Here Are The Tips For Using LinkedIn For Personal Branding As visibility has become a necessity, LinkedIn has proven to be a good tool to tell people about your venture

No matter whether you intend to create it or not but if you have a name and a social footprint, you own a personal brand.

Be it a freelancer or an entrepreneur, to thrive today you'll need to power up your personal brand. A powerful personal brand allows you to represent yourself as an expert and a trustworthy personality in your niche.

To boost and promote their personal brands, individuals and even big brands use social media platforms as an eminent way. LinkedIn, initially initiated as an digitised version of CVs has become one of the most powerful social media platforms intended to promote personal brands.

Why LinkedIn is a powerful personal branding tool?

According to Varun Choraria, the Founder and CEO of WiseWords Interactive Studio Pvt. Ltd., LinkedIn is the best business professional social media channel. "Here's the profound, true secret that you may have not known (no-brainer, actually), LinkedIn has become the best tool for personal branding and it's guilty of being that because since the beginning of Mesopotamian times, customers have always preferred the "human touch" over a cold and pretentious "corporate caress"," said Choraria.

In addition to the human touch formula, LinkedIn also allows you to grow and interact with a highly targeted audience. "Knowing our audience's demographics and their background experiences can help us create engaging content for them. And as we share original content, we are also establishing our credibility on the platform, " says Virginia Bautista. Virginia is the founder and trainer in VB Consulting and has been featured in some of the top publications like Forbes and Entrepreneur Philippines.

Here are the best ways to leverage LinkedIn as a powerful personal branding tool-

Building Community

To start with, you would need to build a community of professionals with respect to your field of interest. With LinkedIn, you can easily find professional who are related to your business and expand your professional network or you can also try reaching out people, whom you believe can help your business and personal brand grow.

"Share contents that are related to your targeted network's interest. Sharing such content will allow to improve engagements and hence strengthen up the relationship with your targeted audience," said Alex Pirouz, the founder of Linkfluencer, Australia's leading LinkedIn Training Company.

Connect with Potential Clients

The other beneficial part of building strong relationships is that it helps to generate sales. The more you boost your relationship with your targeted clients the more are the chances that they might buy from you.This simple strategy will not only help you in increasing sales but will also power up your personal brand. "LinkedIn is a phenomenal way to reach out to your targeted audience and connect with them and start building relationships," said Pirouz.

Reach out to Journalists and Editors

Not just for your own benefits but for them even, more than 92% journalists are supposed to be on LinkedIn. So, if you find the right ones and pitch to them there are chances that you might get published on the top publication houses. "Find out journalists who are related to your industry and try connecting to them and once you get connected start building relationships. The best way to do this is to prepare a list of publications that are related to your niche and the simply connect to their respective writers on LinkedIn. In around 6 months I got my name featured over top 50 publications with this method, " said Pirouz.

LinkedIn Local Meetups

Another reason why LinkedIn is not like other typical social media platforms. LinkedIn local meetups are a great way of meeting people offline and connect with different professionals. "Through LinkedIn, we can take online conversations to offline engagements by exchanging messages in real time and attending LinkedIn local meetups to network with like-minded people within or outside the industry, " said Bautista.

Let the Professionals find you

It's just not you who is doing this on LinkedIn but rather it is a two-way process. There are many people like you out there on LinkedIn who are searching for professionals in their niches. This will allow different professionals to reach you out, for example, journalists may wish to interview you or you might get any speaking opportunity. Such opportunities will definitely boost your personal brand. "Optimizing our profile on LinkedIn requires clarity in who we are and what we do so we can decide on the right keywords to use in our profile," said Bautista.