5 Essential Steps to Becoming a LinkedIn Influencer
A LinkedIn influencer resonates with their audience, provides value on topics important to their brand and followers, and is publicly known online as a trusted authority with measurable successes. Elsewhere, an influencer’s presence across various social media platforms may also impact the behaviours of users and sway them to buy a particular product or service they are personally invested in. In the general sense, an influencer possesses the power to convey their knowledge and position to a wider audience who is willing to listen, think, and possibly even act upon their authority.
However, the LinkedIn influencer’s alternative or shrewd approach to the challenging topics which affect their audience, industry, or what matters to their world is what makes their content potent and relevant to the millions of users utilising the platform. This is where their power is really derived.
Here are some steps which you can take to become an influencer within your own niche:
1 . Build a Public Profile Your Followers Can Trust
An aspiring LinkedIn influencer should ensure their reputation and trustworthiness are seamless upon first impression. This is perhaps the most important and time-consuming step in the process; taking your time to improve this area will pay off in the long-term and lay down a solid foundation. Your influencer status relies upon the effort you’ve invested in your public profile, so before embarking on ways to create and release content, consider addressing the following questions:
- Is your profile picture presentable to future employers? Is it clear and professional? An informal or low-resolution profile picture that would better suit your Facebook or Instagram channel may undermine your authenticity. Ensuring that your profile picture is set to public is also vital.
- Is your Headline captivating or is it too generic? A generic Headline could suppress your unique personality. It could also fail to set you apart on a platform that is growing in influencers. State what matters to you most.
- Is your About (Summary) section up-to-date? Walk your readers through your key experience, skills, passions, and attributes which set you apart from the rest.
- Are each of your profile sections – About, Experience, and Education especially – set to public? Having these set to private may suggest that you’re hiding something that others may not want to see. Being as transparent and open as possible will attract more LinkedIn users to engage with your content.
- Do each of your job roles incorporate an employer logo? Companies listed on LinkedIn will each have their own logo to add to job positions. This further adds to your authenticity and ensures that your profile looks immaculate.
- Have your skills been endorsed by your fellow colleagues? Does your profile showcase recommendations posted by your past or present employers? Requesting your close connections to endorse your skills or write you up a recommendation is an essential component in this process, proving that your character is reputable and reliable in diverse working environments.
Following these initial steps will highly increase your chances of becoming a LinkedIn influencer.
2. Find Your Thought Leadership Niche
Now that you’ve routinely updated your profile from top to bottom, consider ways in which you can make your mark and share content that will engage other leaders within your community. Follow news pages, publications, or other LinkedIn influencers that are aligned with your worldview and be privy to current events impacting your industry. Like, comment, and share with the topics you want to be aligned with. Your presence will be felt if you are receiving engagement in return.
Your thoughts, opinions, and experiences matter on LinkedIn, so sharing what you’re passionate about – whether it’s politics, issues like the gender pay gap or global warming, or technology – will cement your influence, build relationships, and allow you to join the conversation. Building your audience’s trust in your expertise will drastically improve your reach as a LinkedIn influencer.
3. Post Diverse Content: Newsfeed Posts, Articles, Videos
To be a LinkedIn influencer is to also be seen as a regular contributor, content creator, or advisor within your industry. Publishing periodic newsfeed updates, original long-form articles which function as blogposts, or native videos which examine a particular subject, are excellent ways to strengthen your status as an influencer and thought leader. This will establish your authority and earn you greater respect as a contributor with original ideas and opinions about certain topics. Illustrating evidence of credibility to external sources such as publications and peer-reviewed journals will also build your trustworthiness. Measuring which content platform generates the most likes, comments, and shares may also determine which one is relevant to what message you want to get across.
Importantly, devising a regular schedule for researching, designing, and editing your content will support your stance as an influencer and allow you to become more organised. Thought leadership creation, brand exposure, and external engagement from other users across the web can emerge from this with the right help.
4. Engage an Executive PR Firm such as Executive Agents to Create and Manage Content
Utilising the professional services of a firm such as Executive Agents will fast-track your path to becoming a LinkedIn influencer.
Allowing a company like Executive Agents to curate and schedule content with a quick turnaround will save you time to consider and suggest content that will engage your online community. With professional writers, proof-readers, and graphic designers onboard, your LinkedIn content will rival key influencers within your industry. As an aspiring LinkedIn influencer, Executive Agents will wield your individual voice and create content to bring value to a targeted group of followers, generating more traffic and organic search results.
5 . Constructing Your Personal Brand Through LinkedIn Premium
As you begin to notice the ripple effects created by your content and engagement with others on LinkedIn, it may be time to invest in the Premium side of the platform to see how you compare with the competition. Paying for the Premium service will enable you to further develop your skills with on-demand videos and courses which will inform your content topics, business niche, and thought leadership.
Access to more data is power in itself; LinkedIn Premium will deliver accurate business insights on your industry, shaping the relevancy of your content and what is being said on certain topics. You will also be able to gauge your audience and who is engaging with your profile, allowing you the opportunity to adapt and create content that is better suited to your audience. Perhaps this will be a way for you to shape your personal brand through ready data and insights.
Striving to become a LinkedIn influencer is a fruitful endeavour that will build your confidence and stature on the growing business networking platform. Following these steps will supplement your efforts to becoming a powerful contributor on LinkedIn, and although it may take some time, you will find equal enjoyment in finding a supportive network that will appreciate your perspective on the matters than mean the most to them.
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4 Best Ways to Leverage Social Media as an Executive
In a 2018 survey, Forbes discovered that 75 per cent of employees think that a company is more trustworthy if their CEO is on social media. In 2019, though, Influential Executive found that only 54 per cent of Fortune 500 CEOs are on social media. Here are four ways to leverage social media as an executive, generating awareness to both your company and your personal brand.
1. Make sure to react and comment
There’s a reason this is number one. It’s easy to believe social media for executives is all about posting how-to articles and generating awareness, but like many things in life, social media starts from what you’re doing for other people.
So make sure you react and comment on other people’s posts! It’s the building block of everything else you do on social media. The best thing is, reacting and commenting is the most time-efficient thing you can do on social media. To research, plan, and publish an article, you need to block out at least a couple of hours. To read someone else’s post and write a thoughtful comment, though, takes about 10 minutes. It’s even easier if you found a friend posted an image.
It’s important that your comments are genuine, but don’t be harsh—if you think someone is an awful writer who knows nothing about their industry, don’t write a critical comment. In fact, as an executive, try not to write anything critical at all. Your criticism holds significant weight, and leaving a bad comment on social media is like criticising someone in public. Reserve your criticism for face-to-face interactions.
2. Write articles based on your experience and problems
Once you’ve reacted and commented on other people’s work, they’re much more likely to read your stuff. But how do you begin? It’s easy to look at someone else’s budding LinkedIn or Medium account with 100,000+ followers and get discouraged that you’ll never reach that level.
Like always, the trick is to think small. You can’t win a premiership in one go—you have to build it up with every training session. And to write a good article, you have to start in bite-sized parts. Don’t worry about article structure or getting readers or SEO; it’s too complicated to worry about at the start.
Instead, try writing about the problems you faced as an individual or team. For example, Melanie Perkins, CEO of Canva, wrote a very long LinkedIn article detailing some of the problems she faced while creating her startups Fusion Books and Canva. She mentions that when she and her boyfriend Cliff (now COO of Canva) were starting Fusion Books, some clients would ask to speak to the manager. Since it was a two-person job with no manager, ‘Cliff would pause a moment and change voices.’
It’s personal details like this that make you seem more trustworthy and authentic as an executive on social media.
(Of course, writing articles is never that easy. Keep an eye on Executive Agents, where we’ll soon be publishing an article on how to become a LinkedIn thought leader.)
3. Don’t be perfect, but be careful
The best thing about social media is that it makes everyone seem human. That goes for executives, political leaders, celebrities, athletes, and more. And if you want to be human, you’re not meant to be perfect.
Apart from personal details, the other great thing about Melanie’s article is that she’s vulnerable. While she’s currently CEO of a company worth $3.2 billion, in her article she writes about her fears, insecurities, failures, and the times she thought she wasn’t good enough. People are just people, no matter if you’re old or young or rich or poor, no matter what gender or race.
On social media, you shouldn’t try to be the perfect CEO or managing director, you should just be yourself. Something as simple as sharing a favourite breakfast meal can help generate employee engagement. Your team members could be thinking, My boss eats Weet-Bix at 7am just like I do.
But everyone’s heard horror stories of people sending the wrong Tweet and getting fired the next day, and as an executive, the heat on your shoulders is only magnified. Who knows, maybe you evade taxes, and your Weet-Bix photo accidentally includes incriminating evidence. Apart from trying to be a better person regarding the illegal stuff, the best thing to do is to get someone else to check every social media post you make. (You’re an executive; this absolutely isn’t over the top.) You can either turn it over to a trusted friend, a dedicated employee, or you can …
4. Bolster yourself with expert advice from an executive PR firm
It’s a headache, we get it. Even if you can write witty comments, post advice articles that generate tens of thousands of reads, and snap photos like a true professional—you still have to devote lots of time, because social media awareness doesn’t happen by itself.
Add that to all the safety concerns, and you see why it’s a good idea to consider consulting executive Public Relations firms, who are experts at running social media pages. Executive Agents uses an Online Reputation Management service, which we’ve used to help senior leaders from Telstra, EY, Deloitte, Woolworths, and more.
Besides, if you don’t have to worry about safety and all the ins and outs of managing your page, you can focus on just having fun—which is one of the best parts of social media. Yes, social media is fast becoming part of the executive job, but it shouldn’t be a chore like administrative activities. If you’re having fun and being genuine, your social media influence will surely be more effective.
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People Don’t Quit Enough
Give yourself a chance to make a difference in a new industry and embrace your unique journey. ‘The secret of change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new’.
6 Resume Trends to Watch Out for in 2020
As we enter a new decade, you can be sure the next 10 years will present new challenges for job seekers. For example, by 2025, it’s estimated that 75 per cent of workers will be millennials, who are known to value diversity, career progression, blogs like this, and environmental health. As companies and talent acquisition teams adjust their hiring practices, it’s only natural that you’ll have to change your jobseeking approach as well. Here are six hiring trends that you should watch out for as you apply for jobs in 2020.
1 . Talk About Your Emotional Intelligence
As we move into an increasingly technology-focussed world, it’s easy to overlook the flipside of this change: the added emphasis on emotional intelligence. AI can replace many hard skills, but the one thing it can’t replace is your people skills. Nobody comes home and tells their family, ‘Wow! My best friend in the office is the AI machine next door!’
If you can brighten up any workplace you walk into, you’re only going to become more valuable in 2020. Currently 77 per cent of employers think soft skills are important, a number that looks likely to rise as we head into the new year.
Emotional intelligence, however, is notoriously difficult to include in a resumé. It’s fine to list it as one of your skills, but it’s almost impossible to prove. An easy but roundabout way to suggest you have strong people skills is to include some relevant hobbies or interests with your resumé, particularly if they require collaboration or teamwork. This shows you care about the people just as much as your achievements and numbers.
2. Emphasise your technology skills
Along with emotional intelligence, your technology skills are more important than ever. Every field has different technology needs, so there are no easy answers. For example, in digital marketing, CSS, HTML and SEO are essential tech skills, whereas JavaScript and Python are key languages for web developers. They’re all free to learn online, but ‘free’ still requires time commitment. If you’re a budding executive with more on your plate than you can handle, it’s unrealistic to learn skills just for the sake of putting them on your resumé.
So what do you do if you’re not confident in your tech skills? The trick is to focus on getting better at the very basics—which may mean Microsoft Office and email. Then, instead of listing them in a Skills section, where they’re not going to be as impressive as someone with a genuine coding background, you want to weave them into the resumé itself. For example:
- Composed an Excel Macro that increased team productivity by 15 per cent.
- Created email template on Gmail to respond to 100 emails per day.
And there’s one more way to seem like you’ve got everything covered with technology. You can look to master social media, as we detail below.
3. Social Media is Just as Important as your Resume
As we head into the third decade of the 21st century, your resumé is no longer the end of the screening process. Recruiters and hiring managers will hop onto your LinkedIn and see if they match. If genuine inconsistencies pop up, you can kiss goodbye to your chances of an interview. (Online verification isn’t just limited to social media, of course. If you Google your name and find a full page of pictures of yourself getting drunk, hiring teams won’t be particularly impressed.)
Just as much as bad social media management can bite you, though, you can also leverage your social media expertise to elevate your application. If your social media pages look beautifully designed and structured, people are going to think you’re a tech-savvy professional by default. And if you’ve published well-received articles on LinkedIn, maintaining immaculate personal branding and curated comment sections, talent acquisition teams are going to be just as impressed as they are with your resumé.
Because social media is so imperative, Executive Agents doesn’t leave it to chance. We offer LinkedIn management here. If you’d like to know more, stay tuned for next week’s article, where we offer advice on how to become a LinkedIn thought leader.
4. Cater to ATS Software
ATS—or Applicant Tracking Systems—have been the bane of many jobseekers in the past, but unfortunately it’s here to stay. To summarise, ATS software scans all incoming resumés and does preliminary screening for the company. The primary screening method is keyword tracking, often cross-referenced with the job description. That’s why many people advise you to customise your resumé for each application, time-consuming as it is.
ATS software, by the way, is mainly there to tell which applicants aren’t qualified, while the qualified resumés must still be sorted by a real person. For example, as a recent graduate, I once applied for an executive job. ATS software is a good gatekeeper to fend off foolishly underqualified people like me.
ATS also scans through your template and ignores images. As such, it’s best to keep your templates basic, just in case the ATS is unable to read your text, and don’t use too many images. Luckily, Executive Agents employs both professional writers and professional designers to help you get through Applicant Tracking Systems, while never losing sight of the end product for the hiring manager.
5 . Write a Professional Summary
Objective statements have been dying for a long time, and in 2020 it’s time for the last nail to be drilled into the coffin. There’s genuinely no need for a line like ‘Looking to work in XYZ field where I can utilise my best skills.’ Consider your actual application as the ‘objective statement’; you applied for the job, therefore you want it.
On the other hand, Professional Summaries are in. Most applicants still aren’t using them, so it’s a great way for you to separate yourself from the pack. Not only do professional summaries help get past ATS software by cramming in a few extra keywords, they also provide an overview of your career history and your best one or two achievements. In a time where hiring managers infamously spend six seconds going through the average resumé, it’s exactly the Professional Summary that they’re going to be looking at.
Sometimes it’s not easy to know the difference between an objective statement and the Professional Summary. Here’s the easy way to split them apart: the objective statement is about your goals, whereas the professional summary is about your achievements. The first one is all about what you want (‘I want to become your next CEO’). The second one caters to what the acquisition team wants to know (‘I have 20 years of experience as a CFO’). See why the professional summary is much better?
6. Use Numbers
This isn’t a new trend, but it’s still almost certainly one of the most important. With competition for desired jobs rising, there’s one clear way you can elevate yourself over other applicants: by using numbers. Ballpark generalisations are usually acceptable, and the consequences for having no numbers can sometimes make or break your resumé.
For example, at Executive Agents we mainly cater to executives, and often they’re applying to work with prestigious firms. If you’re going for a CFO job at Telstra, where you’ll be managing the finances of a company with $25 billion in annual revenue and $2.1 billion in profit, they need to know you’re not intimidated by big numbers. In your resumé, you’ll have to show you’ve worked with significant numbers in the past.
Even if you’re not an executive, it’s your specific numbers that prove your abilities. Taylor Swift isn’t just a ‘very talented singer-songwriter’; she has 121 million digital sales and has hit No. 1 on the Billboard 200 with six different albums. If you’ve never heard of Taylor Swift before, you just need to hear her stats to know she’s really, really good.
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LinkedIn Influencer? So What?
Becoming a LinkedIn influencer is an opportunity for career-driven individuals to build their network of contacts, share engaging content, and expound their industry expertise on a platform that offers an unlimited professional experience. LinkedIn is a powerful personal branding tool that is much more than an online job directory and digital resume.
As far as professionalism in the digital sphere goes, an aspiring influencer should ensure their reputation and trustworthiness are seamless upon first impression. It is much harder to convince your connections of your influencer status (as on social networking sites) if you do not have a professional profile that reflects this. Becoming an influencer will give you the motivation to make sure your public profile is up-to-date with a business-appropriate profile picture, a unique URL, and an appealing summary which will draw future connections and make your profile stand out. Ensuring your skills have been endorsed and your work ethic recommended by colleagues or industry professionals is also beneficial, smoothing the transition to LinkedIn influencer as you begin to portray an authentic background for users to subscribe to. This is a thoughtful and strategic process, and offers long-term rewards and opportunities to pinpoint what will set yourself apart from others.
To be an influencer is to also be seen as a contributor, content creator, or an advisor within your industry. Publishing original long-form articles which function as blogposts, or videos which examine a topic, are excellent ways to strengthen your personal brand’s scope. Additionally, more formal documents like white papers and infographics also serve a function to industry-specific segments of LinkedIn. Not only will this reflect your authority on a topic on a digital platform, but it will allow you to become a better communicator and thought-leader among your LinkedIn connections. Your passions may also be conveyed to others in the way you deliver your message by your stance on a topic, providing other users the excitement of engaging in a conversation, as well as alignment with your personal brand. As a LinkedIn influencer, you can wield your voice to interact with others on trending topics, bringing value to a targeted group of followers that attract more traffic and organic search results.
LinkedIn also functions as a middle-ground for distributing content on your personal blog, transferring your readership to an increasingly potent platform. LinkedIn influencers regularly circulate their content on social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to generate further engagement, as well as posting to selective forums or discussion boards where insightful discussion can be made. Promoting your content is not the side-effect of becoming a LinkedIn influencer; it is a primary function, and the more effort you put in, the more ways you will be rewarded with a following that will be interested and responsive to your contributions. One of the key values of becoming a LinkedIn influencer is the human connection which arises through these interactions.
Considerable social and cultural profit can be made by becoming an influencer on LinkedIn as the business networking site continues to grow in users and functionality. Current LinkedIn influencers are experts in building relationships with like-minded professionals, and their stature within the platform suggests that authenticity and credibility are essential factors to increasing reach within your professional community. If you are uncomfortable with publishing long-form articles, utilise LinkedIn’s native video feature; if you are uncomfortable with recording yourself, share a short-form newsfeed post about a current event. There is significant personal value for anyone wishing to become an influencer who is willing to share their worldview and experiences.
Becoming a LinkedIn influencer is an effective way to build your confidence in the digitisation of professionalism, and many will find that building a supportive network through content and the celebration of achievements is reason enough to become invested in the platform.
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Getting Hired When Over 50: Seven Steps to Take
Ensuring that you’re employable after age 50 does not require any unusual tactics, just some special attention to the skillset you possess and how you market it to an employer. In this sense, getting hired after 50 does not mean any drastic changes to the strategies you used when getting your first job.
How to Beat Applicant Tracking Systems
ATS systems are known to be inconsistent and ultimately inaccurate, making the job seeking process even harder for those who are unaware these systems are in place that allow businesses to fast-track their recruitment process. The chances of a qualified candidate being filtered out of the application process simply because the resume doesn’t align with the data that the ATS system is scanning for is as likely as the system rejecting an unsuitable resume based simply on how things are phrased and formatted.
Three things you need to know about LinkedIn’s Profile changes
As they say, third time’s the charm with LinkedIn introducing its third major change to your profile in as many years. The goal is to drive engagement, boost activity, and get members talking to each other. The changes might seem minor, but tweaking your profile to take advantage of the new algorithm could prove to be a move in the right direction for your career.
5 things you need to do to get a pay rise
Asking your employer for a pay rise is by far one of the most daunting scenarios for an employee, with less than 30 per cent of job seekers willing to negotiate pay at the interview stage, and less than 50 per cent of employees having never discussed salary negotiations throughout their career.
Effects of Applicant Personality on Resume Evaluations
Recent studies may suggest that your resume is not the only reason why you never received a call back or progressed to the next stage of the interview process. It could be a result of the impression your personality has made on your resume and how certain resume cues impact reviewer judgement.
