How to Develop Your Personal Brand on Linkedin

As a professional, personal branding is a big part of your success. Your personal brand is how you represent yourself to employers, clients, co-workers, and businesses. A strong personal brand helps you thrive, while a weak personal brand can hold you back from showing off your full potential. Since LinkedIn is the most important social network for professionals, here are some strategies for developing your personal brand on the site.

Be Real
An essential thing about personal branding in general is that you need to be real. You need to be authentic. You need to portray yourself as yourself, and never try to build a personal brand that doesn’t accurately reflect your skills, strengths, and personality. Before anything else, be honest with yourself about what your personal brand is all about. Developing an authentic personal brand is at least a hundred times easier than trying to seem like someone you’re not.

Come Up with a Headline
The headline of your LinkedIn profile is extremely important. It’s short, but it’s equivalent to the tagline of a company. It’s your personal tagline, so make it stand out in a positive and memorable way. Keep it short and to the point, highlighting perhaps your best skill and best character trait. This is what people are going to read about you before anything else; it’s your first impression.

Be Consistent
Consistency is important and essential for personal branding, too, so keep that in mind in everything you write and all the information you provide. Use a consistent tone and writing style. Don’t slack off in grammar or punctuation on informal messages, for example. Also make sure that everything on your LinkedIn profile is accurate and consistent with the information on all your other profiles and your website, like using the exact same job title and be careful to match dates.

Consider Your Associations
The individuals and companies you’re associated with via your LinkedIn connections can affect your personal brand, so be sure to only associate yourself with respectable people. Don’t feel obligated to connect with someone just because you know them casually. Your associations should be strong, so also on genuinely building them with the right people in your industry.

Use Groups
The groups you’re a part of on LinkedIn will also give people an impression about you. If you claim to be an expert in a certain field, being an active member of a related group will further assert that expertise as part of your personal brand. It’s important to not only join appropriate groups but to participate in them with insightful comments and questions that will add value to the group and demonstrate your sincerity of knowledge.

Include Keywords
Keywords are an essential part of Internet branding strategies for companies, and they should be a part of your personal branding strategy for LinkedIn, too. Come up with a few keywords that are relevant to you, and use them several times. Using a keyword once in your headline and then a few more times in your summary and experience information will help your profile rank highly when employers or peers search for those keywords on the LinkedIn network.

Written by Lisa Hann for Cloverleaf. Cloverleaf is a leader in marketing intelligence and branding.