Making a good first impression on social media is supported by doing authentic personal branding.
Executive personal branding matters when it comes to building a strong and effective LinkedIn profile—the kind of profile that helps you put your best foot forward, make connections that convert and drive your career more rapidly toward its next milestone.
Before we talk about specific steps you can take to build a LinkedIn profile that fully supports your brand, let’s take inspiration from Michael Dowling’s LinkedIn profile.
When you look at Dowling’s page, you learn three important things about him in the first four lines:
- He is president/CEO of Northwell Health, New York state’s largest health care system.
- He’s a “healthcare optimist.”
- He wrote a book on immigrating from Ireland.
Having such on-brand information right at the start will inspire some people to dig deeper into who Michael Dowling is and what he stands for. Those who do will find the website his team created that features his NY Times quote:
“This is not a job. It’s a responsibility. If it were a job, you could work anywhere. You’re here to transform care and change lives. In return, yours will be transformed.”
Feeling inspired by Dowling’s authentic personal branding? You’re not alone. He has over 37,000 followers.
Doing effective executive personal branding can help you build a LinkedIn presence that’s like Dowling’s—one that’s easily understood and that inspires people to connect with you.
The key thing to keep in mind when applying your executive personal branding to your social media presence is that first impressions matter.
Executive Personal Branding Helps You Make a Good First Impression
I am a firm believer that spending time with the time-proven ETA™ process from Revealing Genius helps leaders better express their personal brand message and make better first impressions.
The process has three steps. “Excavate” is about uncovering your purpose. “Tell” is about developing messages to express your brand effectively in many different situations. (In the “tell” step, you develop such brand collateral pieces as your LinkedIn profile and your elevator pitch.) And “affirm” is about the ways you practice and “steep” in you can talk about it with conviction.
I don’t know if our example, Dowling, went through a formal executive personal branding process, but it’s clear to me from his profile that he knows his unique reason to serve, believes in it and has practiced how to express it. He leverages his authentic personal branding to make an awesome first impression.
Establish Your Professional Brand on LinkedIn
You might find it a little intimidating to know that visitors to your LinkedIn profile may form a first impression about you in as little as 50 milliseconds! The first second on your page might matter more than all the seconds that follow (if any do). Interestingly, a first impression can stay with a person for years. So, you’ll want to make sure that first moment of contact hooks them and makes them want to learn more about you.
How can you go about this?
- Do formal authentic personal branding, like ETA. I’m sure some leaders know who they are and articulate it well as a matter of course. But most people benefit from spending time developing their executive personal branding—thinking about who they are, developing authentic personal branding messages for every occasion and affirming those messages until they can feel them in their bones.
- Study up on and implement design and presentation best practices. To put it in old-school newspaper language, make sure the “above-the-fold” area rocks! Remember how we learned three incredibly compelling things about Dowling in the first four lines of his LinkedIn profile? Be sure to put your most important “news” at the top.
- Get familiar with best practices for LinkedIn profiles. For example, first impressions are 94% design-related. If you use a profile photo in which you are smiling, that will build trust from the get-go. Use the background behind your photo wisely as well. It’s known that simple design tweaks can result in significant conversions. Also, the character limit for LinkedIn article headlines is 220, including spaces. Here’s a place to spend time. And don’t forget to do market testing!
If you’d like to do executive personal branding in support of your efforts to have a LinkedIn profile that makes a fantastic first impression, I have some resources for you. To get our free monthly Revealing Genius newsletter, please add your email in the box at the bottom of this webpage. Or, if you’re ready to be reminded to be on-brand every day of the year, please become one of the first 50 to register for the RG365 Membership, which is in the “alpha” test phase of development, so it’s just $12/year ($1/month).
