Leveraging LinkedIn as a creator to get brand deals
Why should you leverage Linkedin?
A growing number of polls and surveys note that more than 50% of today’s youth would choose to be a full time creator if they could. Plus, the ability to create and distribute content is more accessible than ever means the market is growing more competitive by the day.
Your ability to stand out as a creator will depend more and more on a brand’s ability to easily connect and work with you (or your team). Which is why, regardless of the content you create – if your goal is to turn content creation into a career, you should be leveraging LinkedIn.
Brands, agencies, and startup founders have daily discussions about influencer marketing, but creators are often missing from this important dialogue.
How to join the dialogue
To get started, create a “Company Page” by clicking on the “Work” icon in the top right corner.
Note: If you have concerns about connecting your “professional” identities with your creator “persona,” you will want to create a second LinkedIn profile to manage your company page. This is to prevent accidental interactions from your professional account. You can think about a company page like a Facebook page and your account like your user account on Facebook – very similar model.
Once your LinkedIn company page is set up, encourage your community to follow the page and (using LinkedIn’s native feature) invite influencer marketing and brand managers to follow your company page.
You are able to pin one post to the top of your company page. Ideally, your first post should be an introduction with a pdf of your media kit (even better if your media kit is multiple or can be broken up into multiple pages) – you can think of this like an Instagram post with multiple pictures. Post all of your links as a comment on your own post – avoid using a link aggregator here.
What to post
The content you’re posting on LinkedIn will rarely be the exact same content you are posting to your normal channels. After all, your goal here is not to entertain, but to showcase your business acumen and secure the bag.
What makes LinkedIn magical is that your content doesn’t drop off like most other social media platforms. This is why it isn’t uncommon to see months-old posts getting new engagement.
When thinking about what content to post, make sure to consider how it relates to the goals of your target audience: brands and agencies.
While the goals are unique to each brand, agency, and team working on a campaign there are some goals that are standard. These goals are your starting point to look at your content through their eyes.
Consumer goods are looking for sales, customers, or conversations hyping their products to potential customers.
Service as a Software (SaaS) companies are looking for new user acquisition and to inspire users to return to their game or service.
Service-based companies are looking for lead generation.
To help you get started thinking about the content your audience would be interested in, here are some types of content you should consider posting to your company page:
Monthly reports on your analytics – help brands see you understand data and why it’s important. To do this would be to post your best brand safe content from that month with a written update to how your channels performed this month. If you wanted to take it a step further with your LinkedIn account “repost with your thoughts” talk about what experiments you tried, if you took time off, or if it's an industry trend
Case studies or retrospectives of work you’ve done with brands - post them as a native LinkedIn article to your company page (Note: articles are different than posts)
Share collaborations you’ve had with other creators that resulted in something out of the ordinary
Share about your brand – How did you develop the logo, colors, the moniker? What does your brand stand for?
Share your goals – many people desire to be helpful and sharing your goals could result in great success
Share excitement in trends or predict upcoming trends
Keep the conversation going
With your account and page appropriately set up, you are ready to start following, connecting, and engaging with people (or conversations) that are interesting to you. It’s important on LinkedIn not to just post content into the void, but to actively engage in dialogue.
Remember that you only have one reputation and your reputation is built with every micro moment and interaction. It only takes one person who had a bad experience with you to shape others’ views of you.
Unlike Twitter, LinkedIn is a place for nuance. There are still individuals that lean into posting black-or-white statements to elicit a strong reaction, but even those posts tend to have a colorful conversation on them.
Join groups relevant to your interests! Need inspiration? Check these out:
Maximize your presence
Not every post on your page or account will be a home run– what’s most important is that you post at least three times a week and engage in conversations as often as possible.
Here are three ways to maximize your presence leveraging both your page and account:
Repost your own content
Repost your page’s posts with your account sharing additional context or thoughts from you as a person
Repost (not as a new post) previous content that did well
Repost an old post with new thoughts if you have new or additional comments to add
Engage as both your page and your account
While it may sound counterintuitive to engage two times on somebody else’s post, consider how you might position your page versus your account.
Comment on your own content with your page/account
Share, share, share
Read an interesting article? Share it.
Read another person’s post and find it interesting? Share it.
Have predictions about a product, industry, or trend? Share it.
See a conversation among creators that you have thoughts about? Share it.
And like other services, LinkedIn favors posts with photos, videos, or gifs over just text, and favors natively uploaded content over linking out.
If you’re hungry for more, check out LinkedIn’s resources or Google what others are saying about growing their LinkedIn content.
Now go forth and get started! It’s a competitive market out there, and creators who spend time bridging gaps between themselves and brands will outshine those who don’t.
