As a leader, your LinkedIn profile can connect you with potential clients, talent, and collaborators to your business. Your years of experience in your field are relevant to peers, potential hires and your internal teams—and LinkedIn is the perfect channel to communicate your expertise. Sharing your knowledge, opinions and updates can help drive new eyes to your company and help establish you as a thought leader. We put together five steps to establish your profile and presence to get yourself and your business noticed.

Step One: Get Your Profile Up-To-Date

Update your profile with any relevant published work, media mentions, achievements, or awards. You want any visitors to your page to see that you’re actively involved in your professional community and that your profile is well thought out, considered, and complete. Include any milestones or goals you hit in your current role and ensure you have a 2-3 sentence description that explains what your wheelhouse is and what unique point of view you bring to your industry. Avoid too much corporate jargon—think about how you’d describe what you do to a peer.

Step Two: Establish Your Audience & Niche 

Think about what topics you’re a subject matter expert in. If you were to speak on a panel—what would be the theme or topics covered? What questions do people often ask you? Think about the perspective you have gained from your years of leadership and what advice you often share with people you mentor. Asking these questions and recording your answers will help you establish a focus for the content you write and share. Next, define who you want to connect with, and what subjects will entice this audience to visit your page and read your posts.

Step Three: Create Content

Sit down and record 5-10 topics you could confidently write about and work with a content creator or ghost writer to craft some blog posts to post on LinkedIn. These will be great resources for your own employees, helping those who may not get a ton of face time with you to get to know you better and to feel more connected to you. These posts can also be great catalysts to get you speaking and media opportunities, which can be awesome PR exposure for your business.

Step Four: Grow Your Network

Once you have your profile up to date and a few pieces of content posted—it’s time to expand your network. Search for old coworkers, industry peers you’ve met at conferences and current colleagues. Build up your list and continue to actively send and accept invitations. Follow other well-known leaders and keep an eye on the type of content their sharing—people like Ryan Holmes, Bill Gates and Arianna Huffington are great examples for how to share your own content and how to repost content with your own thoughtful insights.

Step Five: Actively Engage WIth Your Industry and Peers

Always reply to comments on your posts, engage with and read other people’s content and actively check in on your private messages. Building a network and establishing yourself as a thought leader requires two-way conversations and an ongoing time commitment.

Are you interested in learning more about how you can share your organization’s culture, values and vision in a compelling and inspiring way? Our Guide to Employer Branding can help you get your business out there so you can attract top talent and build a strong reputation.