Love vs. Fear LinkedIn
Whatever your career or personal goals, if you’re wanting to play on LinkedIn, having a posting strategy will help you come up in user searches and show you as active vs. dormant. With it’s 875 million members across 200 countries and territories, the opportunity feels huge. But how do we show up on LinkedIn? And how do we align our personal brand to our posts in ways which don’t torpedo our career or eliminate us from our dream job?
If you seek advice from someone with millions of followers and connections, stop reading. That’s not me. If you want insights from someone who’s built 90% of her new coaching client base via LinkedIn, knows at least 50% of her community, and feels creative bliss as she posts, then stay a little longer.
Address and Quieten the Fear
In posting on LinkedIn, many coachees worry that their employer will read their posts, peers/colleagues/managers will mock them for being self promotional, and/or decision makers will reject their promotion. Others worry about humiliating themselves publicly through error. The latter feels amplified when you’re posting in a second or subsequent language different to your mother language. My guidance includes:
- Fret not. It’s just LinkedIn and many posts (even from native English speakers) contain grammatical errors or typos. Few notice. Alternatively, have a posting buddy/communications coach who proofs your posts.
- Separate yourself as an individual. Have a statement somewhere in your profile that clarifies any comments or opinion become your own. (C-Suite folks I coach do this often!) Put that work audience out of your mind or create a separate profile where you feel freer.
- Stay curious of what your fear teaches or reminds you. Might your company culture feel too strict? Your stability feel threatened? Your potential success daunting or ill-timed? (Sometimes we fear success as much as failure.)
- Make any post about industry trends and why you think it’s doomed, hopeful, or fantastic, but separate your comments from anything specific to your work or company.
- Find a theme or purpose unrelated to work, something more neutral, like general management tips, what you’ve learned from managing up, down, and across the chain across multiple continents and industries. Figure out what you’re an advocate of (i.e. wellness, continuing education, ensuring all children gain education — whatever) and post on that.
Have An Intention
To counter your fear and feel pulled into action, let your intention and hopes motivate you. Make your LinkedIn posts less about you and more about those you want to serve. This pivot will pull you into action and feel more uplifting, meaningful, and joyous. (I learned this mantra from my colleague and mentor, Bill Carmody at Positive Intelligence where I certified as a coach.)
My goal and intention: Sparking bravery and creativity in others to reinvent and/or offering insights from me (or others) on how to feel more calm, authentic, and less worried in our written and oral communications, especially with spooky audiences. Knowing and stating this purpose means everything I do must align with this intent when I post. My postings feel then like a gift and sharing vs. something about me, hence motivating me to frequently post.
Have A Target Audience
As part of that same training, Carmody urged all mental fitness coaches to narrow our focus and commit to a target, niche audience. For instance, my target audience is immigrant leaders who, like me, left everything they know behind to come to a new land and make a difference. They want to cultivate a unique blend of leadership presence integrating the best parts of their motherland and the parts they like within the new culture where they now lead. (Rebellious Americans who pulled away from the fold find their way to me, too.)
With this audience in mind, I can self-edit whatever thought leadership ideas I write on here on Medium or produce podcasts on via the Sage Sayers, my first podcast. I think about their struggles, the patterns I see among them, and the learnings from my coaching I can share with others via LinkedIn. As I question my self worth in sharing, I remember: Even if one person reads this, that feels great!
Be Open and Creative
As you build your posts, feel creative and avoid minimizing what counts as a post. For instance, sharing a podcast interview from the Economist Asks and time stamping a moment where an expert beautifully fields a question to which they do not have an answer counts. (This tactic also falls within my goals/purpose.) So does doing my own podcast on the same topic, writing a Medium article, or sharing data on the numbers of coachees who struggle with ad-hoc questions, offering a poll asking my audience why ad-hoc questions bother them so much. For creative fodder:
- Use multi-media. I sometimes produce one-minute explainer videos for a podcast or article I’ve produced on a thought leadership topic for additional ways to connect. Videos also help me relate to the discomfort of being bold. (My trailer video for my podcast, possibly the wildest thing I’ve posted and which I built on TikTok, helped win me a major client.)
- Be a little personal and seasonal. One fellow coach doubled his normal responses when sharing a still life photo of peaches he’d gathered from his summer garden in Rome and musing on what they signify to Romans.
- Be vulnerable, when and if it feels right. One executive coach and friend shared a sad update of her brother becoming murdered and a plea to her community to cherish time with each other and not let work take over, no matter what. Fellow coaches, executives, even CEOs wrote back feeling uplifted and heartbroken, too.
Stay Experimental (and Detached)
We’re talking today about a giant social media platform (LinkedIn) so it’s hard to feel truly detached. But if you’re committed to playing more or starting to play, detach from the outcome and number of responses. Here’s why: Focusing too much on the outcome will squash any enthusiasm and momentum within. You’ll also feed your inner Judge who’s fearful and convinced of failure. Experiment by:
- Observing what people respond to, in numbers, and comments; but not obsessively and more with curiosity on what yields bigger or smaller responses.
- Observing how you feel when you post. What excites you? What feels bold? Safe? Proud? Too out there and/or irrelevant or unrelated?
- Discerning what does and does not yield responses and integrate that learning, if you wish. Sharing my career milestones, like certifying as PCC coach and with Positive Intelligence, exceeding 2,500 individual coaching hours, returning to a memoir I started last year has (to date) yielded my biggest post responses. This taught me: I’ve lots of coaches following me (more than I realized) and many professionals feeling stuck and wanting big career change.
- Lining up across a football field in your mind the number of people who respond or read your post. This tactic helps quieten the Judge who’ll say nobody’s caring. Also, remember Marie Kondo’s mantra in her book, Joy at Work: Less becomes more in social media. You’re more likely to find joy when you target a specific target audience aligned with your goals and values vs. spreading yourself thin across multiple platforms and with no real goal in mind.
With the New Year approaching and heightened layoffs this month, I’ve found more coachees wanting to start a LinkedIn presence but feeling lost as to how. When fear prevails, we immobilize and do not act. I hope my sharing of the importance of purpose, individuality, and creativity (and the joy I feel from my own ad-hoc LinkedIn postings) sparks a new perspective in you.
Debbi Gardiner McCullough coaches and trains immigrant leaders to become more confident, concise, and mentally fit communicators. From Wisconsin, she owns and runs Hanging Rock Coaching and serves as a communication effectiveness fellow coach to leaders all over the globe with BetterUp.