybe you want to raise your visibility because you want to increase your chances within your career, either in your industry or in the organisation you’re working in, then…

Your profile is written completely differently and how you can reflect your personal brand in your profile is by highlighting the things that you are actually passionate about, but relating them to what you do in your career.

This is not a one-size-fits-all platform guys.

Louise’s Top 4 Personal Branding Tips

LAURA: Okay so, let’s hear these 4 top tips then Louise.

LOUISE: So, the best advice I can give you on how to use LinkedIn is to think of it as having four pillars, really.

If you only focus on one pillar it’s not gonna work for you, you’ve got to think about all four together.

Pillar 1 – Your Profile

So, those are number one, having a really good strong LinkedIn profile. And that means a fully filled out profile that if you are in a career, it’s going to help people who are looking at you in terms of career progression.

If you are a business owner or entrepreneur, your ideal client’s gonna read that and think, “Yes, this is somebody I want to reach out and connect with and know more about.”

Pillar 2 – Your LinkedIn Content

The second pillar is understanding what kind of content you should be sharing. I work with so many different kinds of people. From corporate organisations, business development managers, and all the way through to entrepreneurs. Mostly, this differs for every single client that I work with. This is why I love what I do because you get to personalise it with every different kind of person that you work with.

And so, the content should really be showcasing your knowledge and expertise. But you need to do that in a way that helps all of the people, you’re connected to.

Rather than broadcasting out how amazing you are. What you’ve been awarded for, or what you’ve spoken about. Instead you should use your content to really help the audience and the network who are connected to you. It’s all about showcasing how you’re helping people as well.

An idea might be, to run a poll. You might ask your audience questions that they can engage with. It’s about doing this all in a way that highlights and showcases your knowledge.

It’s a little bit tricky to get used to, and that’s some of the work that I do with my clients.

Pillar 3 – A Genuine Network

Pillar three is building a genuine network around you.

I have got the most fascinating people in my network. They reached out to connect with me because of the things that I’ve done on LinkedIn.

I have a whole stream of women from the UK film and TV industry for example. It was so much fun doing a webinar for them recently. I also have the European, Mid-East and Africa partners for Microsoft. They contacted me because I’ve written for Social Media Examiner all about how to use LinkedIn and the things that you can use on LinkedIn company pages. As a result of this she reached out and connected with me.

Down to the ex-cyber security head for the UK.

I mean, it’s just all about building the network on LinkedIn. One that you want to connect with regularly. This makes it a joy to go to LinkedIn every single day.

And if you’re going what?! It’s not a joy to go to LinkedIn!

I’m telling you. If you build a network full of people that you are interested in, they’re interested in you, and you have great conversations it actually makes it the platform that you like interacting with people the most.

It’s also far easier to get interaction and engagement on LinkedIn. So few people are actually posting anything on there at all.

Another little tip for you there.

If you actually get out of your own head and start posting content on LinkedIn, you’re actually in the top 1% of the people who are using LinkedIn which is astounding really.

With Linkedin you’ve got really wide open space to get yourself out there. You can get noticed, and share your knowledge and expertise.

Pillar 4 – Using Messenger The Right Way

The fourth thing then is Linkedin messenger. I am a huge advocate of sending a connection request with a personalised invitation. When you do this, you are opening up a conversation with the person you are connecting with.

For me has led directly to people booking sales calls. They want to have conversations. Sometimes this results in new connections recommending new people to me from their network. All of this as a result of connecting within the one-to-one messaging space on Linkedin and not out in the newsfeed.

Build Connections

When you get used to using Linkedin and using it to market. You can help people. Serving others in your Linkedin content will initiate people to start connecting with you and asking you questions. This then leads to the all important – “Can they find out more about your products and services?”

What we don’t want is for you to connect with somebody and immediately send them a sales message. That is not what it’s about.

It’s about building relationships. This is the key to success on Linkedin for me.

The LinkedIn Pervs Issue

LAURA: Now, you and I have had this discussion together offline. It’s worthwhile us bringing it up. I really loved your response to it when I asked you this. Now I think it’s time to ask you now in a public way. One of my personal brand themes is that I’m a proud feminist.

I am really passionate about making sure that the way I do business helps our younger generations of females raise up with more confidence and more power.

How I Handle This

Now, when I get hit on Linkedin by an absolute perv, I personally handle this with my personal brand in mind. I actually have a copy-and-paste reply that I send to somebody when they’re trying to talk to me as if we were on Tinder, and not on Linkedin.
And then if I find that they’re part of an organisation, I will report them to the HR director for gross misconduct of the organisation that they work for.

I think for me, that’s on-brand.

Have you got any top tips then Louise today on how modern females… and I think it is mainly females that receive these types of messages, particularly on Linkedin.

What’s your advice on how we should be handling this?

LOUISE: Laura, I feel that everybody approaches this in a different way and you and I approach this differently.

How Louise Handles This

I am a raging feminist as well. It’s best to not engage with that kind of person or troll or any form of argument on any of my social media. And it’s really interesting because before we were recording, I was streaming live onto multiple platforms. I was getting these really gross comments from one of the platforms which I don’t normally stream live to. It’s put me off.

And I just think, you know what?

Life is too short to be dealing with these people. They are in their own heads. If someone sends you a connection request or is abusive on Linkedin, honestly, I would report. Block them and then just put them out of my mind.

But that is the way I deal with life. I like to focus on the path ahead and don’t let these other people distract me from what I know is a brilliant service.

You have brilliant services, Laura!

And if you can cut those people down and move on with grace, then do it. I would rather just not engage with them at all. That is my approach to all of my social media and always has been.

Making it with Haters

I remember somebody saying to me years ago now,

“Who are your haters Louise?”

(laughs) I was like,

“I don’t think I have haters.”

(laughs) I don’t want haters. And some people say,

“Oh, you haven’t made it until you’ve got haters.”

Doesn’t Need to be a Milestone

LOUISE: It’s just not my approach in business or online to engage with all that negativity. I just steer away from it. Yes, I’ve had negative comments on my posts before, people making derogatory remarks. Subsequently, my way of dealing with it is just to move on and ignore them.

Let them stew in their own juices.

I know that’s different too. It’s different for everybody. Based on this, my advice is for everyone to take their own approach. What works for you?

Keep on doing that.