BrightonSEO: Ekua Cant over personal branding op LinkedIn in het AI-tijdperk

Welcome, Akua Kant. Thanks for having the time to join our podcast. You obviously had your talk yesterday already. Can you maybe introduce yourself to our listeners? Sure. Well, first of all, thank you so much for having me on the show. My name is Akua Kant. I am a LinkedIn visibility expert. And yesterday, I spoke about how to build your personal brand in the AI age. As you know, it's very quick and easy to make content these days. Everyone is using AI tools. But you know, you want to stand out. The whole point of my talk was, why do you want to be the same in a sea of saners? You don't actually. You want to be unique. You want to be authentic. But how can you do that effectively by using air tools that everyone else is using? And I talked a bit more about how you might want to train it, how you might want to give it your tone of voice, how you might want to ask it to ghostwrite in your style, and how you also might want to actually not just use it, but also use it as a way to create ideas, but also a way to decide what is good and what's not good. Because actually, it's not always good. No, definitely not. And before deep diving a little bit more in your talk, what do you normally do during your day-to-day work? Yeah, so normally I work with speakers. So I'm actually on a mission to help one million diverse speakers get paid to speak by 2030. I have an award-winning book called Your Platform Power. And that's how to build your personal brand in a polarized world. So it's all about using my expertise as a LinkedIn expert to really help you deep dive into thinking about how do you become a speaker that is relevant that's credible and that uses the right tools on LinkedIn but also who understands the full system what it means to be visible and what it means to actually become a paid speaker okay wow so yeah and then it's beautiful that you can be on stage here and show everybody how to do it and how did it go It went well! Yeah? Yeah! No, I mean it was a great atmosphere and there were lots of engaged people and the stream was very well curated so as I was just mentioning before, the person before me was talking a bit about more of the technical details while I was talking more about branding and more about getting into actually how you might use it as an individual or a company to build like a business brand or a personal brand or a speaker brand. Okay, great! So, authenticity on LinkedIn, using AI is really difficult for a lot of people, right? Because when you post yourself, like yourself, manually written content, it's you. And what is your trick to get an AI to understand that and ghostwrite stuff? Do you have some ideas for that? Yes, definitely, definitely. The first thing is... it's as good as you what the information they put in so garbage in garbage out basically so if you haven't actually given it any context or you haven't actually shown it how you write naturally and i know that sometimes people feel vulnerable and suddenly naked because they're like oh no but isn't it how about it no that's not that's not the point the point is you're training it to be like you or even be you know as close to you as possible so actually you need to just be authentic and not feel worried and Put in your authentic writing. Share samples of your articles, your blogs, your emails, whatever kind of content that you're creating that you want it to imitate. And ask it to ghostwrite and be as close as possible to your style and tone. And ask it not to use some of those horrible words it likes to use, like no fluff. You know, because then it's obvious that, you know, it's probably written by AI. But if you train it, you might even want to give it your own vocabulary scripts. You might say, I have these 10 words which I really love. And actually, please. And every time I write something, use one of these ten words. So it kind of gets your language and your words. Or your isms, as I would like to say. And so I downloaded all my LinkedIn posts in the past to feed it to an agent. But it never works. I have to do a lot of stuff myself. Yes, so the point about it is you have to edit. You can't just let it be free range. Because the point is, it can only do what you... you ask it to do and if you don't actually see what it produces and you know it's like a baby if you tell it that it's doing good it will do better stuff so once once it comes out wrong or not as well as you'd like it then you say okay that was not a good output can we go again perhaps you can use this word or more like this one that i liked and then it's like oh yes i can't do that today Give it treats! Amazing, amazing. Hey, and how many times do you have a sort of holy grail for yourself? How many times do you post, for example, on LinkedIn or other platforms? Yeah, LinkedIn is my main platform. I post seven days a week. Seven days a week? Seven days a week, yes. I did not start this way, but it's something that I've decided that I want to do with someone who... is very intimately linked to the platform and just how it operates because essentially it's not the fact is that your content doesn't always go out to who you expect it to go out to so the more times that you're giving the opportunity for it to be seen the better but that doesn't mean you need to post as much but what it does mean is when you are posting let's say it's once three times whatever cadence you choose that it is something that you have really taken the time to cure it to create and to make sure that it's has a point that is really focused on your target audience or the object of why you're on LinkedIn. Because a lot of times people are very specific or clear and they're wondering why they didn't get results, why they didn't get engagement or feedback or whatever. But if you're unclear, then you need to start with the clarity of the goal before you put something out and expect people to engage. And also, if you're not regular, people can't expect to know that you're going to show up. So people know that I show up every day. So, you know, it's regular. And people sometimes are like worried if I don't show up. It's that regular. Yeah. And do you then post every day a LinkedIn post or an article? Because that is also something that has come up before. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, so my articles, I don't post every day. I post a general LinkedIn post every day. And then I have specialized times where I have a newsletter and I post on the newsletters and sometimes I also do articles. But articles are actually great because if we're talking about, if you're wanting to get more AI citations, having news... LinkedIn articles and structuring it in the way that I really love in terms of like the lists of the facts and making sure that you're you know being balanced yeah and can really be a way for you to actually get some of your content you know served out to the places that you want to be served to. And is that something that, because for our listeners that never wrote or published a LinkedIn Pulse article before, do you have some advice for them? How to structure them? How do you know where to write about? What works or what doesn't work? Yeah, so I would say, you know, keep it clear and specific about one topic. Don't try to do like five, six in one. I mean, just like any person, like, you know, you're going to be confused. the more laser focus it is on one specific part of your expertise, one specific problem, one specific myth per se, one thing that you want to challenge, but that one topic, and then structuring it into an intro, into... Yeah. So that's the thing about structuring it. So you want to make sure that you introduce it, so you don't assume that everyone knows your area. Yeah. You do that intro, then you make your three main points, and then you give some kind of conclusion. But I think the temptation is not to write everything that you know, but give it a summary of the main things for that one main thing that you're trying to articulate, and that is the goal. So think about if you're going to explain it as simply as possible to a friend or a child, what would you say in that? Yeah, yeah. One discussion that happens a lot in the Netherlands when it comes to LinkedIn personal brand is the picture of yourself. I have a lot of discussions about that also because people tend to place pictures of themselves without the context of the post. What is your stance on that? some people find it a bit narcissistic to always post your own picture on linkedin but it's also recognizable when it comes to personal brand right so what is your stance on that yeah well i think that sometimes it's not about being narcissistic it's about being comfortable with the fact that actually linkedin is your channel it's your name uh if it's a personal brand so i'm going to assume that it's your name obviously it's your company that's slightly different but if it's narcissistic was not right if it's a personal brand then people would expect to see pictures of you um and as much as you might not feel that every picture for you is a great picture you might just want to choose to choose a selection of pictures you feel happy with and use those pictures and use pictures with you and other people but there's no awkwardness about it it is your channel it's your street like i say people are there to see you and to hear from you so it's i understand why it feels weird but actually it's not weird Hey, and is there also... No, let's put it in another way. Let's say that somebody has a day per week time to load their personal brands. What would you then advise to do in that limited time? So, again, being clear on your goal, so I have a framework which is called cash. And that basically stands for C, clarity of your goals, A for aligned action, S for your strategy, and A for being happy to serve and to be in community and to actually create opportunities for yourself. So one of the things I would say is thinking about making content. The second is actually about getting more of it in the right conversations. So one of the things I actually want to just share is that comments, which are thoughtfully made, can be content and actually also become future posts. So if you are actually engaging in people's conversations that are thought-provoking, that are relevant to your industry, and you comment and it's a really interesting viewpoint, it adds to what was happening in that conversation, you can also actually reuse that comment as your own post. True. Yeah. So I would think about it in that way. Good one. Smart, not hard. I shouldn't do the comment for each comment. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It doesn't work, I guess. No, but I think most of the people only post their own. and do not comment a lot, except for congratulations. Yeah, I mean, those comments have a place. I definitely agree that you need to be supportive and collegiate to your community, but when you're getting involved in discussions for your industry or for advancing your career or your business, then those comments can actually be repurposed. Yeah, I think it's actually quite in line with some other podcasts that we recorded with other speakers here that were explaining that we have to... switch a little bit more from thinking about keywords to thinking about the conversations that people have, like your audience have, about your product or service. And I actually think it's quite smart. It sounds quite logical that when you comment on a post what you see and that you create a post about it. But I think that a lot of people forget. Yeah, I know, I know, it can seem a bit like counter-intuitive actually. But actually, you know, one of the things that I've been taught about commenting is actually when you are effective in thinking about why you're commenting and what you're commenting for, when you write those comments actually you could be thinking about actually how can I spread people wanting to be curious about my product and my service. And not in a way that's like spammy to other people, but in a way that's thoughtful and actually once it's thoughtful... everyone benefits yes you benefit doubly because you can then actually repurpose that comment into a post yeah an article yeah yeah lovely lovely and the nice thing is you can't automate that stuff right yeah it should be manually done yes I mean people are all training comments on LinkedIn but I think that the more effective comments are those ones that are you have made themselves yeah Yeah, exactly. Hey, and is there one last thing for you that you want to share with our listeners? Yeah, so I would say that LinkedIn Busybody, when they talk about consistency, it isn't just about the volume. It's about the mindset and the attitude. So a lot of the time people are worried about being judged. They're worried they're not doing enough. But what I really urge your community to think about is why am I on LinkedIn? What's my goal and what's my objective? And then if you think about that... scale your action in alignment with that. So if you're building a business, then clearly you want to show up a bit more than if you're building like a career or personal, you know, professional, like showing up. So think about why are you there? What are you actually trying to do? Because if you're wanting to build business, that means it's more involved. Content outreach and all the rest of those things. If you're being more professional, then again, it's about content, but it's also about... joining relevant discussions and collaborating with people. So just be clear on the goals and then align the time to invest in actually building the results that you want. Very nice one. Be clear on the goals. Yeah. I think we have one last question, right? We do. You are not an SEO, but you are a personal brand specialist. We always ask the question, what is your biggest SEO fuck up? We want to put it into the LinkedIn visibility for yourself or for a client, maybe. So really curious. So when AI first came out, I didn't really realize that you had to do editing. So I was very naive. And I thought, you know what? You put the stuff in, you take it out, you post it up, and job's done. And I realized people didn't take too much of that. So you learned a lot from that. I love that. Oh, amazing. Thanks for sharing. Yeah, very nice to have you on this podcast. Thank you so much and have a lovely day. Cheers!

Op BrightonSEO spreken we met Ekua Cant, LinkedIn-zichtbaarheidsexpert en auteur van Your Platform Power. Een gesprek over hoe je AI inzet zonder je authenticiteit te verliezen, waarom ze zeven dagen per week post, het CASH-framework voor personal branding, en waarom je beste LinkedIn-comments ook je beste content kunnen zijn.