Leveraging Your Voice on LinkedIn

Written by Lilly Stairs, Founder of Chronic Boss Collective and Patient Authentic

LinkedIn has become a powerful platform for individuals and businesses to foster meaningful relationships and build thought leadership. Yet, only 1% of LinkedIn users share content weekly. 

There is a huge gap between the number of casual content consumers and proactive thought leaders on LinkedIn, and this presents a huge opportunity for anyone wanting to build their personal brand.

Share Your Authentic Voice

LinkedIn remains a professionally oriented platform, but that doesn’t mean your content needs to be stuffy. People crave authentic content they can relate to or get value from in a world of spam, generic content, and brands pushing billions of dollars worth of ads.

Whether you’re an entrepreneur building your thought leadership platform or a career woman looking to secure your next corporate role, sharing your personality on LinkedIn will help you stand out and form genuine connections.

For example, we’re all about flipping the script on the way people perceive chronic conditions and believe that living with chronic conditions grants you superpowers that you bring to the table in your work. This could be resilience, adaptability, or empathy, just to name a few. If you feel comfortable disclosing your condition online, it can help you to build authentic connections with people who have similar experiences.

Share your unique perspectives, experiences, and passions, and this will make you more relatable and memorable. Provide insights from your personal story, highlighting your successes, challenges faced along the way, and lessons learned. Being open and vulnerable is the key to connection.

Be an Active Contributor

As previously mentioned, only 1% of users share content on LinkedIn weekly. This leaves a huge amount of opportunity for you to stand out just by posting consistently every week. Consistent posting will bring you visibility and establish you as a go-to industry expert.

The key with LinkedIn is quality over quantity. Users only spend about 17 minutes on LinkedIn per month, compared to 33 minutes per day on Instagram. On LinkedIn, users are very intentional about their time and they’re not ‘doom-scrolling’ like they might on another platform.

This is why just posting one high-quality piece of content per week can be extremely effective. If you’re not sure what to post, try using these content ideas:

1. Commentary on industry news. Use this as an opportunity to highlight your opinions on the matter or start a conversation among your peers.

2. How-to guidance/practical tips. This content spotlights your expertise and positions you as a helpful resource to others.

3. Personal stories that tie back to work. Again, this style of content builds authentic relationships by helping people connect with you, like sharing a challenge and how you overcame it.

4. Motivation/inspiration for your target audience. Position yourself as someone others can look to as a resource and a leader.

5. Social causes that are important to you. Highlight a way that you give back and be a champion for the mission.

6. Behind the scenes. Give your audience a look at your day in the life, a project you have been working on, or an event you attended.

7. Success stories. Share your wins, personal milestones, and case studies to keep others connected with you and the work you do.

Be an Engaged Consumer

Beyond just posting on LinkedIn, like any social media platform, you should make an effort to be social. This looks like spending time consuming the content of others in your network and engaging with it thoughtfully.

Be sure to curate your connections and follow accounts that represent industry leaders. This will fill your LinkedIn feed with content you can engage with by reacting, leaving a thoughtful comment, or sharing the post with your thoughts.

You can also join groups and follow hashtags related to your industry to find relevant content to engage with. The key is to identify people you already know and want to cultivate a relationship with, or people you want to know, and genuinely engage with their content. This can deepen your connection by building trust and keeping you top of mind.

Leveraging your voice on LinkedIn is all about embracing authenticity and vulnerability. Just spending a couple of hours per week posting and engaging can build your thought leadership platform and credibility, opening up new opportunities for connections.