Building Your Brand on Linkedin

Building Your Brand on Linkedin

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  Company/ Showcase Pages Your CompanyPage is the foundation for a strong LinkedIn presence. It’s often one of the first pages that LinkedIn members visit when checking out a company, making it the perfect place to feature thought leadership content, including links to your latest and greatest whitepapers, eBooks, and how-to content. Company Page With the introduction of Showcase Pages, companies can now extend their thought leadership content by creating dedicated pages for their more prominent brands, businesses, and initiatives. Through Showcase Pages, companies can segment content to distinct audiences who are interested in different aspects of their business. Showcase Page Develop a unique and groundbreaking viewpoint Use content marketing concepts and best practices to disseminate your thought leadership Deliver thought leadership at every stage of the buying cycle Define success criteria and measure and report on it While any person or company can establish itself as a thought leader, it doesn’t happen overnight. It takes commitment and a long-term strategy. Just like a well-defined blueprint to build your dream house, your thought leadership strategy won’t deliver results overnight—it takes time to develop. But don’t think you have to go into it alone. Here’s a handy checklist for thought leadership success: LinkedIn Groups can be a great place to extend the reach of your thought leadership content as well as gather new content ideas. Jennifer Lonoff Schiff, business and technology writer and a contributor to CIO.com, suggests these ways to maximize your thought leadership efforts with LinkedIn Groups: SlideShare Join groups where your customers and prospects are. Don’t stay siloed in the LinkedIn Group you create. Be the life of the party and make the rounds. Join Contribute Poll Contribute to group discussions. Our research finds that participants who comment on group discussions get four times the number of profile views. Poll group members to conduct market research and then publish the results as new content. Research shows that people seek out visual content and find it engaging. Think about how you can turn your content visual, especially content like research and trend reports, and then share your content out on SlideShare. It's not only a terrific repository for content in general, but serves as a great place for thought leadership content specifically. SlideShare embeds seamlessly across blogs, landing pages, resource pages and more. And it renders beautifully in the LinkedIn feed and Twitter feed. That means it’s easy for people to consume your content in its native environment. Need more thought leadership content to feed your LinkedIn editorial calendar? Encourage your employees to publish long-form content on LinkedIn, then share their posts from your Company Page. We encourage our members to write about their professional experience. Empower your employees to write about topics important to them and to your business. Sharing organic updates to your Company Page allows you to reach your followers, but if you want to extend the reach of your content, sponsor it. Sponsored Updates help you achieve your goals by sharing content in the feed with a targeted audience who are highly engaged on LinkedIn. Define what thought leadership means to you/your organization Secure top-level buy-in and support Align thought leadership with product/service and organizational leadership goals Establish a process for brainstorming, vetting and developing a manageable number of ideas Sponsored Updates Groups Long-Form Content A Blueprint for Thought Leadership Success Building Your Brand On Suggested Topics: What concrete advice would you give to someone hoping to enter your field? What your industry will (or should) look like in 5, 10, or 15 years and how it will get there. What is the biggest problem your industry needs to solve? What skill is essential in your job or at your company, and why? How has your job, profession or industry changed since you started? For more tips on building a successful thought leadership strategy on LinkedIn, download our popular all-encompassing playbook "The Sophisticated Marketer's Guide to Thought Leadership."