How to Build Your Personal Brand on LinkedIn

Recently, I spoke with Diana de Jesus, a Customer Success leader, an expert in personal branding, and my personal Customer Success Queen of LinkedIn. Diana is one of the 100 CS Strategists of 2020 and is the creator of Keep the Customer, a blog dedicated to educating others on customer retention. Diana has built a strong online presence on LinkedIn, and on the podcast, she shared her tips and strategies for content creation and building a personal brand on LinkedIn. Maybe you don’t know where to start or you worry that no one will care about your personal brand. But Diana encourages us all to give it a go! She says: 

‘Whatever you have to share is super important! Everybody has their own story. Everybody has different things that they’re passionate about and different perspectives on things—there’s space for everyone to say something.’

Diana de Jesus

Where to start with building your personal brand?

A great place to start when creating your personal brand is to focus on building your presence on LinkedIn. For anyone who is looking to change careers, it can be challenging to make a successful change when you don’t have the appropriate experience or impressive credentials to show off. But being active on LinkedIn can be tremendously helpful because it lets you put yourself out there, lets you learn from industry thought leaders that can help you excel in your career, and lets you build important relationships in your network. Even if you have very few connections on LinkedIn, posts and articles can travel through your network and be seen by many people. 

‘There’s this one amazing woman that I love, Mel Robbins, who mentioned something that really resonated with me: you have to work in high visibility. What that means is you need to stop working behind closed doors. You are your own marketer for your own brand. So what are you doing to help yourself be active and work in high visibility?’

Diana de Jesus

What type of content should you post on LinkedIn?

When deciding what type of content you want to post on LinkedIn, think about what you’re passionate about. It might sound counterintuitive, but your brand doesn’t necessarily have to centre around something that you’re already experienced in or already good at, as long as it is something you want to learn more about.

Diana wanted to learn more about retention because her position at the time wasn’t giving her the experience she wanted and her role wasn’t proactive about retention. So, she decided to create her own space where she could listen to podcasts about customer retention strategies and learn about who the key players were in the space. She started writing about what she learned, and that’s how she created her personal blog and brand, Keep the Customer.

How do you engage with your audience?

LinkedIn helps you grow your reach and connect with networks of people that you wouldn’t otherwise have relationships. Good engagement doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to be posting long, viral articles all the time. Interacting with your feed, commenting on posts that resonate with you is already a great way to build relationships with your network. 

Whenever you publish a new post, it is also important to be mindful of what is called “the Golden Hour,” where the first hour after a post is first published is key in determining how far it gets shared on LinkedIn. Responding to any comments that might come in during the Golden Hour can boost your engagement.

Diana has also had great success reaching out to people in her network to collaborate on projects. LinkedIn is great at this type of connection and just a little bit of engagement can have a huge return on investment.

‘LinkedIn is great for building relationships with people. It’s a type of interaction that not a lot of us are getting right now because of COVID. But LinkedIn allows you to have a bigger reach, even international. So there are all these different people I would have never met before had it not been for LinkedIn.’

Diana de Jesus

How to manage your personal brand alongside your career and everything else?

It can be a challenge to add managing your social media presence on top of everything else in life, but it can be helpful to stick to a strategic posting schedule. Post at consistent times when you know you can dedicate a little time to monitoring activity during the Golden Hour, then move on to your other work and family responsibilities. Check back in at regular times when you can (your lunch break or in the evening).

Another great but counterintuitive piece of advice for managing your LinkedIn presence is to reduce your presence on other social media platforms or to stop using them at all. Focus all of your social media time and energy on LinkedIn. That way, you’ll be able to engage with your feed and respond to your comments and messages. Channel your energy on one platform that is the most important for your career.

‘It’s tough because three days a week I have to wake up at five o’clock in the morning to work on Keep the Customer and work on what I want my brand to be. But I’m so proud of every little milestone and everything that I’ve learned along the way.’

Diana de Jesus

Follow Diana. Check out the full podcast episode.