Promoted? Adjust Content Pillars to Reshape Your Personal Brand

If you’ve been recently promoted, taken over a new area, or accepted a position with a different organization, the first thing to do is to update your Experience section on LinkedIn with your new title and job responsibilities (1-3 sentences at the onset). If you’re just getting into the role, you may want to borrow some descriptive copy from the person who last held the position. But don’t stop there. Beyond that, be sure to change up your LinkedIn content strategy and pillars based on your new role.  

Why? Your content strategy should leverage how to build your brand on LinkedIn specifically. It outlines your target audience - who they are, what they’re looking for - and helps to keep you in alignment when composing copy. 

Your content pillars are an extension of your core brand values - they signify to others what you want to be known for such as innovation, transformative leadership, or mental health, for example..

Content pillars are especially important for LinkedIn content because they:

• Define who you are as an individual, which makes it easier for your audience to get to know you over time 

• Identify your niche within your particular industry and position you as a subject matter expert 

• Help you to stay on course when creating content across platforms

• Increase your search engine optimization (SEO) because of the volume of keywords used that make it possible for you to reach a broader audience

• Make it easier for content planning, forcing you to “stay within the lines” 

How I’ve Helped Clients Reshape their Content Pillars

On LinkedIn (and all social media platforms for that matter) the stickiness you want to achieve is in the details - how you shape your content to align with what your target audiences want to read and know about. Identifying content pillars will help you do just that. 

One of my clients was recently promoted to a more senior role in a different area within a large enterprise company. This shift necessitated a re-working of her content pillars. Here’s how we adapted them to better match her new position.

Note Subtle Changes: One of her existing content pillars was Customer Experience, which referred to individual consumers who purchase the company’s products. In her new role, she will be overseeing the company’s Enterprise business and her team will service very large companies. We shifted the focus of her content pillar from consumer to enterprise, which may seem subtle, but the content targeting this audience will be quite different.

Shout Out to the Team: One of the things I’ve been successful doing on LinkedIn is building engagement and followers. I took a client from 7500 - 25,000 followers with a content pillar based on Acknowledging the Team. This is when we take comments and turn them into future posts, while shouting out to the person who posted the original comment. This pillar will remain the same.

Team Well-Being: Mental health is one of the most important tenets in keeping a workforce happy, motivated, and productive today. While we will continue with this content pillar, the focus will be more on the stressors and issues that come with working with large, enterprise clients.

Table What You Don’t Need: While the client’s former pillar, Women In Technology, is still of importance to her, we decided to put it aside for now in order to focus on the other pillars.

For more ways to enhance your LinkedIn profile after a job change, read my tip sheet Tips to Update Your LinkedIn Profile Following a Promotion.