How One Marketer Built a Personal Brand on LinkedIn in Under 8 Months

Building your personal brand on social media might seem like an impossible task. 

What do you post? How do you get it to resonate? What do you offer? Should you use video or a different type of content. 

In this episode of AMP Up Your Digital Marketing, Glenn Gaudet speaks with Daniel Murray, Senior Manager of Marketing Operations at ServiceTitan, a software platform for trades. They discuss how Daniel built up his personal brand on LinkedIn in less than 8 months to the point where his simple, short, text-based posts consistently garners him hundreds of comments in just a few hours.

What you’ll learn: 

• The keys to building a personal brand on LinkedIn.
• Why LinkedIn is different from other social media platforms. 
• What TikTok and LinkedIn have in common. 

Daniel garnered over 11,000 followers in less than 8 months and breaks it down in a way that’s simple to understand.

He explains that it’s about consistency and quality, but consistency is the most important piece. To make it easy on himself, he sticks with what he’s good at and tends to stay away from posting ebooks, videos of himself, or other tricks of the trade you typically see influencers go with. This may be a different practice for others, and may even come off as against the grain, but it’s worked for him to build his personal brand.   

How to Present Your Personal Brand

Each person will present themselves in a different way. 

You might want to use video, share your blog posts, appear on podcasts and share your snippets, and more. Daniel strictly uses text. He writes out each post and rarely shares a blog post, ebook, video, or any other piece of content. 

Why? Because it’s what he’s most comfortable with. 

“You do what you’re good at,” Daniel said. “For example, Dave Gerhardt and Garry V. are very good at video, so they kill it when they get on video. For me, I’m better at writing text, so I stick with what I’m good at on the platform.” 

Many marketers think that they need to chase the latest trends and do things they see other people doing that they may not be comfortable with. You’re not going to be comfortable in your first moments on camera. You’ve seen people posting videos of themselves on social media, but you’ll need a few attempts on it before you’re comfortable with it. 

You could get really good at video or podcasting eventually, but what are you comfortable with now? You’ve seen a lot of people find success on rapidly growing apps like TikTok, but is that app right for you? 

“A lot of marketers chase that shiny new object instead of sticking with what they know works,” Daniel said. “They give up on stuff that’s been working for them for years because they go after the shiny new object everyone else is talking about. ‘Ok, I need to invest in TikTok for B2B’ or something like that, and the audience is not there. You need to do what resonates with your audience.” 

Growing Your Personal Brand on LinkedIn

As someone who grew his own LinkedIn personal branding in a short amount of time, he has some tips for other marketers. 

He credits one small change he made in LinkedIn settings to growing his LinkedIn presence “exponentially.”

That change is removing the “connect” option in your profile and only allowing people to follow you. 

If you go into your LinkedIn Settings under the Privacy section and click on “Who can follow you,” you’ll see an option to enable follow as the primary action people can take when they view your profile.

By turning that option on, people won’t be able to connect with you, and they’ll follow you instead. 

Why does this work? 

“It feels like they can just follow you instead of being a business connection,” Daniel said. “There’s no approval process at all. I don’t even know who is following me. People will just connect with you for no reason. Following has been a good switch for me.”

The other key tip he has for marketers is, “B+ quality, and A+ consistency.” 

The most important thing you do is be consistent, but you need quality as well, according to Daniel. 

“I post every day,” he said. “Consistency is key. You need quality too but it can be B+ to be successful. The greatest thing about LinkedIn is it has a networking effect. It builds with every post. The same people come, then there are 5 or 6 new people.”

Building Organic Reach 

The benefit of building a large personal brand for yourself on LinkedIn is you have a huge organic reach. 

There are companies that would spend a great deal of money to have the amount of reach on their posts that Daniel has organically. That is the point of paid ads and influencer marketing after all. 

“LinkedIn and TikTok have the best organic reach,” Daniel said. 

Last year, Daniel posted random videos on TikTok that were not consistent to a target audience, but he was still able to get 1,000 views. Now that TikTok is much more popular and has more people on it, it’s a little more competitive, making it tougher to get 1,000 views, but he still thinks it’s one of the best platforms for organic reach. 

The Benefit of Personal Branding for Companies

When the employees of a company are on LinkedIn, it increases the brand’s reach, it humanizes the brand, and it lets followers know that there are some smart and helpful people at the organization. 

“I recommend every company encourage their employees to get on LinkedIn,” Daniel said. “I would never force them to, but if the leaders in the company start to show their success there, and explain to colleagues that it’s a great way to promote your personal brand, and get your name out there, it has a greater effect for your company. Employees are the face of the company.”

Daniel isn’t trying to promote ServiceTitan on LinkedIn, but his personal branding helps promote the company he works for, he said. If people like the people who work at your company, they will also like the company or be more interested in it. 

AMP Up Your Digital Marketing brings together the leading marketing practitioners to share how they are succeeding in today’s digital landscape. Each podcast episode focuses on providing you with the knowledge and strategies you need to be a successful marketer. Subscribe via Apple, FIR Podcast Network, or wherever you get your podcasts. 

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