Guy Kawasaki Has Mastered LinkedIn—Have you?

Guy Kawasaki is a well known silicon valley based entrepreneur, investor and evangelist who has written numerous books including, “The Art of the Start” and, “The Art of Social Media.”  To me, he is best known as a “LinkedIn Influencer” because after following him for several years now I’ve realized that there are some very important lessons we can all learn from him.

Influencers, B2B entrepreneurs and sales leaders are flocking to LinkedIn. They have learned from experience to go where decision makers and other influencers go, and recent stats show that  45% of LinkedIn’s 450 million users are upper level decision makers, comprised mainly of managers, VPs and CEOs.

With such a density of decision makers and influencers, LinkedIn has become the obvious choice when it comes to B2B marketing and B2B lead generation.

Here are 4 LinkedIn lessons we all need to learn from Guy Kawasaki:

1. Content Is Not Just King…It’s the Kingdom!

You’re probably sick and tired of hearing how content marketing can help you build your brand and generate highly targeted leads. Guess what?  It’s true and Kawasaki is leveraging LinkedIn to expand his already popular brand by sharing relevant and valuable content.

As a LinkedIn Influencer, he has published articles regularly since 2012 that cover a variety of interesting and compelling topics.  This is a primary strategy that has allowed him to accumulate over 1.94-million targeted followers from around the world.

These thee articles highlight some of the most important best practices when it comes to creating compelling LinkedIn content.

How to Achieve Likeability

Here, a compelling title that is central to being successful in business and goes back to the old idiom, “People buy from people they know, like and trust.”

Let’s Stop with the Glorification of Busy

In this post, he used multimedia in the form of a slideshare to tell his story in a way that plane text could never do. Towards the bottom of the post he also adds links to other relevant articles to increase the value and last but not least he includes a call to action to share and click to follow.

If I Were 22 – Don’t Get Married Too Soon (And Always Make Your Boss Look Good)

The title hits on a compelling theme: hindsight is always 20-20, which makes it very difficult to not get drawn in.  Then he once again uses slideshare with relevant quotes from well known people to spice up the post.

2. Build Trust by Admitting You Don’t Know It All

In my experience, many Influencers only share their own content and rarely, if ever, share other people’s content. This is obviously a mistake that Kawasaki recognizes because he regularly shares posts and articles from other LinkedIn users, Influencers and industry experts.  

Sharing third party content is important because you build trust by not making it all about you and beacuse it quickly and easily adds quality content to your arsenal. As well, you make yourself known to other content producers, which will increase the chances of reciprocation as well as other opportunities.

3. Facts Tell, but Stories Sell

Influencers like Kawasaki understand the importance of telling stories, and the best way to do that on LinkedIn is with multimedia. Video, images, audio and slideshares are the best way to tell your story and stand out from the crowd.

Kawasaki uses several forms of multimedia including video, slideshare and images throughout his profile to make your visit to his LinkedIn story compelling and your visit to his profile more memorable.  A picture is worth a thousand words so here is Guy Kawasaki’s LinkedIn profile.

4. “A Jug Fills Drop by Drop” – Buddha

One of the most challenging things about marketing—social media being no exception—is being consistent. A tweet, post or share once in awhile is just not going to get you where you want to go. 57 percent of B2B marketers admit that producing content consistently is a major challenge:

Top five B2B content marketing challenges: Producing Engaging Content (60 percent); Measuring Content Effectiveness (57 percent); Producing Content Consistently (57 percent); Measuring the ROI of Content Marketing Program (52 percent); Lack of Budget (35 percent). (Content Marketing Institute/MarketingProfs)

Kawasaki has been publishing articles and sharing content regularly since 2012. You might not be surprised but his consistent effort has paid off, as evidenced by his growing LinkedIn fan-base of over 1.94 million users as the views and engagement of some of his earliest posts in comparison to some of his most recent ones. Being consistent over time has allowed Kawasaki to create trust and engagement with his growing audience.

Now that you have these 4 LinkedIn lessons in your tool belt, it’s time to take action and put them to work.  Pick one lesson, get on LinkedIn and take action toward building your influence and audience on one of the fastest growing B2B marketing platforms online.

For more LinkedIn training get my free book, “The 7 Habits of Highly Successful LinkedIn Users.” You can also visit my blog at  AskDennisBrown.com/blog or follow me on Twitter.com/AskDennisBrown

This is a Contributor Post. Opinions expressed here are opinions of the Contributor. Influencive does not endorse or review brands mentioned; does not and cannot investigate relationships with brands, products, and people mentioned and is up to the Contributor to disclose. Contributors, amongst other accounts and articles may be professional fee-based.

Tagged with: