LinkedIn can be an incredibly useful platform for building your reputation, developing professional relationships and getting your expertise in front of the right people, but for many business owners it can also be quite intimidating. There is so much conflicting advice about how often you should post, what you should talk about, who you should connect with and whether you should be messaging new connections that it can become easier to do nothing at all.
In episode 275 of The Monday Morning Marketing Podcast, we were joined once again by LinkedIn specialist, author and self-confessed accidental YouTuber Louise Brogan. Louise has been helping businesses and professionals use LinkedIn for years, and with her book Raise Your Visibility on LinkedIn, we wanted to talk about what visibility actually means and, importantly, how you can build it without becoming overly sales-focused or spending every waking hour on the platform.
Visibility is about more than posting regularly
One of the misconceptions around LinkedIn is that becoming more visible simply means posting more often. You can post every day and still fail to build a meaningful presence if what you're sharing isn't relevant to the people you actually want to reach. There has to be some purpose behind the content, and that starts with understanding your audience and what they are likely to find useful.
Louise has built a considerable amount of her own visibility by sharing information freely through LinkedIn, her YouTube channel, podcast, newsletter and now her book. Some business owners can be reluctant to do this because they worry about giving too much away for free, but as we discussed during the podcast, people aren't necessarily paying you simply because you possess information. There is already an enormous amount of free information online. They are often paying for your experience, your interpretation of that information and the ability to apply it directly to their particular situation.
There is also the accountability that comes with hiring somebody. You could watch dozens of videos explaining how LinkedIn works and still never actually change your profile or create a content strategy. Working directly with somebody can provide the push and the personal guidance needed to turn all that information into something useful.
Being visible makes you easier to refer
Another interesting aspect of visibility is that the person seeing your content doesn't necessarily have to become your customer for that visibility to have value. They might become the person who recommends you.
Louise shared the example of receiving a referral from another LinkedIn consultant who had been approached by somebody looking for a service she didn't provide. Rather than simply turning the enquiry away, the consultant recommended Louise because she knew exactly what Louise did. That referral subsequently became a monthly client.
It's a useful reminder that other people working in your industry don't automatically have to be treated as competitors. Building relationships with people in your wider professional community can lead to referrals, collaborations, speaking opportunities and introductions that you might never have generated by simply promoting yourself.
The easier you make it for somebody to understand what you do, the easier you make it for them to recommend you. Ideally, you want people within your network to be able to think, "I know exactly who you need to speak to," when somebody mentions a problem that you solve.
Start with the four pillars of LinkedIn
Louise structures her approach to LinkedIn around four main pillars: your personal profile, your content, your connections and the community you build around yourself. Rather than thinking about LinkedIn purely as somewhere to publish posts, these four areas give you a much broader way of looking at your presence on the platform.
Your personal profile needs to make it clear who you are, what you do and why somebody might want to know more about you. From there, your content gives you the opportunity to demonstrate your knowledge and talk about the problems you help solve. Connections are about deliberately building a relevant professional network rather than simply chasing a bigger number, while community is what happens when those connections begin to develop into actual relationships and conversations.
This is where LinkedIn can become much more valuable than simply posting something and waiting to see how many likes it receives. Commenting thoughtfully, joining relevant conversations, supporting other people's content and becoming a recognisable part of your professional community can all contribute to your visibility.
You don't need to cold message everybody
One thing Louise feels particularly strongly about is the advice that businesses should connect with large numbers of people and then immediately send cold sales messages in the hope that eventually somebody will respond. Most of us have experienced this ourselves. You accept a connection request and, almost instantly, receive a lengthy message explaining what that person sells and asking you to book a call.
There has been no conversation, no relationship and, quite often, very little effort to establish whether you have any need for the service being offered. It might technically be marketing, but it doesn't do much to establish trust.
There is a significant difference between being visible and being intrusive. If you want to use LinkedIn to develop your authority, concentrate on becoming useful and recognisable first. Answer questions your customers regularly ask, explain something people frequently misunderstand, share useful experiences from working with clients and contribute to other people's conversations. Give someone a reason to become interested in what you do before asking them to buy something from you.
Make your customers part of your content
It is very easy for business content to become centred entirely around the business owner. We talk about our services, achievements, qualifications, new products, meetings and everything else happening within the company, but it is worth stopping occasionally and asking what the person reading that content is actually getting from it.
During the podcast, Louise talked about a business owner who needed to bring more clients into her business but was spending valuable time struggling with a piece of software. Instead, she could have used some of that time to share a story about a client who had approached her with a particular problem, explain what she did to help and show the outcome. Suddenly the content isn't simply talking about the business owner. It allows a potential customer to recognise a problem they might also be experiencing.
Client stories and case studies are particularly useful because they allow you to demonstrate your expertise without constantly having to tell people how good you are. You're showing the problem, your approach and the result, and allowing the reader to make that connection for themselves.
Not everything needs to become a business lesson
We also touched on something that has become increasingly common on LinkedIn: taking almost every personal experience and finding a way to turn it into a business lesson. Someone walks the dog, misses a train, makes a cup of tea or goes on holiday and somehow it becomes a lesson about leadership, sales or entrepreneurship.
Personal content absolutely has a place on LinkedIn. It can help people get to know the person behind the business and can make your content more relatable, but the connection needs to make sense. If every everyday experience is being forced into a business analogy simply because you've been told that storytelling performs well, it can quickly become formulaic.
Sometimes your expertise is interesting enough. Talk about what is changing in your industry, something customers regularly get wrong, a question you've answered several times that week or something you've learned through working with a client. You probably have far more genuinely useful material around you than you realise without needing to manufacture a story around it.
Create once and use the content more than once
Louise also talks about her COPE framework, which stands for Create Once, Publish Everywhere. This is particularly relevant when it comes to video, because video can take more time and confidence to produce, so it makes little sense to create something useful, publish it once and then forget about it.
One video can potentially become several different pieces of content. The main video could be used on YouTube or LinkedIn, while shorter sections could become clips for social media. The subject could be developed into a blog, discussed in a podcast or included in a newsletter, and individual points could become separate LinkedIn posts. You don't have to repeat exactly the same piece of content everywhere, but you can use the original idea in different ways.
For small businesses in particular, this is a far more realistic way of maintaining
