My go-to guy for all things LinkedIn is David J.P. Fisher. His recent post on LinkedIn got me thinking about creating and maintaining a professional personal brand on social media, and whether it was worth the effort anymore. It seems like a lot of people have decreased their time on social media, or stepped away completely. The algorithms change all the time and organic reach seems to keep going down.
Below is Fisher’s full post. (You can scroll down within this window or read it here on LinkedIn.)
Fisher talks about “influencers” who want to build a personal brand and business model around that. I agree with his assessment that it is going to get even more difficult to do this going forward. He writes:
The first is the “influencers”. These are people that use personal brand as an end in itself.
They want to build their platform and following to market themselves in some way. They’re usually selling their consulting services, trainings, products, merch, etc. They are content creators who are focused on building up a large following and getting their name out there as broadly as possible.
I think many of these people will struggle. A lot of these business models require high volume to work, and they are aligned to a small number of ubiquitous platforms that created a ton of organic reach in the past. And that’s just not the world we’re moving towards.
When Fisher suggested we think about our professional personal brand as our reputation, that made sense to me, and a compelling value proposition. He writes:
In fact, you can replace “personal brand” and just say reputation. These are the people who want their brand to support their credibility as a professional. It’s the salesperson who wants to be seen as a trusted advisor or subject matter expert who has developed years of expertise in their field.
Your reputation is everything in business. I think it is important for white-collar professionals, corporate or entrepreneur, to maintain a presence on LinkedIn, and any other social media platforms that would be relevant to your current and prospective clients or employers.
Photo by Greg Bulla on Unsplash
