Becoming a LinkedIn Influencer comes with many benefits. Having a large receptive audience, holding up the position of a thought leader, better engagement with your post, and a basis from which to build a strong personal brand that makes it easy to ship your products to the market with less marketing cost and high ROI!
The benefits are numerous.
As a digital/social media marketer, becoming an influencer on LinkedIn would constitute a major milestone in your career journey. So if you have not being intentional about pursuing being a LinkedIn influencer, then you want to re-examine your stance and consider prioritizing it—quickly!
The earlier the better.
Every journey starts with a step—a right step—and picking your way through requires utilizing the correct strategies and tactics until arrival at the desired destination.
In this post, I will be sharing with you the truths of becoming a LinkedIn influencer. I will put you through the process step by step.
So stay laid back with your action cap on. Yes, you want to launch into action immediately and start carrying out the strategies.
Define your interests
The first thing you want to do is to define your subject matter of interest: what do you want to talk about? What topics do you want to write posts on? What posts do you want to engage with?
This is a necessary process as it puts you on the path to becoming a thought leader in that domain. It defines what your personal image would become. And most importantly, it provides a framework within which you can create and structure your posts.
Here, you want to pick a set of related topics and update your LinkedIn profile to display these topics. Additionally, you can update you LinkedIn title to reflect your interest, so anyone can see them without going to your profile.
Build Valuable Connections
How do you make connections on LinkedIn?
Do you just send connections request randomly to anybody?
Do you just connect because you want to want to increase your connections to 10,000 followers in one month?
If you have been approaching the connections building process on LinkedIn this way, it is time to change your strategy.
Anytime, anyday, you should always prefer quality over quantity.
You have to focus first on the value. “Value” here implies the goals you want to achieve on LinkedIn. For instance, and inline with your main goal of becoming a LinkedIn influencer, one of the goals you want to achieve would be to have high post engagement. The goal, high post engagement, thus represents a value.
There are other values: building strong private communication with other influencers, becoming a thought leader and more.
Consequently, a valuable connection is one made based on these values. Before you send out a connect, thus, you want to interrogate yourself:
- Does my potential connects have similar subject matter of interest?
- Do they engage with posts on your subject matter of interest?
You want to make sure your answer is a “yes” to both questions before you send out a connect.
You have to be intentional and be ready to put in some work in order to build right connnection that would be valuable to achieving your goals.
I know, it is a lot of work and stress to have to go through the profile and the activity of each connect to decide if they are good connect or not. While this is an option, you don’t always have to do this to build valuable connection.
In the next strategies, you will learn more subtle, very effective, and less stressful ways to gain the right information before sending out a connect.
So here, you want to keep on a valuable connection mindset, and ensure you send connects to people who will proof useful to achieving your goals.
Discover and Connect
To become a LinkedIn influencer, you need to stand on the shoulders of giants in your field of interest. They are the people you want to make connects with.
You want to make it a task to look out for the big influencers in your niche of interest as soon as you identify your subject matter of interest. They are the wings to ride on.
They are easy to spot: their posts always gain huge numbers of reactions (likes) and lots of comments.
While LinkedIn would not always make the posts of big influencers available in your feeds, you can utilize the search icon on LinkedIn to discover them.
Utilize the “people” and “post” features on the search display results to filter down the results to the needed results.
So here, you want to discover the big influencer and make connects with them. This will ensure LinkedIn notifies you when they make a new post.
This would prove important and valuable to you in the next step.
Sidecar posts
Be the first to comment on posts by the influencers in your niche.
Create and post valuable mini-post as comments that complements post made the influencers. This is good for two reasons:
Influence trickle down effect
Think of a sidecar. The sidecar has neither an engine nor power to move itself, but it moves at the same pace with the motorcycle, gaining momentum as the motorcycle gains momentum.
In essence, the post of the influencer is the motorcycle. It gains momentum as it receives likes, reactions and comments.
The main catch is your mini-post being the sidecar is not going to left out. As people engage with the influencer’s post, your mini-post being the first comment will also receive engagement allowing you to freeride on the momentum of the influencer’s post. Now, isn’t that a piece of cake you want to eat every time.
Easy connect/follow effect
By sharing valuable comments, you immediate establish yourself also, as a thought leader on the subject of the post.
There is a high chance that people will click through to your profile and hit the connect/follow button. And there you go: more follows and connects without breaking a sweat.
Read comments
There is still more gems to harvest from posts by influencers. Don’t just turn away after adding a side post.
Remember, posts by influencers attract loads and loads of comments: meaning, loads and loads of gems you should be exploring.
You want to read through the comments as it would help you to discover other influencers and connects that would prove useful in building your network of valuable connections.
You should connect with them and hit their follow button.
Additionally, reading comments on such post help you learn in significant ways that no other medium, blogposts for instance, would be able to. Comments are always loaded with insights that you can Add to your own creative toolbox, helping you generate ideas that would feedback into your own posts.
Create Posts
While you might be up and about making and building valuable connections, the real demonstration of being an influencer is having engagement with your own post.
You don’t want to be the sidecar all your life on LinkedIn, at some point you have got to be the motorcycle yourself. Gaining your own momentum.
You want to start creating post from the moment you nail down your subject matter of interest. You want to start making posts from the first day.
While it might be discouraging initially, the effort will only pay off if you remain consistent and persistent. You must not give up.
The strategy every influencer know today about getting to the status of an influencer from scratch is to remain persistent and consistent.
Don’t skip a day. Create a post everyday. Post a post everyday. Remember to make them valuable. And give it time.
Content Repurposing
So while you are busy creating content day-in day-out, you should also start twerking and reposting them. Don’t waste those resources by posting them just once.
Content repurposing is a tool you will find very useful. Content repurposing means altering the content of your post. Changes or alterations to post are always minimal, so there is usually no alteration to the main ideas of the content. Just a twerk.
Content repurposing allows you to repost old content thus providing you with an avenue for garnering more engagement on the same post.
It is particularly useful as it allows you to increase the visibility of old posts, either to increase the engagement on an old content that performed very well in the past, or to give an old content that got low engagement in the past a chance to perform especially if it has valuable content.
Here, you do not want to keep making posts and putting them up for view only once.
Not repurposing and reusing a top performing content is like buying a very beautiful dress and wearing it only once.
Content repurposing improves time efficiency (reduces time spent producing content) and increases content engagement rate.
Consistency
Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.
Yes, the last strategy is to repeat and remain consistent carrying out all the strategies above.
You must accept the fact that the goal will not be achieved in a single day. It is a process and you must be willing to keep doing them over and over again.
With consistency, slowly, the end goal of becoming a LinkedIn influencer would draw nearer until reality.
Summary
Becoming a LinkedIn influencer comes with many benefits, hence, it constitute a big milestone for digital marketers.
First, you want to define your subject matter of interest: a set of topics that would feature in every of your post.
Then, to boost your visibility and improve post engagement you want to make only valuable connections.
This you achieve by discovering and connecting with influencers in your niche, and also complementing their posts with your sidecar posts.
You want to create your own posts and remember to twerk and repost them for higher performance, engagement and visibility.
Lastly, you want to maintain a consistency culture implementing these strategies.
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