9 Reasons Why An Active Presence On LinkedIn Is Essential To Your Personal Brand

Personal Branding has become essential for the careers of many people in the 21st century. With millions of people using social media on a daily basis, your personal (and business brands) on social media can make or break your growth potential and income.

Let's start with a definition as found on Wikipedia:

"Personal branding is the practice of people marketing themselves and their careers as brands.... the personal-branding concept suggests ... that success comes from self-packaging....
Personal branding is essentially the ongoing process of establishing a prescribed image or impression in the mind of others about an individual, group or organization."
(as found at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_branding)

With that in mind, I think LinkedIn is an essential tool to build your brand for all of the following types of people: 

• Sales people
• Business owners
• Job Seekers / Career changers
• Vendors
• Any professional to whom their reputation matters

 You can add the word "potential" or "future" in front of any of the above.

How can an active presence on LinkedIn help all of these people with their personal brand or reputation? 

1. LinkedIn is a place where you can showcase recommendations. These recommendations are social proof that you have done great work in the past and you are capable of maintaining the types of relationships where someone is willing to write you a recommendation, - the more specific the better. In my view, recommendations are a prime reason why I believe everyone should have at least a complete profile on LinkedIn, even if they spend most of their marketing efforts on other social media platforms. (Not to be confused with the one-click endorsements.)
2. Here you can demonstrate your writing skills in your own profile, recommendations you write for others and by posting blogs.  
3. Your blog posts, comments and conversations allow you to show off your critical thinking skills.
4. You can offer samples of your creativity by the topics you select for posting and how you address them.
5. Your Experience section can show reliability based on your career trajectory (i.e. several multi-year positions held or consecutively greater responsibility in the same company).
6. You can demonstrate respect for others in how you interact in groups and in how you express yourself when you don't agree with someone's point of view. After all people want to work with and buy from people they know, like and trust. LinkedIn gives you the opportunity to show you can play well with others.
7. You can demonstrate your understanding of social media and basic technology - potentially especially important for older job seekers.
8. You can also demonstrate an understanding that this is a "professional" platform where the content and images should be of a different tone from facebook and other media.
9. There are regular opportunities to be helpful to others in answering questions, curating content that is of interest to your connections and/or target market and even offering to help directly if you have managed to extend your virtual network into "real life" via phone calls and in-person meetings.

Though the above are not in a particular order, to me number one is the most essential, as it is least paralleled by other platforms.

Considering all of the above, I believe that part of your reputation can be based on your presence on LinkedIn.  It's the first place I look up someone I speak with, receive a call from or research people for other reasons.

Continuing along the social media theme, you may also want to check out Sara Grillo's post on "3 Easy Ways to Monetize Social Media".

Which of the above is most important to you? Do you see other reasons why LinkedIn is important - or even essential - to your personal branding and marketing efforts or do you have a different opinion? 
What is your view on this topic? Please share it in the comments below.
And one more thing: If we aren't connected yet, how about changing that? Send me an invitation.