How to use LinkedIn creator mode to build your brand and business

If you haven’t turned on Creator Mode on LinkedIn, now is the time to do it.

Especially if you are a content creator and especially if you are trying to build your brand and business.

Creator Mode is a profile setting on your LinkedIn dashboard that can help you grow your reach and influence on LinkedIn.

Turning on Creator Mode is how you get access to the new content tools on LinkedIn such as LinkedIn Live and Newsletters.

LinkedIn Live enables you to go live on LinkedIn in video format that appears in your cover image section. You can set it up as an event and it also is permanently housed on LinkedIn too.

LinkedIn newsletters is a great way to build your brand and engage with your followers.

You can essentially send the content from the newsletter to all your connections. My rule of thumb here is to just always make sure the content is about your readers and helpful.

I also believe that LinkedIn users who have Creator Mode turned on are getting more engagement on their posts and that the algorithm may favor their content.

Here’s why it’s time to switch your profile to Creator Mode:

  • By activating LinkedIn Creator Mode, you’ll be able to organically get your content in front of people who are interested in the topic of your post, EVEN IF you have no audience, no connections, no followers or you’re starting from scratch.
  • Creator mode allows you to focus and highlight your original content on your profile. It makes your Featured section more prominent, helping you grow your brand and influence on LinkedIn.
  • You get access to new LinkedIn content tools – you can now create a LinkedIn Newsletter, which you can send to your network (this is HUGE and you should start doing this immediately – in fact, this is the top reason I am switching over to Creator Mode) and use LinkedIn Live to broadcast content.
  • You share the topics (hashtags) you post about the most. This makes it easier for other LinkedIn members to discover your content and follow you.

Also – drum roll – LinkedIn Newsletters are coming to LinkedIn Company Pages that have more than 500 followers SOON!

Do you have Creator Mode turned on? What do you think of it?

Here’s an article on how to turn on LinkedIn creator mode.

And of course you should follow me on LinkedIn!

“What’s the difference between following and connecting with someone on LinkedIn?”

I am often asked this question, and so I thought I would dedicate a blog post to it, in case you were wondering about it as well.

This was the big reason I didn’t turn on Creator Mode – I didn’t want people to just be able to follow me without connecting with me and be able to see all of my content.

But according to LinkedIn, you don’t have to worry about that because there are things people can’t see by just following you.

In addition, people can still connect with you, they just have to go through an additional step as the follow button becomes your preferred method of connecting with others.

So here are the major difference between the two ways of connecting with others.

Connections are members who connected on LinkedIn because they know and trust each other.

If you’re connected to someone, you will both be able to see each other’s shares and updates on your LinkedIn homepages. You can also send messages to your connections on LinkedIn.

By default, you will follow your 1st degree connections, and you can always unfollow them.

Following someone on LinkedIn allows you to see the person’s posts and articles on your homepage without being connected to them. However, the person you’re following won’t see your posts.

You can reach a larger audience by allowing others to follow your activity and read what you’re sharing on LinkedIn. That’s why you should turn on Creator Mode IF you have more than 500 connections.

I’ll cover what kind of content you should post in creator mode in my next post.

I’m excited to see how my network and brand grows with Creator Mode and its features since I’ve been able to build my brand without it up until now and gain 11K followers on LinkedIn.

I’ll report back in a couple of months!

If you haven’t turned on Creator Mode on LinkedIn, now is the time to do it. Especially if you are a content creator and especially if you are trying to build your brand.

Creator Mode is a profile setting on your LinkedIn dashboard that can help you grow your reach and influence on LinkedIn.

Turning on Creator Mode is how you get access to the new content tools on LinkedIn such as LinkedIn Live and Newsletters.

I also believe that LinkedIn users who have Creator Mode turned on are getting more engagement on their posts and that the algorithm may favor their content.

LinkedIn Creator mode tools

Creator Mode enables you to grow your reach and influence on LinkedIn.
As a LinkedIn creator, you can share the topics (hashtags) you post about the most. This will make it easier for other LinkedIn members to discover your content and follow you. To turn on creator mode:
  1. Click the Me icon at the top of your LinkedIn homepage.
  2. Click View profile.
  3. Click on Creator mode off under Your Dashboard (and turn it to on)
  4. Click Next on the preview pop-up window.
  5. Add topics (hashtags) to indicate the topics you post about the most.
  6. Click Save.
  7. Follow the prompts to turn on creator mode.
To edit your hashtags or to turn off creator mode:
  1. Click the Me icon at the top of your LinkedIn homepage.
  2. Click View profile.
  3. Click on  Creator mode: On under Your Dashboard (and turn it to on)
  4. From here, you can:
    • Switch the toggle to the left to turn off Creator mode.
    • Click Add topics to add new topics.
  5. Click Save.
You can turn on creator mode to get access to additional tools and features that help you create content and grow your audience base on LinkedIn. Learn how to manage creator mode and edit your topics. Once you turn on creator mode:
  • The Connect button on your profile will change to Follow. LinkedIn will display the number of followers you have in your profile introduction.
  • You can display the topics you post about in your profile introduction as hashtags. This will make it easier for other LinkedIn members to discover your content and follow you.
  • LinkedIn will highlight your original content on your profile by moving your Featured and Activity sections to be first on your profile. In addition, the Activity section on your profile will no longer include your likes, comments and other activities (They will still be available when you click on see all activity).
  • You become eligible to be featured as a suggested creator to follow so potential followers can discover you and your content across LinkedIn.
  • You can get access to creator tools such as LinkedIn Live Video and LinkedIn Newsletter if you meet the access criteria.

What’s the difference between following and connecting with someone on LinkedIn?

This was the big reason I didn’t turn on Creator Mode – I didn’t want people to just be able to follow me without connecting with me and be able to see all of my content – but according to LinkedIn – there are things people can’t see by just following you.

Connections are members who connected on LinkedIn because they know and trust each other. If you’re connected to someone, you will both be able to see each other’s shares and updates on your LinkedIn homepages. You can also send messages to your connections on LinkedIn.

By default, you will follow your 1st degree connections, and you can always unfollow them.

Following someone on LinkedIn allows you to see the person’s posts and articles on your homepage without being connected to them. However, the person you’re following won’t see your posts.

You can reach a larger audience by allowing others to follow your activity and read what you’re sharing on LinkedIn.

I’ll cover what kind of content you should post in creator mode in my next post.

I’m excited to see how my network and brand grows with Creator Mode and its features since I’ve been able to build my brand without it up until now and gain 11K followers on LinkedIn. I’ll report back in a couple of months!

What not to do on LinkedIn

Do you have good LinkedIn manners?

For the most part most people do. But it’s really important to be a good corporate citizen on LinkedIn in order to build your professional brand, network and community.

Here are a few LinkedIn bad manners that I keep seeing some individuals make on the platform that you should avoid.

  1. Don’t sell your services in the comments of someone else’s post or link an article of yours/your web site in the comments of someone’s post. This is hijacking their post. Even if you did write something that is relevant to the post, it is bad form to essentially steal the author’s thunder by directing others’ attention to your thought leadership versus theirs. Just create your own post. And if you’ve ever had this done to you, just delete that annoying comment.
  2. Don’t send anyone (especially your connections) impersonal, mass automated sales messages – and please don’t do it as soon as they accept your connection request. This is spam and this will damage your credibility. Doing this is one of the fastest ways get deleted and blocked on LinkedIn. Everything you send your connections should be tailored and positioned for their benefit if you want to build relationships. Always focus on adding value to others and you’ll never have to sell anything.
  3. Don’t mass tag people in your posts. You may think this helps to alert people to read your posts but it’s the equivalent of spamming them. Just don’t.
  4. Don’t hit on or flirt with anyone, and when in doubt on whether you should send the message, don’t. LinkedIn is a professional platform, so always keep it professional.
  5. Don’t post anything political in nature or too personal. While it’s good to let people get to know more about you and your life, oversharing doesn’t help your brand. Neither does talking about politics. I personally don’t think you should ever discuss politics on social media.

Which one of these LinkedIn bad manners bugs you the most?

And do you have any LinkedIn bad manners to add to this list?

I’m honored/humbled/excited/thrilled to announce that I’ve been nominated for a “lawyer of distinction” award but there’s just one problem, I’m not a lawyer!

And this is exactly why I have an issue with so many of these lawyer “awards.” They’re scams.

My PSA to all lawyers – I promise that you DO NOT need these spammy fake pay-to-play awards.

They actually undermine your credibility.

If a client sees them on your website or on your LinkedIn profile they’re going to question your credentials.

Much to the chagrin of many legal marketing professionals, these organizations reach out directly to lawyers which creates confusion and also hope on the part of the lawyers who are excited for being recognized, and then it’s up to us to break the unpleasant news that these are actually scams, which is always fun for us 😬🙄

There are plenty of reputable awards in the legal industry that involve references, research and submissions with your client work, so focus on those, if you must.

And those awards don’t ask you for a dime.

A pay-to-play award is one where the defining characteristic of who gets “honored” is paying to be listed, not actual skills or expertise.

Real awards honor exceptional lawyers without caring whether they pay or not.

I can give you 10,000 things on which you should spend your money when it comes to marketing and business development that are better value versus these spammy awards.

So lawyers, please don’t pay for a profile for these bogus awards, use their badges on your website or pay for a plaque 😱especially if you know it is a scam, or if you have a nagging suspicion.

Also you don’t need a plaque anymore because you’re probably not really going into the office that much and even if you were in the office isn’t it a little much to have a bunch of plaques about yourself hanging on the wall? I always thought that was weird when I walked into a partner’s office and it was all about them…

Put these phony award solicitations where they belong – in your spam folder or right in the trash.

And if you’re unsure whether an award has merit, reach out to your marketing person, reach out to me or reach out to Igor Ilyinsky who put together a running list of the spammy awards to watch out for.

Just know that you don’t need one of these awards to validate how good you are at what you do. And you certainly don’t have to pay anyone to tell you that.

These awards are not going to bring you new clients. What will is superior client service, referrals and strategic marketing and business development.

It was nice to have that Esq next to my name for a second though🙂

It’s one thing to create social media posts, events and web site content to support diversity and women’s initiatives, or to say that your firm has a diversity program, but it’s another to actually incorporate strategies to advance inclusion in the workplace.

Companies that “talk the talk” of diversity and inclusion without “walking the walk” are seeing that inauthentic actions and performative allyship cause disengagement and attrition as Paula Edgar notes in this LinkedIn post.

Paula also posted this quote with a post on LinkedIn, which went viral on LinkedIn and is such an important lesson to companies of all sizes.

MLK social media post wise

In this incredibly competitive legal hiring market, I am seeing some law firms try to use diversity in their recruiting and marketing efforts. This can fall flat when it’s not authentic.

Paula and were talking last week about some of MLK Day social media posts we saw that were well-intentioned but seemed to fall flat because their culture may not yet reflect their stated intentions, and how we might be able to offer some guidance.

I’ve counseled several firms throughout the years, advising them not to do external diversity campaigns because their firms didn’t truly reflect diversity.

As we enter into the various diversity-related monthly commemorations and observances that law firms, professional service organizations and companies in general tend to promote, we think they should be thinking about how to balance their external marketing and branding efforts with their cultures and where they currently are.

Join me and Paula next week on January 26 for a free webinar to learn about some of the challenges and opportunities that exist and the strategies that we recommend when it comes to authentic diversity marketing.

I always learn from Paula, and I hope you’ll join us for this important conversation. Register for the program.

Check out Paula’s web site.

Follow me and Paula on LinkedIn.

Limit LinkedIn comments

Providing LinkedIn training to your employees is a smart investment worth making for many reasons.

For starters, to be truly successful at LinkedIn as an organization and to harness the power of LinkedIn for lead generation and brand building, you need to tap into your employees’ valuable professional networks.

What holds most people back from posting to social media is that they don’t know how to do it, they feel like they don’t have anything to post or they feel like they don’t have the time to do it.

If you show them that it’s not hard and it’s worth their while, they’ll start to do it.

What I find often works is showing them success stories of their colleagues and especially their competitors. That usually gets them motivated.

Most people just need to be shown how to share content and need help building their networks.

I have found that doing this via Zoom to be just as effective as sitting with people at their desks pre-pandemic.

In fact my social media training business has been busier during the past 22 months than it ever (not to mention more efficient due to Zoom).

Some of my clients have me do LinkedIn profile trainings and others are investing in LinkedIn workshops and group trainings over several months where they learn from me and from each other.

Other clients also have me train their employees on how to use Twitter, Facebook and Instagram too.

Investing in your people to help them leverage the power of LinkedIn and build their professional brands is a smart business move.

Your company will benefit and so will your employees.

So what’s stopping you from investing in training your people on the most important social media business platform?

LinkedIn has more than 750 million users and growing every day. It’s also the primary global business networking web site.

Today it’s never been more important to have a strong LinkedIn profile and presence, and to consistently build your professional brand on the platform.

This program led by legal marketer and Big Law veteran Stefanie Marrone will take you through the how-to’s on building a strong profile, using the platform to generate business and new connections, how to share your successes to demonstrate your value – without showing off or being boastful, how to strategically build your network, and how to use LinkedIn to become a thought leader to obtain speaking engagements.

There will be time at the end for a Q&A session for specific attendee questions.

Register here for the free program on February 25 at 1pm ET.

Educational webinars are one of the most effective forms of marketing for generating leads, promoting your business and its employees, and boosting conversions for professional service organizations.

But once the webinar is over your work is far from over. In fact that is where the greatest opportunities are.

Smart marketers find creative ways to extend the life of their webinars and make use of all the valuable content that was generated from it in order to engage with attendees, those who registered who couldn’t make it and others who might be interested in the content who didn’t know about it.

The solution is all about repurposing it in creative ways.

By repurposing your webinar content, you provide your audience with multiple ways to consume the content while giving yourself more opportunities to reach prospects.

Here are 10 effective ways to repurpose your webinars into great content and extend their shelf life.

First things first – make sure you have a transcript of your webinar.

This is going to make your life so much easier as you create new content from your webinar.

Then go through your transcript and pick out important topics on which to focus as well as speaker sound bites.

You can repurpose your webinar content into:

  1. a podcast with the webinar’s speakers expanding on the topic
  2. blog posts – your webinar can easily be turned into blog copy
  3. a white paper or ebook (expand on the webinar’s topic)
  4. social media video clips (splice up the full recording into short segments – less than 3 mins and post on social/YouTube
  5. speaker quotes, statistics and examples from your webinar are all great inspiration from which you can create graphics
  6. email campaign funnel copy (use the video segments and blog posts)
  7. FAQ content – answer attendee questions in a social and blog post
  8. A Slideshare presentation (will help enhance your SEO)
  9. infographics illustrating the webinar’s key points
  10. conference topic – you have the slides and did a dry run, so submit to speak at major conferences in your industry

And here are some ideas to turn your webinar content into blog posts:

  • How-to or list posts: Expand on a topic from the webinar in educational posts
  • Digest posts: Summarize the webinar in a post and include links to additional relevant resources
  • Infographic posts: Use data shared in the webinar to create informational posts.
  • Quote compilation post: Compile the best speaker quotes into a roundup piece

How to repurpose your webinar content

Repurposing what you already have is one of the most important tools you have and webinars are such a great way to showcase your expertise in professional services marketing. There’s no time like right now to use your existing content to your advantage.

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Here are a few ideas on how to educate and help your clients and prospects learn how to use your product/services.

Create step-by-step guides with screenshots explaining how to solve a problem your audience struggles with using your tools.

You can use Loom to help you do this by video.

Canva is a great tool to bring a guide like this to life visually, sort of like an infographic.

The guide doesn’t have to focus on teaching readers to solve their problems using your product only.

In fact it’s better to make the guide more general so that it’s not super salesy.

Hubspot does a great job of this offering content solutions on their website.

Another idea is to record explainer tutorials giving a video walk-through of how your tools can help your clients. The other benefit is that prospects can learn about your products and solutions as well.

Short explainer videos are easy to repurpose — share them in your emails, blog posts, social media, YouTube channel, Slack community and more.

You can also write case studies explaining how others are driving results by solving a particular problem using your product.

I have found asking clients to be part of a content series on how they use a product or tool to be effective in giving my clients’ brands credibility and gravitas.

I include client quotes on social media, white papers, the web site and other prominent public-facing places. Let others in the industry with strong reputations help do your marketing if they are willing (also this is free!).

Repurpose your Glassdoor reviews, Google reviews and awards about how your clients use your products. There is already a lot of positive press about your organization out there – so why not use them to your advantage?

You can repurpose these on your website and social media channels, and in client guides/tutorials.

I hope these ideas show how you can showcase sales-related content and use it to market your business without being overly salesy.

When you have a great product or services, they will really market themselves.

Follow me at Stefanie Marrone and Stefanie Marrone Consulting | The Social Media Butterfly on LinkedIn, and on YouTube for more content like this and sign up for my e-newsletter to find out about my upcoming webinars!