Personal Branding: Engaging Online Communities
We've come to believe the importance in investing time to build our personal brand, to attract and appeal to communities offline and online. It is the go-to-market strategy, for many professionals to gather network that can eventually be their potential clientele, investors, partners, employees or in anyway contribute to their business or career.
With more than 650 million professional profiles listed on #LinkedIn, offline networking though still effective is now not as important as networking online.
Why online?
Simple math, it's relatively easy to understand that online presence allows us to tap into virtual communities to which we can connect with far more people, in a shorter period of time, and e-meeting people from countries we probably never been to. This naturally opens up opportunities to transact business, collaborate or win clients easier than investing physical time to acquire them. We are limited to how many people we speak in person in a day, but our message conveyed online could reach thousands - just far more effective. (of course, in consideration that these online communities are our right target audience)
It's still about communicating.
And communicating is still a two way street. Connecting with people and gathering communities online is not about you broadcasting announcements day to day but to invest a considerable time to communicate, initiate conversations, follow through enquiries and genuinely connect. People connect with you, because you responded to them. You post like you are communicating with them, and you acknowledge their comments and feedback in response.
Here are four ways to engage community online, that you can start applying to see a major hike in your online engagement while you invest in your online personal brand.
Replying and acknowledging comments
After curating good content and posting them, you'll naturally get some reactions and comments in response to what you shared. Regardless their content reply, it's firstly polite to acknowledge their comments and wherever possible, to spend some time replying to them. Your post clearly impacted them to initiate a response back to you and replying to them naturally initiate a conversation that sub-consciously build up online trust between you both. That online trust will form the basis for any transactions or collaborations, in future. This act also let other people know, you value new friendships and that you are approachable and friendly.
Read here for my article on the Top Questions About Personal Branding
Reply private messages
Putting yourself out there is just 50% of the work, the other half is about doing the proper follow up. It's like attending a physical event, exchanging name cards but going home only to do nothing about those contacts. Online connection can be of high value, and it's your intent to make something happen for you and the other party. Your good content might encourage someone to make contact with you possibly to engage your services, find out more of what you do, share their problems so you can offer solutions etc. Hence, replying to those private messages as a decent follow up is when you can take that first step to closing a deal or earn revenue. And you wouldn't want to lose a potential client.
When someone tags you
Ok, I get it. Some people hated to be #tagged by random people on LinkedIn. Tagging is one of the algorithms that triggers online engagement on #LinkedIn hence contributing to the awareness of your profile. So here are your choices!
- If someone who tagged you in a post never communicated with you before, or contributed to your past postings, this most likely will irritate you. Additionally if the post is not related to you, or your business or in a demographic you are not keen to be visible - then feel free to remove mention, so the tag is removed completely.
- However, this is #LinkedIn and we do not know everyone anyway but that does not mean, we cannot contribute to posts we are tagged in. Sometimes people we don't know tag us because they see us an industry expert and welcome us to give our opinions or insights to their content. And if we do have that spare 5 minutes, why not share something we know - after all, this increases our visibility to their network and that also triggers traffic to our profile hence boosting our personal brand.
Requesting Endorsements and Recommendations
If you realised that there are some profiles who have been engaging with you for quite some time, they probably know you well enough now to give you an endorsement. You can start to humbly asking them to leave you a good recommendation or endorsement for the skills you are good at - or you can endorse or leave them a recommendation first for the great skills they have. Naturally people reciprocate such gestures back to you.
In this video below, I shared some tips on how to get started with Personal Branding.
I touch on what is personal branding, identifying target audience, engaging communities online, and the four steps on how to win people.
Need help with Personal Branding?
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