While munching over a fried chicken wing, who would have thought that LinkedIn would dramatically change from being a static resume to a content-driven social platform.
Prior to jumping on LinkedIn, I did think it was an old fuddy-duddy platform. That all you did was place your resume and use it to find a job. Alas, LinkedIn has changed for the better, it’s become more sticky by allowing others to create interesting content. It has become a channel that enables professionals to leverage and build a personal brand.
LinkedIn has changed my life and allowed me to amplify my voice.
Each year, LinkedIn recognises the world’s top 250 content creators and influencers by compiling a list of LinkedIn Top Voices.
For the past 3 years, I’ve been recognised as a Top Voice.
I love to share with you my journey on how I arrived at this point.
Here’s an outline of this post:
- My Pre-LinkedIn Days
- My Rapid Rise on LinkedIn from 2017
- 2020 and Beyond: How do we build trust online?
- Key trends on LinkedIn
My Pre-LinkedIn Days
2016: Breaking My Imposter Syndrome
I visited San Francisco for the first time in 2016. To celebrate, I organised a fried chicken party for my friends to meet and hang out. Many of my friends that attended were people I had first met on Meerkat – remember that cool app that was cool before Snapchat was even a thing?
So there I was in Silicon Valley, meeting with my Meerkat peeps and eating fried chicken. If you’re a startup person, Silicon Valley is the place to be surrounded by nerds who gave a shit about cool stuff like software and emerging technology and used buzzwords like growth, scale and user churn.
I kept travelling, networking with people, eating fried chicken and surrounding myself with nerds. I was on a journey to find who I was as a person, and what my next direction in life would be. Being a curious geek on the future was something I loved, and social video apps such as Snapchat were my tools to amplify my thoughts on what was next in social, content creation and the digital revolution.
Within 6 months I was able to grow my Snapchat profile, growing it to 10,000 followers. There was a channel I produced called Women In Tech and it won an award. But Snapchat was hard to monetise. I was even producer While building up my Snapchat, I had my eye on another platform that was experiencing record growth: Instagram. I knew it was time to make the switch to Instagram and see if I could both grow and monetise my content.
Coincidentally, the day I wanted to switch to Instagram was the day that a LinkedIn staff member inboxed me on Snapchat with the following message:
“Hi String, I love your videos. Would you be interested in testing out LinkedIn Videos?”
LinkedIn Staff (he was part of the video product team)
Of course, I said yes and I joined the LinkedIn Video beta program becoming one of the few early adopters to create a channel on LinkedIn. I had no idea how pivotal that moment was to become for me.
But it died within 6months, I still think it’s a better product than Persicope.
— 🍗 String Nguyen (@StringStory) January 23, 2020
🍗 Snapchat
🍗 Blab (it was better than google hangouts)
My Rapid Rise on LinkedIn
2017: Year 1- Finding My Voice
2017 was the year I became a digital nomad and connected with my peeps around the world. Meerkat was on its way out, while Snapchat was very much in. I started getting active on Snapchat in 2017 and remember taking a selfie with Bill Nye the Science Guy. As an Australian fresh to the whole ‘travelling the world’ thing, all I knew was about Bill was that he was a big deal for science education.
My experience with Meerkat, transitioned over to Snapchat and the eventual switch to Instagram were all sending me the same signal: Video was where I had to be. It was the communication channel that allowed me to broadcast being me. Accepting myself and finding my voice with video was a fundamentally powerful moment in my life.
My first video went viral in 2017. We chatted about LinkedIn on LinkedIn. We also rapped about startups, because we can.
LinkedIn has changed from being a static resume to a dynamic content-based platform. Your reputation is based on the content you distribute via your LinkedIn profile.
LinkedIn provides each of us the opportunity to own and amplify our voice, building our brand and reputation by creating content – and sharing others’ content – to connect and engage with a diverse target audience. Owning my voice – my narrative, my thoughts, ideas and experiences – is also important to me on a personal level.
Becoming String On Video
I learned a lot from my various experiences in growing channels on different apps – Meerkat taught me the art of channel creation and I saw a similar trend emerging on LinkedIn.
I was ready to go all-in on video.
I changed my name from Suzanne to String.
I embraced String as my online brand name and Being Awesomely Awkthentic as my mantra.
“Just be you.” “Be authentic.”
How many times do we hear our friends, loved ones and colleagues tell us this? What does it mean to ‘be you’, and ‘be authentic?’
To me, it simply meant authentically embracing my awkwardness – being Awkthentic!
I’m actually quite an awkward person, yet love to socialise and share in a good geek out session. Still, I had a curious hunger to learn, and I would go and interview awesome people such as Gary Vaynerchuck and other innovators.
Each time I geeked out with them, I realised that they focused and executed on their passion. They had found their calling, and loved doing it: this was no ordinary job. It changed my entire perspective on what a ‘job’ could be.
Here’s my recipe to grow on LinkedIn:
— 🍗 String Nguyen (@StringStory) January 23, 2020
🍗 be a Channel
🍗 have Credibility
🍗 cultivate a Community (not a passive audience)
🍗 relevant Content
🍗 be Charismatic AF
2018: Year 2 – When You Have Momentum, Double Down
In 2018, my life improved once again: I travelled around the world and interviewed amazing entrepreneurs like Gary Vee, Holly Kabam and founder of SXSW.
I learned about video, social, channel curation and the world of business from these amazing people. I began to hyper-focus on becoming a media influencer and learnt more about business.
In hindsight, if I have one big regret, it’s not growing my YouTube channel during this time. I have about 4 years of catchup to do on the YouTube side of things, which is ironic: many experts say you that any given moment in time, a person has approximately 4 years of knowledge in their head that is not being tangibly shared with the world.
Have I got 4 years of YouTube knowledge swirling in my head that’s waiting to be let out into the world? Who knows!
My LinkedIn Became My Landing Page
Throughout 2018, I noticed my LinkedIn profile visits were jumping from the low single digits to thousands of weekly visits – and it was all because of my early access to LinkedIn Video. It would be another year before LinkedIn Video became generally available and I was still one of the few early adopters using it, so I took advantage of this by doubling down on content creation, getting my videos in front of as many eyeballs as possible.
I optimised my profile page as a professional landing page, introducing myself and my key message: To increase creative vibes around the world.
Creativity can be many things. I believe that when we find purpose, we find our own inner sense of creativity.
I made a prettier version of my profile banner and used it to promote my offer (which reminds me, when is the last time you updated yours? What are you promoting? Only promote one thing, just like a billboard – so what is your profile banner promoting or saying about you?)
LinkedIn is so YUGE, that you will find a community that resonates with your own values.
Be a Voice. Be a Channel.
Being a channel means transmitting your voice to the right audience.
Therefore, the way you curate your content and develop your message is critically important – so too, is understanding your target market.
The more relevant your content is to your target market/your people/your audience – however you want to label it – the stronger your transmission becomes, and the more valuable your channel is to your audience. They won’t want to switch it off!
This is why understanding your volk is key to creating content. If you don’t understand your volk, then your wagen has no wheels. Your content will only gain traction if you figure out how to best connect with your volk and give them what they want.
Volk? It’s my funny slang for folk. Volkswagen – volk – the people – wagen – car – I don’t care much about cars, but I care a lot about people! It’s actually a german word for people
String Nguyen
Once your volk jump on the (band)wagen, they’ll bring others along for the ride too, which is what happened with my channel. At the time, very few professionals were creating video on LinkedIn, so I had a captive audience who were hungry for something different. My channel was growing fast!
Optimising My Branding and Reputation
It was during this incredible period of growth on LinkedIn that I developed the 7Vs (originally the 5Vs) and this framework has helped hundreds of people think about their branding and how their superpower fits into the world.
Creating a framework for developing content isn’t a short-term grab for eyeballs. (Well, it could be, but I think content has so much more to offer than just a short burst of viral material.) It’s also a long game.
LinkedIn is evolving – it’s a stage to amplify your voice and become an authority in your field. While it continues to be a platform for showcasing our reputation, the one who creates content will win the game.
Why? Because they are constantly reaching the top of people’s feeds and planting seeds about their narrative. Seeds grow, audiences grow, and word spreads fast. Before you know it, your content could be impacting thousands of people around the world.
Branding is repetition. The more you repeat, the greater the opportunity becomes for your brand to stick. They are hundreds of thousands of people with the surname Nguyen in the world (It’s more common than the name Smith by the way) which is why I switched from Suzanne Nguyen to String. Who else do you know that is named String? I would love to meet them and have a fried chicken party together!
Branding is repetition, and repetition helps things stick. But repeating too many different things results in the opposite effect. When you wear too many hats, and offer too many different messages, it can confuse people and make your messages hard to remember. Even worse, your target audience might be bombarded with so many different messages that they don’t remember anything.
I apply the same logic with my own brand of String’s fried chicken. I’m all about the 7Vs, String Story and fried chicken. I want to sink the fried chicken emoji into people’s souls. When they see a fried chicken, they will think of String. 🍗🍗🍗🍗🍗🍗🍗
2019: Year 3 – A Door Opens to the Globe
Forming The Trusted Voice
Early in the year, I joined a startup accelerator called QUT CEA’s Collider. They help creatives scale and build a sustainable business. Thanks to Collider, I gained funding for my new startup, The Trusted Voice. For about 3 months, I developed a new String in my brain and began to look at entrepreneurship in a completely different light.
I started thinking back to the experiences I had in San Francisco 3 years ago. I realised that the time I had spent surrounding myself with startup volks, in fact, was mental preparation for the roller coaster ride I am now enjoying in the startup scene, developing my personal String Story personal brand and The Trusted Voice side by side.
While I love personal branding, The Trusted Voice is not just about me. It’s amplifying content far beyond the sound of my own message. It’s part of a wider conversation about developing a volky-folky community that cares about living their values and finding their own path to freedom.
The 9-5 path doesn’t make sense for many, which is why new roads have been created for those who want to travel a different way. Working remotely and the digital nomad lifestyle are two examples that are revolutionising the concept of what work means. No matter what road we’re on, let’s keep travelling together and shift our mindset towards creating a passion economy, rather than a gig economy.
I would love for you to join The Trusted Voice community at our Facebook Group!
Volk As a Community
We need to find more ways to start conversations, build understanding and share with each other. One of the most beautiful ways we can do this is by building a community. We know how awesome it feels to attract an audience for your content. Cultivating your audience and forming a community with them is what evolves that audience from passive onlookers to active participants. And that’s even more awesome! Community building is how volk come together to form a wagen. When that wagen starts rolling, amazing things happen!
Over coffee one day, I talked with some friends about building a community and making new friends using LinkedIn. They looked back at me with disbelief. I persisted and today I am grateful to have some wonderful friends whom I genuinely vibe with. I haven’t met in person – yet…
LinkedIn is more than a black business book, it’s a community. You too can find your own circle of volks and share together.
Key Takeaways for being a Channel on LinkedIn
Be you. Be Awkthentic.
No matter how many hundreds of experts exist in your field, there is only one version of you – so embrace you as you are, awks or not! Leverage the 7Vs to develop your personal brand.
- Be a voice. Be the go-to-channel within your industry. What is your area of expertise? Find your niche, stick to it and use your channel to showcase your super powers.
- Creating a channel isn’t a once-off thing. It’s always on. You are in the production game now, and that means you rocking up, giving value to your volks. It means creating engaging content on a regular basis that actively inspires your community.
- It’s never about you.
I know this sounds like a bit of paradox, as you need to showcase your expertise and cred, but it’s critically important to stay humble. The key is understanding who your volks are and how you can be of service to them. The more you know them, the more you know what types of content they want to read, watch and listen to. - Treat your LinkedIn profile like a landing page with a clear call to action.
Need help building your profile? I’ve got 44 tips from LinkedIn experts to help you establish your authority and level up your LinkedIn presence today.
2020 and Beyond
I’ve become a trusted voice on my LinkedIn channel within two and a half years. As I drive towards the end of 2019, I can see 2020 on the horizon. How will you use LinkedIn to steer your superpower in the right direction?
Here are some LinkedIn trends I see happening:
- LinkedIn Live won’t have the same growth traction as native video. Why? Because LinkedIn is a feed experience. Think Facebook or Twitter. If they wanted people to learn and stay tuned, they should have developed it to be like YouTube. You lean back and learn.
- Newsletter! I’ve been part of the beta group for this feature, and recently I saw a jump in numbers for subscribers. The great thing is that people get notified into their inbox when you push a newsletter. In this article, I talked about how to use LinkedIn to land speaking gigs. There are over 3,800 professionals who read my newsletter, String’s Theory.
- Text-based post will continue to do the best in views, the habitual habit of LinkedIn users are readers. That’s why it’s also important to have closed captions (please don’t confuse this with subtitles) in video.
- PDF Slides – Remember Slideshare? It’s back as part of the feed experience. Make sure it’s super visual so people will stare how pretty the information is being given.
- And finally, to be a trusted voice, be a channel – be a voice.
If you like to follow my journey, follow me on LinkedIn. I will continue to grow on LinkedIn.
I will also explore the bigger question: how do we build trust online?
Credit + Kudos:
Jay, The Trusted Voicesmith and wordcrafter, for crafting the word Awkthenticity and proofreading this piece. He’s awesome to chat to about vocalising content and podcasting.
