The day Ryan Reynolds joined LinkedIn, his Deadpool swagger faced an identity crisis. But then Snoop Dogg came along and people got curious. What is happening?
People often ask us why LinkedIn is more invested in onboarding celebrities like Priyanka Chopra or Jenifer Lopez than serving its role as a job listing platform.
Truth is, LinkedIn is not just onboarding famous, wealthy people. It is invested in their brands. In that, they are sending a crucial message to their jobseekers.
LinkedIn is onboarding celebrities to let you know that the road to financial stability is to become a personal brand, with a ‘specific skill set’, highly effective communication and undeniable influence. So, if you wanna make it work on LinkedIn, I will help you with some strategies for doing LinkedIn like a Pro. Check out – Strategies for Self Branding on Social Media
At Ohh My Brand, people have often asked us, how they can use LinkedIn to create their personal brand and get their skills noticed by the global Silicon Valley.
We respect your hustle and will break it down for you step by step on how to build a skill and communication-driven empire on LinkedIn (without paying a premium).
To write any type of LinkedIn post, you will need to have 3 types of skills. Every successful personal brand on LinkedIn has mastered the same. [1] They are as follows-
Based on these skills, there are as many as 5 types of posts on LinkedIn.
Table 1: Types of Content to help you go Viral on LinkedIn (Sources- [5], [6], [7])
| Types of Posts | Writing Techniques, Unsaid Rules and Specifications |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
These 5 types of LinkedIn content are the most profitable in terms of personal branding, organic lead generation, conversion, talent acquisition and brand expansion. The data gathered for the last four years, between 2020 and 2024, reveal the relative engagement of different types of content on LinkedIn.
LinkedIn is all about graphics, as of now. Personal branding requires face-to-face association across a virtual platform. So, creating the right image literally is the key to relevance. If you are a one-man team, there is no doubt the task is especially difficult, to speak enough without exposing yourself too much. There are different types of models in image selection which can help you consolidate a positive association between your brand and your client.
This is the McDonald’s model. It has been nearly a decade since McDonald’s has been dissociating itself from its iconic clown mascot, and rather using AI-generated food humour to associate its brand with different festive occasions. The process of this imagery involves creating a visual story with your product and can be effective across tangible and intangible commodities. Humour and emotional appeal are the central plots of these visual stories.
These are posts with whiteboards or dashboards for images. It helps communicate serious insights in simple terms to your B2B knowledge and service partners. The text part of your post will describe the conceptual phenomenon, while the image portion will be a whiteboard or a dashboard helping you represent the concept with pictures and statistical charts. It can also be a tool for humorous posts which helps build a quick bond with your audience.
An effective way to prove that your brand is thriving is to put forward celebratory posts marking your milestones, declaring how you have employed more people, successfully retained your workforce, and given them a real reason to celebrate (and not get inebriated at parties). Celebrate your employees’ accolades and make yourself a stakeholder in their lives and vice versa. Yes, LinkedIn is flooded with cheesy team bonding posts, but you can take it a step ahead and make it real by actually empathising with your employees. That is what attracts B2B partners to collaborate with you. Notice (above) the recent ad of ‘Cadbury’ of an employee’s boss dancing at his wedding with his family and friends. Notice (below) the same event happening in real life at Team Coco Pvt Ltd.
People also ask us what they can write to keep their audience interested when they have nothing new to say. Well, we suggest, give them something good to look at, anything that makes them joyful, positive and hopeful. You can remember an old concept from your college days and pack it in a carousel post… given, you pack them well. Your carousel should look like an artwork and with AI tools like Canva, Midjourney, Dall-E, and Open AI, you cannot complain. However, there is no limit to how premium can you go with these flashcards. We have seen carousels painted like French holiday cards with nothing but inspirational quotes and they really work well. When people search for anything, they are not always looking to be educated- Sometimes they just want to smile, laugh or relate. So, if you have nothing new to add, just give them a view to hold in their minds.
Animated content captures the most attention and keeps viewers highly engaged. They work well with both B2B and B2C clients but are used more frequently for the latter. While you need to make organised and planned videos for B2B communication, nothing like a funny gif to make your audience chuckle on an otherwise uneventful Wednesday.
People get into a preaching spirit when speaking on LinkedIn. Everyone has it difficult at their work. And everyone either tries to hide it when writing on LinkedIn or wants to shout their minds from the rooftops. Neither is good for your brand. There are some topics which allow for free discussion and even debate. While venting on social media reduces your long-term social currency, faking ingenuine positiveness can be even worse.
So, you need to take the high road to humour. Humour is the one thing that unifies us as strongly as tragedy. But no one wants to hear a tragic story unless the person saying it is rich, famous and a potential employer. So, comedy is your strong suit. Dig the internet, you don’t have to be original, but make sure your presentation is on point. Every joke should land without offending anyone. You can pick on the big guys, but the simple Joe is your audience, your brand.
Do not make it salacious (sleazy)- The “Managers + Dating = Disaster” model worked in the early half of 2020 but fizzled out as people lost their interest in off-the-topic comedy. Do not post edits of insta-reels because copy-pasted comedy loses traction after a point. So what do you do-
Memes are a way to survive in the modern world. Any screen-grab, gif or video edit from ‘The Office’, ‘Corporate’, ‘Friends’, ‘How I Met Your Mother’ or ‘Who’s Line is it Anyway’ works like a dream. Feel free to use clips from the present and vintage ‘Late Night Shows’ or ‘Daily Shows’ when appealing to an international audience. But take care not to go on a political route. And please watch ‘Netflix is a Joke’ for some topical humour, (no paid partnership). [16] [17]
But trying to be humorous on LinkedIn can be fun- So, let it. Research all types of topics. Besides humour, food is always a selling point. Associate your product with some type of food or culinary bliss and people will notice. And when we say food, we mean it. We do not mean lifestyle- because most of your audience will not be able to visualise lifestyle products. But everyone associates with food. Let us give you an example. How can you present the following not-so-funny text-
“POV: Your company pays you in Pizza Parties and Peanuts:
Monday Morning: Begins the day like a New York slice,
Monday Afternoon: Hits rock-bottom like a Chicago Deep Dish”
This can be represented as follows for an international audience.
There is a difference between LinkedIn Experts and Personal Brands on LinkedIn. The LinkedIn experts work in a fixed domain and dabble in current events, advisory posts, and social events. However, LinkedIn Members attempting to develop their personal brand on the platform have to appeal directly to their consumers. Yes, the B2B expertise does matter, where you have to intersect the current events of your domain with your own insights, but your B2B clients will always ask one question–
“How many people follow you? How many of them engage with you? And how much followership have you expanded in the last 6 months?”
So, even before you can aim for a B2B Client base or following, you have to develop your B2C consumer base, so much so that, other creators on LinkedIn wish to collaborate with you. Now, your B2C client base is less likely to care about world events unless it affects the quality or price of the product or both. Historically speaking, your B2B partners will want a bird’s eye view or a top-down approach of looking at the industry from macro to micro. Your B2C audience is just the opposite. They will start with you as the brand and then look upward at the industry if they want to. That is, they go from micro to macro on an as-needed basis.
This is the thumb-rule of content creation as a personal brand on LinkedIn. The LinkedIn experts start with B2B content and the personal brand agents start with the B2C content before exploring the other side. So, what does it mean for you? Let us break it down. Your most frequent posts should centre around your product, the process of production, the specifications you follow, and the social and environmental issues you are aware of. Feel free to include content on the sourcing of raw materials, customer stories, stories about your work culture, your managers and what inspires them to contribute to your product.
Build a community, before you become a phenomenon.
To grow this ability, you need to study the work of established brands on LinkedIn. Read through their content and observe the kind of engagement they get from their B2C audience and B2B partners. When you scroll you see people also ask targeted questions to the creators just to get a response from them. A good creator answers every single question. You can give an empathetic answer to a seemingly silly question and make your brand stand for inclusivity, ethicality and kindness.
Every word goes into building your Brand. Every word is a buy-in. Make it count.
When you are a brand on the rise, a lot of time goes out in production, operations and sales. LinkedIn branding is time-consuming even if indispensable. Nothing blows a deal like people failing to find your page on LinkedIn, or worse, finding a page that is not well-maintained.
If you are an established brand, rediscovering your communication becomes a hassle. As of 2024, our clients have reported struggling with LinkedIn branding despite hiring three separate teams in their respective workplaces.
The reason is simple- LinkedIn is more than creativity and planning. It is playing with an algorithm. It needs thorough experimentation at the backend so that you can serve your clients the most successfully tested model at the front end. You can run 100 permutations and find the most unexpected content to receive the most traction. Part of it is predictable and the rest is painstakingly difficult.
Ohh My Brand provides dedicated LinkedIn Branding services so that your LinkedIn profile works on autopilot while you focus on the priorities at hand. We dedicate separate research teams to build our expertise in your domain. It helps us generate targeted content specific to your brand, industry and audience.
When you collaborate with us, our problem-focused information processing helps us respond speedily, accurately and satisfactorily to your needs. Join our team at Ohh My Brand and watch those LinkedIn impressions make the desired impact.
LinkedIn has become a powerhouse in professional networking, connecting over 1 billion members globally as of 2024. With more than 300 million active users every month and six hires occurring every minute, the platform is a gateway to countless opportunities. Each week, around 50 million people actively search for jobs on LinkedIn, making it the […]
LinkedIn has solidified its position as a premier platform for professionals, boasting over 1 billion members across more than 200 countries. This extensive network includes a significant number of senior-level influencers and decision-makers, making it an invaluable resource for businesses aiming to connect with key industry figures. For B2B marketers, LinkedIn stands out as the […]
A strong LinkedIn profile serves as a gateway to professional opportunities. With over 1 billion members, the platform has become indispensable for networking and career growth. Statistics show that eight professionals are hired every minute through LinkedIn, and 94% of recruiters use it to source and evaluate candidates. Beyond job searches, 50% of decision-makers rely […]
