10 Tips to Become a LinkedIn Influencer in 2024

Discover the 10 key tips that will help you become an influencer on LinkedIn and reach leads for your business through the visibility you'll gain

If these ambitions resonate with you, then this article is custom-made. We will present 10 practical and proven tips to become a LinkedIn influencer in 2024.

Whether you're just starting your journey on LinkedIn or have already established a solid foothold, our tips are designed to adapt to every stage of your journey and your personal aspirations.

Ready to grow your influence on this professional network? Follow the guide!

1. Define your niche and positioning

To stand out as an influencer on LinkedIn, clearly identifying your preferred subject and target audience is crucial. This involves determining your area of expertise, the needs you address, the sectors most affected, and how you can differentiate yourself.

Find your area of expertise

The core of your content strategy is your area of expertise. It should align with your profession, passions, or projects. It's crucial that it's specific enough to specialize and establish yourself as a reference.

For example, if you're a freelance web writer, the real estate sector might be a good specialization choice.

To pinpoint your expertise, ask yourself these questions:

• What are your skills, knowledge, and experiences?
• What problems can you solve or needs can you fulfill?
• What subjects inspire and motivate you?
• What are the needs and interests of your potential audience?

Competitive analysis can reveal opportunities and under-served areas. Identify the content already offered and think about how to make your unique contribution.

Understand your target audience

Understanding your target audience, or the people you want to engage, is fundamental. It should match your specialization and goals and be specific enough to ensure a relevant message.

For example, if you specialize in real estate, your content might interest real estate agents or investors.

To better know your audience, adopt their perspective and study their characteristics, needs, expectations, challenges, motivations, etc., through tools like personas or surveys.

Also, observe how your audience interacts with other LinkedIn influencers in your field. Analyze the content they like, comment on, share, and the questions or opinions they express. This monitoring will help you adjust your tone, style, and message to better engage, interest, and retain your audience.

On the subject of audience segments in "Mastering LinkedIn segmentation for precise customer acquisition".

2. Optimize your LinkedIn profile

Your LinkedIn profile is much more than an online business card. It reflects your professional identity, highlights your skills, achievements, and outlines your future ambitions. It is also an essential tool to attract the interest of potential clients or partners.

Optimizing the visual aspects, content, and SEO of your profile are key steps to achieving this. Integrating a call to action into your summary and working on its copywriting can demonstrate your knowledge of influence and adapt your content to your personality.

Profile picture and professional banner

The profile picture and banner are your first ambassadors on LinkedIn. They must be carefully chosen, professional, and aligned with your personal brand. Choose a recent profile picture, of high quality, with a welcoming smile. Avoid selfies, vacation photos, or distracting backgrounds.

For the banner, prioritize a custom and meaningful design, which can include your logo, slogan, a link to your website, or a visual representation of your professional activity.

Captivating summary and relevant experience

The summary is essential; it summarizes you in a few sentences. It should present who you are, your profession, what you're looking for, and what unique offering you can provide. Keep it short, precise, structured, and engaging. Use simple sentences, impactful words, and cite specific numbers. Don't hesitate to include a call to action, quotes, or personal recommendations.

As for the experience section, it should detail your journey in a consistent and valuable manner. Highlight your missions, the results obtained, and the skills acquired with action verbs, keywords, and specific performance indicators.

Use of keywords

Keywords play a crucial role, as they allow your profile to be easily found by users searching for specific skills on LinkedIn. Select terms related to your expertise, sector, function, or location. It is advisable to strategically integrate them into different sections of your profile such as the title, summary, experience, skills, and recommendations, ensuring to vary expressions to cover a broad and relevant spectrum.

Don't forget to use synonyms, acronyms, and expressions specific to your field to maximize your visibility.

3. Be active and consistent

To become a LinkedIn influencer, it's essential to mark your presence consistently and regularly on the platform. This plays a crucial role in increasing your visibility, credibility, and reputation.

Furthermore, it's important to maintain consistency in your editorial line, in other words, to be methodical in your choice of topics, the tone used, and the format of your publications.

Publication frequency

The frequency with which you publish is crucial for retaining your audience and attracting new ones. While there is no single guideline, it is recommended to publish at least once a week, or more if you have relevant and quality content to share.

Vary the types of content – articles, videos, infographics, podcasts, case studies, etc. – to offer added value to your audience, meet their needs, pique their interest, and above all, demonstrate your expertise.

Using a planning tool can help you organize your publications in advance and save time. Analyzing the statistics of your profile will also help you identify the most opportune moments to publish and the most popular topics.

Thematic consistency

Thematic consistency is crucial for forging your brand identity and establishing your authority on LinkedIn. This involves staying true to your niche and positioning, without straying into unrelated subjects.

It is also essential to find a tone and style that are uniquely yours, reflect your personality, and strengthen the closeness with your audience. Choose formats that match your message and target audience. In the case of a direct and impactful message, opt for a simple post with an image or video. For exploring a subject in depth or telling a story, favor an article or podcast.

4. Produce valuable content

To become a top LinkedIn influencer, it's crucial to produce valuable content. This means creating content that not only informs but also offers practical solutions, provides inspiration, or evokes positive emotions in your audience. It's vital to stand out by bringing a new perspective on topics already covered in your field.

Start by identifying the trending and relevant topics, those that captivate your target audience, meet their needs, are current, or are related to developments in your sector. Stay tuned to the market to produce content that attracts, intrigues, and increases traffic to your profile.

Identify trending and relevant topics

The topics that most captivate your audience are those that answer their questions and aspirations, and reflect the developments in your discipline. To stay relevant, capture attention, arouse curiosity, and generate traffic with targeted content.

You can check out our article on 2024 B2B Sales Trends for inspiration.

Here's how to identify these topics:

Here is the translation into perfect US English for the parts that weren't translated:

Bring your unique perspective

To stand out on LinkedIn, it's essential to bring your unique perspective to the topics you discuss. Share your viewpoints, analyses, experiences, and advice to establish an authentic connection with your audience. This positions you as an expert and builds loyalty among your followers.

To achieve this, consider these techniques:

• Tell a Story: Storytelling captures your audience's attention, illustrates your points, conveys a message, and shares lessons. Tell personal, professional, or even fictional anecdotes, integrating all elements of a good narrative.
• Give an Example: Support your arguments with concrete examples to clarify your ideas, demonstrate your competence, or inspire your audience. Draw from your experiences, those of clients, colleagues, or mentors.
• Ask a Question: Engage your audience with questions. Whether open-ended, closed-ended, or rhetorical, they encourage reflection and participation.

5. Engage with your community

To become an influencer on LinkedIn, it's crucial to engage with your community. This means building a relationship of trust, exchange, and loyalty with your followers. Fostering your network is also essential to spark interest, encourage participation, and promote sharing of your content.

This engagement involves responding to comments and initiating engaging discussions.

Respond to comments

Comments reflect the impact of your content on your audience, revealing their interest, curiosity, or questions. They represent a golden opportunity to create dialogue, highlight your expertise, collect feedback, and retain your subscribers. It's important to respond in a personalized, polite, and relevant manner.

Remember to thank your interlocutors, ask them questions, provide additional details, or suggest additional resources. Using emojis, gifs, or stickers can make your responses more dynamic and friendly.

Initiate discussions

Initiating discussions involves launching conversation topics that captivate, challenge, or intrigue your audience. Should we use AI-boosted icebreakers could be a topic to engage meaningfully with your network, while demonstrating your expertise in using sales development techniques on the platform.

• Pose an open, provocative, unusual, or humorous question that encourages the exchange of opinions, experiences, advice, or recommendations.
• Share a quote, statistic, anecdote, or news item that prompts a reaction, debate, information gathering, or entertainment.
• Propose a poll, quiz, challenge, or game that invites participation, tests knowledge, meets a challenge, or simply entertains.

6. Expand your network

To become a LinkedIn influencer, expanding your network is essential. This means increasing the number of connections on the platform, which will boost your visibility, credibility, and influence. It's crucial to expand your network strategically by targeting relevant individuals for your sector, goals, or areas of interest.

This involves connecting carefully and actively participating in LinkedIn groups.

Kanbox's kanban and its messaging are valuable tools for managing your network. Kanbox messaging allows you to communicate directly with your contacts, send them personalized messages, content, or invitations, and request recommendations.

With Kanbox's kanban, you can organize your exchanges according to their status, priority, and objective. This facilitates the visualization of your ongoing discussions, those to follow up on, and those concluded, ensuring efficient management.

Nihel Debbih - Career Coach & Recruiter

A Powerful tool to supercharge your LinkedIn Network

Kanbox is a powerful tool to supercharge your network on LinkedIn. For any professional, Kanbox is an incredible lever to establish strategic connections and seize the opportunities that arise!

Source Capterra

Connect strategically

Connecting strategically means sending personalized invitations to individuals who are likely to bring you value, whether they are prospects, clients, partners, mentors, experts, or influencers. It's also important to avoid spamming those who may not be interested in your profile or content.

Here are some tips for effective networking:

• Use search filters (name, title, company, sector, location, etc.) to find the right people.
• Visit their profile to assess their summary, experience, published content, and recommendations.
• Send personalized invitations that explain why you want to connect, what you have in common, and the value you can bring.
• Monitor the status of your invitations by following up on non-responses, thanking acceptances, and canceling invitations without response.

To enhance your connection process, consider using LinkedIn Sales Navigator. This tool helps you export and organize your LinkedIn contacts, send them personalized messages, track their responses, and automatically follow up, allowing you to effectively convert them into leads.

You can also contact them via email after finding their emails. For that, check out our article on "how to find emails with LinkedIn Sales Navigator"

Participate in LinkedIn Groups

Being active in LinkedIn groups introduces you to communities of professionals who share your interests or challenges. It's an excellent way to establish yourself as an expert, build trusting relationships, and discover collaboration opportunities. Here's how to get involved in LinkedIn groups:

• Search for groups that match your field using keywords or LinkedIn suggestions.
• Join those that interest you by examining their number of members, activity, description, and rules.
• Contribute by sharing valuable content, commenting, asking questions, or offering advice.
• Build connections with other members by inviting them to your network, communicating via private messages, or offering services and resources.
• By participating in LinkedIn groups, you expand your network significantly and qualitatively, targeting individuals already interested in your expertise, who could become your clients, partners, or ambassadors.

7. Use Storytelling

Becoming a LinkedIn influencer requires mastering storytelling, which is the art of captivating, moving, and marking your audience through stories. It's crucial to use storytelling to reveal yourself, share your vision, and effectively convey your message. This involves unveiling your journey and narrating either inspiring or educational stories.

Share your journey

Telling your personal and professional story includes your successes, failures, what you've learned, your motivations and values, and can serve as an icebreaker to start meaningful conversations. This allows you to present yourself authentically, humanize yourself, stand out, and build connections with your audience, while demonstrating your ability to master "social selling".

It's also essential to be relevant, choosing aspects of your journey that resonate with your theme, goals, or target audience. For example, if you're a personal development coach, share your career change, the challenges you've faced, the solutions you've discovered, and the lessons you've learned. Share what motivates you, what excites you, and the successes you help your clients achieve.

Tell Inspiring or Educational Stories

Telling stories that inspire or educate your audience adds significant value, whether through information, solutions, inspiration, or emotion. It's also an excellent way to demonstrate your expertise, creativity, and leadership.

Your storytelling should be original, captivating, clear, and structured, tailored to your theme, objectives, and target audience. For example, if you're a personal development coach, share stories of transformation, overcoming challenges, or educational anecdotes that illustrate key methods or concepts in your field.

Integrating personal stories can also enrich your advice or lessons, making learning more accessible and human.

8. Collaborate with Other Professionals

To establish yourself as an influencer on LinkedIn, it's crucial to collaborate with other professionals. This means building synergies, exchanges, and opportunities with those who share your values, interests, or goals. Collaboration is also fundamental for enriching your content, expanding your audience, and strengthening your credibility. In this context, forming partnerships with other influencers, using tools like Kanbox, and participating in online events are essential steps.

Partnerships with Other Influencers via Kanbox

Partnerships offer you the opportunity to create high-quality content, reach new followers, generate traffic, and improve your visibility. This could involve co-writing an article, co-hosting a webinar, conducting joint interviews, or co-organizing a contest. To identify ideal partners, target influencers with a similar or complementary audience to yours, recognized for their expertise, and who have a good reputation and strong ethics.

Kanbox is an innovative tool facilitating B2B networking on LinkedIn. It allows you to search, contact, track, and manage your interactions with influencers that meet your criteria. With Kanbox, create customized lists, send tailored messages, schedule meetings, and share documents, all while saving time and effort and increasing the efficiency of your influencer marketing strategy.

Participation in Online Events

Participating in online events is another effective method of collaboration on LinkedIn. Attending or organizing virtual events allows you to share your expertise, educate, inform, inspire, or simply entertain. Options include conferences, workshops, training sessions, debates, podcasts, live streams, and more. Organize your events based on your goals, preferred topics, and target audience.

Participating in virtual events facilitates networking, positions you as an expert, stimulates dialogue, fosters connections, and identifies opportunities. LinkedIn's Events feature allows you to discover, join, or create online events. Other platforms like Zoom, Webikeo, or Livestorm can also be used to host and broadcast your online events.

9. Showcase Your Expertise

To become a LinkedIn influencer, it's crucial to highlight your expertise. This means proving that you have a thorough understanding of your industry, staying up-to-date with the latest trends, and being able to offer relevant solutions to your followers. Demonstrating your expertise is essential to establish yourself as a reference in your field, increase your credibility, and attract new professional opportunities. To achieve this, you should publish in-depth articles and actively participate in expert panels or webinars.

Publish In-Depth Articles

Writing in-depth articles involves creating long and detailed content that delves deeply into a specific topic. These articles should offer analysis, a personal perspective, shared experiences, or recommendations. This demonstrates not only your expertise but also your ability to identify and solve complex issues. Your writing should be rigorous, relevant, and original while remaining accessible and non-commercial.

Your articles should align with your areas of interest, objectives, and meet the expectations of your target audience. For example, a personal development coach could write articles on topics such as setting SMART goals, stress management, improving self-confidence, or changing habits. It's also relevant to share case studies, testimonials, or tool recommendations. LinkedIn's Articles feature allows you to publish your contributions directly on the platform, but you can also use other platforms like Medium, WordPress, or Blogger to create a blog and promote your articles on LinkedIn.

Participate in Expert Panels or Webinars

Participating in expert panels or hosting webinars positions you as a dynamic and eloquent speaker capable of capturing attention on current topics, challenges, or innovations. For this, it's crucial to be well-prepared, persuasive, and interactive, while avoiding being lengthy or monotonous.

Choose events that align with your expertise, goals, and the audience you want to reach. For example, a personal development coach could participate in debates on career change, work-life balance, continuing education, or interview preparation, enriching these discussions with practical advice, anecdotes, or relevant questions.

LinkedIn's Events feature is ideal for finding, participating in, or creating online events. Other platforms like Zoom, Webikeo, or Livestorm can also be used to organize and broadcast your online interventions.

10. Analyze and Adjust Your Strategy

To excel as a LinkedIn influencer, it's crucial to regularly analyze and adjust your strategy. This involves measuring the effectiveness of your initiatives, recognizing your strengths and weaknesses, and making necessary adjustments to boost your results. It's also vital to evaluate and modify your approach to meet the needs, expectations, and feedback of your audience. Use LinkedIn analytics tools to refine your strategy based on robust data and feedback.

Use LinkedIn Analytics Tools

LinkedIn analytics tools facilitate tracking and evaluating your performance on the platform. They provide valuable insights into your audience and its segmentation, your content, visibility, and engagement levels (also, check out our article on "10 tools for audience segmentation"). This data is crucial for determining your goals, tracking your key performance indicators (KPIs), benchmarking your results against competitors, and maximizing your return on investment (ROI).

There are mainly two categories of LinkedIn analytics tools: native tools and third-party tools. The first are directly integrated into LinkedIn and are accessible through your company page or personal profile, providing statistics on visitors, followers, updates, competitors, prospects, etc. The second, external applications or software, connect to your LinkedIn account and offer advanced or customized features for more in-depth analysis.

Adapt Your Strategy Based on Feedback and Data

Adapting your strategy based on feedback and data means using insights from LinkedIn analytics tools to refine your actions and strategic decisions. This approach encourages you to continuously test, learn, and improve your marketing strategy.

For this, you can:

• Regularly assess your performance, evaluating quantitative and qualitative data collected.
• Identify areas for improvement, identifying gaps between your current performance and your goals, determining the causes of these gaps, and implementing necessary corrective actions.
• Experiment with new ideas, testing new formats, topics, messages, partnerships, etc., and measuring their impact on your results.
• Capitalize on your successes, replicating or intensifying successful actions, adapting them to different contexts, and sharing them with your network.

Conclusion

At this stage, you have all the keys to excel as a LinkedIn influencer in 2024. You have mastered several crucial aspects: selecting your niche and positioning, optimizing your LinkedIn profile, maintaining an active and consistent presence, creating valuable content, engaging with your community, expanding your network, applying storytelling, collaborating with other professionals, demonstrating your expertise, and analyzing and adjusting your strategy. You're also informed about the use of Kanbox, a valuable tool for effectively managing your relationships, conversations, and partnerships on LinkedIn.

Now is the time to take action and implement these tips without delay. Don't hesitate any longer; join the ranks of LinkedIn influencers and embark on an upward trajectory for your career, your business, or your personal brand!