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During these past two years, I have earned 30K+ followers, my posts have received more than 300 likes and more than 30K impressions, and I have created my own like-minded LinkedIn community.
So, am I now a LinkedIn influencer?
I guess we have to figure this out together.
Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube have created a universe where everyone can become influencers.
But who could have thought that this would become a buzzword even on LinkedIn?
For this matter, I’ll be guiding you through some important topics to understand what exactly LinkedIn influencer marketing refers to:
- What Is A LinkedIn Influencer?
- Why Become A LinkedIn Influencer?
- How To Become A LinkedIn Influencer?
- 3 LinkedIn Influencers You Can Get Inspiration From
There is much to cover, so let’s get into it.
What Is A LinkedIn Influencer?
Let’s start with the fact that influencers differ on each social network.
There’s a real difference between high-profile business leaders like Bill Gates, Arianna Huffington, Richard Branson, and LinkedIn Influencers.
The big names typically delegate about 95% of their content and interaction efforts, while LinkedIn Influencers do the work themselves.
LinkedIn influencers are the content creators that:
- Create content for their community,
- Become thought-leaders at online and live events,
- Share content to help others succeed similar way,
- Build trustful and respectful space for peers to share and connect with others.
They simply like to share their expertise in an engaging and supporting way, which sets them appart from other high-end business figures.
Why Become A LinkedIn Influencer?
Here are several benefits you get by becoming a LinkedIn Influencer:
- Make your voice heard
- Build a reliable audience
- Increase your business and networking opportunities
- Inhance your personal brand
- Influence industry trends
1. Make your voice heard
By becoming an infuencer, you can share your insights and expertise on a broader platform.
More and more people read your publications, listen your podcasts and engage with your content.
Even here you can reach beyond your immediate or 1st connection network to a broader audience.
Weather you have tips, growth hacks, know-hows, or any kind of engaging information, you share and wait for the right poeple to click to it.
Consequently, your increased visibility positions you as a thought leader in your field.
2. Build a reliable audience
As I said, by making your voice heard, you reach your target audience that resonates with your LinkedIn content.
This means that the people that follow you are the LinkedIn users who appreciate high-quality content, that helps them to scale their business, write better copy or do better LinekdIn outreach.
On LinkedIn you usually connect with people that you’ve exchanged in real life, which makes this platform a central place to build your credibility.
So, establishing authority on LinkedIn not only solidifies your reputation with direct contacts, but also extends your influencer status throughout their networks.
3. Increase your business and networking opportunities
LinkedIn has over 1 billion users, which makes it the biggest social media platform with and for business professionals.
By posting valuable and engaging content, building trust withean reiablt audiance you pass to the next level.
With your infleuncer status you attract the attention of other top voices and potential business partners. This leads to increasing your professional network.
Don’t be surprised if you recieve inmails or connection requests from other LinkedIn influencers or industry leaders, with a proposal of new business opportunities or collaborations.
4. Inhance your personal brand
Becoming a LinkedIn influencer is a great opportunity to boost your personal Brand.
This highlights your expertise and authority in your field, next to other decision-makers, that can be beneficial for authority, trust and career advancement withean your audience.
This trust is important to forging stronger professional relationships, landing mentorship roles, or launching entrepreneurial projects.
In essence, as your personal brand grows, so does your ability to positively impact your career and the industry as a whole.
5. Influence industry trends
Finally, as a social media influencer, your voice and expertise becomes a pivotal force in shaping, establishing new trends and ways of communicating in your industry.
This role enables you to introduce new ideas, promote innovative practices, methodologies and challenge other innovators to participate in this wave.
You encourage the adoption of better practices, learning and development via informal content.
So your involvement and content “set the agenda for professional debate”, bring important issues to the table, and influence the direction or development of industry standards.
How to Become a LinkedIn Influencer?
9 steps to become a LinkedIn influencer:
- Define your goals
- Build a content strategy for a niche
- Optimize your LinkedIn profile
- Activate Creator Mode
- Batch and schedule posts
- Use an engagement tool
- Reply to all comments
- Engage with other posts
- Expand your network
1. Define your goals
Building an audience on LinkedIn is useless if you have nothing to sell.
Becoming a LinkedIn influencer is not a goal in itself. It’s a way to build an audience and sell a product or a service.
So before you start posting on LinkedIn, ask yourself: why am I even doing that?
What type of LinkedIn lead generation strategy do you want to create?
Think about the ways you could monetize your LinkedIn influence and make that goal very clear.
2. Optimize your LinkedIn profile
Starting to post on LinkedIn without having an optimized LinkedIn profile is like having a hole in your pocket.
Would you spend money on ads to send people to a website landing page not optimized for conversion?
I guess not. Same rules apply for LinkedIn profiles.
You don’t want to attract people with posts and then get them disappointed by your profile.
Before you start posting, take the time to:
- Design an original picture and banner
- Write a Simple and Clear Headline
- Detail value proposition in the About section
- Display social proof in Featured section
- Customize your LinkedIn URL
- Optimize the Activity section
- Detail job experiences and education
Once you have that, you can start thinking about content.
3. Build a content strategy
There a more and more people posting on LinkedIn so you need to think about a digital marketing strategy if you want to make your personal brand stand out.
The best thing is to start with a niche, take a precise subject and become the best expert on this topic.
I personally started to post about Sales Navigator before giving any startup, productivity, growth advice and it worked really well.
With experience, I understood what type of content performs well. In my case it’s:
- Celebrations
- How To’s
- Stories
To sum up:
- Become an expert about one topic
- Publish tutorials and stories around this topic
- Celebrate your victories with the audience
Your followers count should start increasing.
4. Activate Creator Mode
If you want to use you authority to generate LinkedIn leads or traffic to your website, you absolutely need to activate creator mode.
There are 3 advantages to that:
- You can showcase a link on your profile
- You display your number of followers
- You put your content forward on your profile
To activate creator mode, simply scroll down on your profile and click on “Creator mode”.
5. Batch and schedule posts
A huge part of becoming successful on LinkedIn is to be consistent.
You need to publish at least once a week. Whatever your rhythm is, you must stick to it. That will force you to produce content.
There will be times when you won’t have the inspiration or the energy to produce content.
To anticipate these moments you can do 2 things:
- Batch LinkedIn posts creation.
- Use a scheduling tool to schedule LinkedIn posts for next weeks.
I personally use Taplio for that. The tool is really simple to use and save a lot of time.
Every month, I take 4 hours to write all my LinkedIn posts for the month.
I program their publication using a scheduling autmation tool and I don’t need to worry about anything.
Only need to connect to reply to the comments.
This saves so much time compared to connecting to LinkedIn every day and writing the post on the platform.
6. Use an engagement tool
Engagement pods allow you to automatically get likes and comment from members of the pods.
They are often used to give LinkedIn post an initial boost to increase their chances of going viral.
They have a bad reputation, as many people completely abuse of them to add thousands of fake likes to their post.
However, there is a smart way to use them. The condition is that you can create engagement pods with people you know.
Here is how to process:
- Create a pod
- Invite your friend and colleagues
- Add your LinkedIn posts link to the pod
- Your friends and colleagues will automatically like the post
That way you don’t have to send DM’s to all your friends and colleagues every time you publish a new post on LinkedIn.
7. Reply to all comments
Replying to all comments is essential is want to build a solid community.
Two advantages to replying to all comments:
- You build relationships with followers.
- You increase the reach of your posts.
The number of comment is taken into account by the LinkedIn algorithm to push your post into more LinkedIn’s feed.
The more you get comments, the more your post get impressions.
Plus the comment count on LinkedIn posts takes the replies into account, the more you reply, the more your post looks viral.
8. Engage with others posts
You can’t expect to have dozens of comments if you don’t interact with anyone on LinkedIn.
If you consistently comment other influencers’ posts on LinkedIn, there is a good chance they will give you back the favor and comment your post as well.
Taplio also make this really easy.
They automatically detect posts in your niche and allow you to send comments from their interface in just a few minutes a day.
The best part?
You can also build your own list:
- friends
- colleagues
- influencers
This allows you to build targeted lists of people you want to interact with.
9. Expand your network
When you publish a new LinkedIn post, LinkedIn first shows it to your 1st degree connections.
Mathematically, the more you have 1st degree connection, the more you get chances to get likes and comments.
If your 1rst degree connections interact with the post, then LinkedIn will show it to their connections (your 2nd degree connections).
This is how virality works on LinkedIn.
And so, you should make actions to expand your LinkedIn network as you soon as you can.
A good way to do that is to use Sales Navigator to build super targeted lists of people you want to connect with.
3 LinkedIn Influencers You Can Get Inspiration From
Here are 3 LinkedIn influencers you can get inspiration from to build your content strategy:
- Gary Vaynerchuk
- Justin Welsh
- Guillaume Moubeche
1. Gary Vaynerchuk
You probably already know Gary Vaynerchuk, he is all over the place because he is a content machine.
A true inspiration.
2. Justin Welsh
Justin Welsh has quickly become the #1 LinkedIn influencer for solopreneurs.
His posts are really well written as he follows precise copywriting techniques.
3. Guillaume Moubeche
Guillaume Moubeche writes about Saas, B2B and Growth.
His posts are short and efficient.
You have good example that your post don’t need to be really long to get likes and comments on its profile.
Conclusion
Becoming a LinkedIn influencer is more than just earning followers.
It’s more about establishing a platform where you can share what you know, impact your industry, enhance your personal brand, and open up countless professional opportunities.
So, by applying the strategies I’ve outlined in this guide, you’ll surely elevate your professional presence on LinkedIn.
FAQ
What is a LinkedIn influencer?
LinkedIn Influencers are people who use thier voice to promote their expertise, brands, products, software and more on this platform.
Though LinkedIn focuses on professional networking and applying for jobs, content creators play a critical role in influencing and engaging users.
How much do LinkedIn influencers make?
The money you earn from being a LinkedIn influencer it depends on how you monetize your LinkedIn audience.
It can be based on factors like partnerships, follower count, and content type. Generally, an influencer with 100,000 followers might earn between a few hundred to a few thousand dollars per post.
Richest LinkedIn influencers leverage their audience to sell products, trainings, or services. LinkedIn influencer is not a job title itself.
How many followers does it take to be an influencer on LinkedIn?
10K followers is high enough to perceived as a LinkedIn influencer by a majority of people. Even if there is no official follower number to hit to be considered a LinkedIn influencer.
How are LinkedIn influencers selected?
If you want to integrate the LinkedIn influencer program, you need to reach out directly to LinkedIn at linkedincreators@linkedin.com. They will tell you everything you need to know about how to join the program.
What are the benefits of becoming a LinkedIn influencer?
The main benefit of being a LinkedIn influencer is to have an audience you can monetize.
If you sell products, trainings, or services and you have LinkedIn followers, it will be way easier for you to makes sales than someone starting from scratch.
How much money does it cost to become a LinkedIn influencer?
Becoming a LinkedIn influencer doesn’t cost anything. You just need to create a free LinkedIn account and start posting. You can invest in tools like Taplio to save time, but this is not an obligation.
What is the difference between a LinkedIn influencer and an influencer on other social media platforms?
The difference between a LinkedIn influencer and an influencer on other social platform is that they post business related content. LinkedIn is professional social media so most content published on it is B2B related.
