Sales Leaders! LinkedIn is THE Most Popular Platform to Share Long Form Content And Build Your Sales Pipeline. But there ARE other ways to grow your audience and brand, and here’s how.
Podcast: The State of LinkedIN on The Honest Field Guide Podcast, by JinJa Birkenbeuel
I always advise my agency clients that LinkedIn is the most popular social media platform to share long-form, industry-focused content, but it's not always the best platform to share your strategies and ideas related to the industry you're in if you aren’t all in. So, here are a few things you need to change immediately that will help you start building up your professional brand, which leads to a more powerful sales and networking pipeline:
Your mindset that online content sharing is the best way to get your message out is simply not true. Try to find opportunities to get your content published into different publications or trade journals. Can you write Op-Eds to help build your thought leadership brand like I do for a prestigious publication like Fast Company Magazine?
Show up at in-person events, conferences, and meetings. Sharing your ideas that you would've put in long-form content during a conversation at an industry event can be more powerful because you have a direct conversation with an actual person that you can help or that might be able to help you.
Publish a white paper on an area of your superpower expertise. And that white paper can be published on your website, and you can ask people for their contact information in order to access your white paper.
Create your own newsletter, on your own website, or by using substack, and then collect people's email addresses, and then you can send out a newsletter once a week, every two weeks, every month, every quarter, once a year; you are in charge of your content, and not at the dire mercy of any tech platform. You own the distribution frequency process, and the people you collect through email are your people.
All in all, LinkedIn deserves to be the most popular way to share long-form content because it's a powerful network with powerful people, and the algorithms are powerful as well. Keep in mind, you don't control this platform. The content you get served, the people that are recommended to connect with - someone (or AI programmed by that someone) is programming that, and it’s not you. You don't own it. You can't fix it; you can't change it, so you always need to make sure that you use other resources to get your content out. And again, some of these other resources sometimes are more powerful for you individually than even LinkedIn is.
I share more content like this in my monthly newsletter The Birk Creative Reset. Sign up here.