Thought Leadership on LinkedIn: How CEOs and Business Leaders Can Build Their Brand and Influence

By Laura Holland

Despite reaching a record number of users, LinkedIn is still a very underutilised platform for thought leaders.

Establish Yourself as an Industry Thought Leader

The advantages that LinkedIn can provide CEOs and business leaders with is incredible, the platform has over 1 billion users spanning 200 countries, meaning that you have the ability to reach and influence a huge number of key decision makers worldwide.

Establishing yourself as an industry thought leader on LinkedIn is a great way to share your expertise and passion for what you and your business is trying to achieve, in fact posts shared from personal LinkedIn accounts receive 561% greater reach than company pages alone (you can read more about this and employee advocacy in one of our previous posts).

Just some great ways you can do this are:
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• Weekly industry news round-ups and your thoughts around this
• Insights on your career - what can you tell people just starting out?
• Company announcements/initiatives - help to highlight the culture at the company

Not only will you increase your own personal brand (which we’ll go into next) but you’ll build and extend a community of like minded individuals within your chosen industry helping to increase your authority.

Increase Your Personal Brand Visibility

Growing your personal brand and increasing your visibility goes beyond increasing your bottom line (but of course, that’s a big bonus).

Being more visible publicly will also attract more investment and investors into your business as well as retain your current customer or user base.
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It will also benefit your real-life networking with LinkedIn stating that those who post frequently garner 48% more engagement from people in the room after watching their video or interacting with them online.
Proving that LinkedIn is a great reputation management tool for CEOs.

Increase Your Company's Brand Awareness

It’s not just the CEOs or business leaders who benefit from increasing their personal brand and visibility - it has a positive impact on the company too.

People relate to, and buy from people they trust, so if they can see your involvement within the industry, your passion and expertise, they’re more likely to choose your company over your competitors, and also remain loyal.

​The key to all of this is to be authentic, and offer a view that is unique to you and the position you are in. A great example of this is an X (then Twitter) thread by Slack’s CEO Stewart Butterfield who gave an open and honest account of what being a CEO at a technology firm was like during the pandemic. It received an exceptional response from people and put Slack in a very positive light to prospective users and employees alike.

Increase Lead Generation Opportunities

There are a few ways that thought leadership can help with your lead generation efforts. Firstly, just by providing some added value through your thoughts and insights can help to generate more inbound leads.

Secondly, you can create landing pages, gated content and lead capture forms as a destination for any call-to-actions (CTAs) you may include within your thought leadership content - this makes it much easier to get prospects into the sales funnel and for attribution.

Conclusion

Thought leadership, especially on LinkedIn can offer a cost-effective and engaging way to increase not only the personal brand of your CEO but the business as a whole, attracting investors, new customers or clients and future employees.

If you’re considering thought leadership as part of your marketing strategy and need some guidance, please do get in touch. Email: [email protected], or call us on 020 3357 9740