You could build your brand anywhere, but as a Customer Success professional, LinkedIn seems to be the right platform to do it.
The majority of articles on this site related to branding will focus on LinkedIn, and there are reasons for that. In this post, I want to pop the hood and show you why LinkedIn is the right tool for the job.
LinkedIn by the numbers
LinkedIn has nearly 600 million users on the platform and over 9 billion content impressions weekly.*
But that's not the best stat. The stat that should make you get on the brand building train is this one:
Only 1% of users on LinkedIn actually use LinkedIn to post frequently! The rest are consuming the content that other people post 🤯
The platform for CS professionals
A quick search for the term "Customer Success" on LinkedIn returned "about 4,200,000" people:
Back in April, hashtag #customersuccess on LinkedIn had 15k followers, today we're at 20k followers. To put things into perspective here, the term "Sales" returned 57 million people, and the hashtag #sales has 5.8 million followers.
The Customer Success community is slowly growing on LinkedIn, so again NOW is the time to start building your brand there.
Your audience = your peers
The numbers above matter because they tell you where your audience is.
You could write the best post ever, but if you don't have an audience, the right people aren't going to see it. It's almost as though that "best post ever" didn't exist at all.
For CS professionals, your audience is the CS professionals (see 4.2 million) on the platform, most likely consuming content and not posting anything.
If you're starting with a handful of connections, building the base of your audience is easy on LinkedIn. You can type in "customer success" into the search bar, filter it by "people" and start sending invites.
Forming more connections will start showing you content relevant to you, which you can engage with. When you're ready to post, these connections will likely be the ones to engage with your content.
To wrap things up
You could try your hand at TikTok or Twitter and it may work but it's a gamble. LinkedIn has seen the rise of other CS professionals. LinkedIn is where CS professionals go to talk about their strategies, ideas or the last community event they attended.
All of the right ingredients are there: reach, people and ease of use.
Action items
Here are two things you can do right now to help you start building your brand:
Follow some hashtags (I have a video with plenty of comments to help you with that 😉). This will bubble up posts you can engage with, and if you're not connected with the author of the post, it's an opportunity to send an invite.
Send 20 personalized invitations to connect with other CS professionals.
*LinkedIn stats: https://kinsta.com/blog/linkedin-statistics/