Personal Branding For Women on LinkedIn

We all have a personal brand whether we do something about it or not. LinkedIn is a great place to proactively manage it.

Personal branding on LinkedIn is about curation and authenticity. Curation is about carefully selecting what information you feed into your LinkedIn profile. If you put everything you’ve ever done on your LinkedIn profile, your personal brand will be all over the place. And this is how people will perceive you.

Because we all have a personal brand whether we do something about it or not. A personal brand is what people say about us when we leave the room, said Jeff Bezos. Luckily, thanks to LinkedIn it’s easy to proactively manage your personal brand.

Personal branding for career women on LinkedIn

Women more than anyone need to be intentional about their presence on LinkedIn. As stated in a recent Harvard Business Review article, women must be twice as good to get half as far.

2 steps for women to bring their personal brand to life

The first step to proactively manage your personal brand is to get clear on:

What you want to be known for and how you want to be perceived.

The more specific you are, the better. In other words, your LinkedIn profile has to have a clear direction that is simple stupid for anyone to understand. From that point on, everything on your LinkedIn profile has to be dedicated to supporting your personal brand.

This means selecting what information you keep, what information you delete, and what needs to be added to complete the full picture of you as a leader. More often than not, the key is to rework your LinkedIn profile with your personal brand in mind.

• Rewrite everything with the intention to reassure people that visit your profile that you are exactly the leader they’ve been looking for.
• Use all visual features available on your LinkedIn profile to anchor your personal brand.

Repetition is key to create a trusting bond with your network. But trust doesn’t come only with repetition, you also need authenticity. Authenticity is key to make your personal brand memorable. If your personal brand is not making you memorable, then it’s not serving you and your career goals.

Applying storytelling and personal branding can help women make their LinkedIn profile more authentic

Stop using words and phrases that anyone can say about themselves. Here's a list of real examples of overused phrases you should NOT put on your LinkedIn profile:

• I am a passionate, global, and experienced leader.
• I am a pragmatic leader who can navigate ambiguity.
• Accomplished executive with a XX+ years track record of successful strategic and tactical leadership.
• I am a motivated and hands-on professional with over XX years' experience.
• I am a leader that collaborates effectively with external experts.
• With a strong business acumen and commercial mindset, I am a doer, and a result-driven manager.
• The team really matters to me! I enjoy leading it to success.
• Being a good leader is one of my greatest goals.
• Versatile professional with experience working in cross-functional teams & diverse industries.
• Capable of working in detail while driving organisational and strategic challenges.
• I bring a unique mix of leadership, a truly global mindset, and first-hand expertise with XYZ.

I bet you can stand behind all those statements, can’t you?! That’s why those are not great phrases to have on your LinkedIn profile because anyone with drive and ambition can say them about themselves.

Adding authenticity to your LinkedIn profile in a way that works means that you find a way to say these phrases in a way that no one else can...

• Instead of writing that you’re passionate about something, talk about why you’re passionate about it.
  It makes it more believable, human and friendly.
• Instead of “strong business acumen” use specific words that actually prove your point.
• Instead of “pragmatic”, describe what pragmatic looks like in day to day activities.

In sum, use simple words to describe your unique way of doing things.

QUICK TIP: PERSONAL BRANDING FOR WOMEN ON LINKEDIN

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For more hands-on tips, read my article: Algorithm-based LinkedIn Profile Optimisation for Women