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More buyers are researching businesses on LinkedIn before they ever book a call—but most companies are still treating the platform like an online résumé. Kaila Vander Horn explains how to create organic LinkedIn content that earns attention, builds credibility, and keeps your business top of mind when prospects are ready to buy.
The LinkedIn Thought Leadership Myth Nobody Told You About
Somewhere along the way, “thought leadership” turned into a phrase that makes people roll their eyes, silently gag, or disappear into their happy place. It’s been slapped on so many mediocre LinkedIn posts that it’s started to feel like corporate wallpaper. But strip away the buzzword and what’s underneath is still worth paying attention to, especially if you run a small business and have been putting off posting because you don’t think you qualify.
I recently talked with Kaila Vander Horn, head of content at Speedwork, a LinkedIn advertising agency, and she believes you don’t need to be a Fortune 100 CEO to be a thought leader. You just need real experience and the willingness to share it. That’s a much lower bar than most people assume, and it’s also a much higher bar than most people clear in practice, because sharing what you know consistently is harder than it sounds.
Thought Leadership Is a Habit, Not a Title
Kaila works with founders who are brilliant at their product and terrible at talking about it. Her fix isn’t a personality transplant. It’s a series of simple questions: What’s your prospect’s pain point? What challenge are they facing? How does your product help? Answer those questions publicly and consistently, and congratulations, you’re doing thought leadership. No enterprise logo required.
This tracks with something I’ve noticed running an agency for small and medium sized business clients for a couple of decades now. The businesses that win attention aren’t always the biggest. They’re the ones willing to say something specific instead of something safe.
The Posting Cadence That Won’t Burn You Out
Even people with the best intentions can get burnt out. Someone gets motivated, commits to posting every single day, keeps it up for two weeks, and then life happens. They stop. Two months later they come back, post something, get crickets, and conclude LinkedIn doesn’t work for them.
Kaila’s take: LinkedIn rewards consistency, not intensity. A realistic cadence is one to two posts per week, with one of those as a long-form article. That’s it. She points to research suggesting the most-cited people on LinkedIn are posting five to six times a month, not five to six times a week. If you’ve been avoiding LinkedIn because you assumed it required a full content calendar and a video crew, you can let that go.
Copy-only posts work fine on personal profiles too. You don’t need a fancy graphic or a scripted video. Sometimes it’s just your thoughts, written down, sent out into the world. The barrier to entry is lower than the algorithm anxiety makes it feel.
Your Company Page Is Probably Boring, but That’s Fixable
I’ll admit it, in all my years on LinkedIn I’ve struggled to find a company page I’d call genuinely engaging, including my own. Kaila’s diagnosis: businesses forget there are humans behind them, so the content ends up reading like a press release nobody asked for.
Her fix is to write company page content the way you’d talk to a peer, not the way you’d write a press release. She points out that some of the tools now pulling data for AI-generated answers draw from company pages just as often as personal profiles, so if you’ve abandoned yours in favor of your personal feed, you may be handing visibility to competitors who haven’t.
LinkedIn Just Became an AI Answer Source, Which Changes the Math
This is the part of the conversation that made me sit up. LinkedIn is increasingly cited as a source when people ask AI tools like ChatGPT for professional recommendations, whether that’s the best agency, the best tool, or the best person to follow on a given topic. Kaila mentioned research showing long-form LinkedIn articles play a significant role in that citation activity.
That means the content you post isn’t just competing for a scroll and a like anymore. It’s also potential training material for the answer someone gets when they ask an AI which CPA, marketing consultant, or SaaS product to check out. That’s an incentive to keep showing up, and it’s one most small business owners haven’t factored into their content plans yet.
Stop Obsessing Over Vanity Metrics
Kaila’s advice on measurement is low-tech: forget chasing follower counts and start tracking conversations. Are people sending DMs? Are calls getting booked? Are prospects mentioning they found you through a post? If you want to get fancier, dropping UTM parameters into any links you share (something we do here at flyte…when we remember) lets you trace exactly which post is doing the work in your analytics.
The bigger point is that organic LinkedIn content isn’t meant to close a deal on the spot. It’s meant to keep you top of mind until someone’s ready to buy, which might be next week or next year. Judging a post’s success by its like count is a little like judging a good conversation at a networking event by how loudly people laughed. It misses what matters most.
Your Next Step
If you’ve been sitting on a half-written LinkedIn post, this is your sign to hit publish. Don’t aim for daily. Aim for one to two posts a week, with one longer piece thrown in when you can manage it. Write one about a recent client conversation, a lesson you learned the hard way, or a challenge you’re currently working through. Skip the polish. Consistency and a real voice will get you further than a perfectly designed graphic ever will.
Transcript from Kaila Vander Horn’s Episode
Rich: My next guest has spent over 11 years in marketing and is the head of content at SpeedWork, a LinkedIn advertising agency. She works with B2B companies and leaders to create LinkedIn content people actually want to read, that in turn, helps build brand and personal awareness and trust and helps turn a cold target audience warm.
Today, we’re going to look at how you can build trust and thought leadership on LinkedIn organically with Kaila Vander Horn. Kaila, welcome to the podcast.
Kaila: Hi. Thanks for having me.
Rich: Now, from what I understand, you spent over a decade in marketing wearing a lot of different hats, from operations, sales, social. What was it about LinkedIn specifically that made you stop and say, “Hey, here’s the thing I want to go deep on”?
Kaila: Yeah, that’s a good question. So as you mentioned, I actually started in the marketing sphere with Meta for social content, and then I dabbled into the operations and the sales.
And whenever I started working with SpeedWork, it was a different area than I was used to. I was used to SEO, I was used to Facebook and Instagram. TikTok wasn’t as big then. And it was really fascinating because I saw this opportunity where you have so many professional people on one platform, and it was being underutilized so much.
Because people just think, oh, LinkedIn is for job posting, or LinkedIn is for press releases. Which, sure, but it’s also for so much more. There’s actually a stat that’s like 84% of B2B buyers are scrolling LinkedIn to help them make business decisions. And that number keeps growing.
So I just saw that, if you are in the B2B space or if your target audience is on a platform, you should be using it. And a lot of brands weren’t at the time. And it was just fascinating to me because why would you not use the platform where those buyers are at? And not only that, help leverage yourself, your personal brand, and also your business.
Rich: So when you started to make the shift into LinkedIn and working with clients to use LinkedIn as well, were you active on the platform yourself at that point? Or was that something that you kind of grew into as you started to see the opportunities that were there?
Kaila: Yeah. It’s definitely the latter. So I created it in undergrad as an assignment, and then from there, I helped get jobs from it. But whenever I kind of stumbled upon it and I started working more with it, that’s kind of when I was like, “Okay, wait, this is actually something.”
And then with SpeedWork, I’m on the platform every single day and I grew to love it. And it’s actually a platform, it’s my number one most used platform for social. Yes, during work hours, but even after, because it’s a mix of different content. You can relate to the content. It’s educational. There’s videos, there’s things that you can just sit back and kind of read. And so it’s definitely something that has grown on me over time. And as I get on it, the more I’ve realized the different avenues that you can use it for.
Rich: Yes. I find that it’s probably the one that I spend the most time on as far as social platforms go these days. I was an early adopter to social, and I think partially because of that I may have gotten burnt out on social. But LinkedIn is the one that does not bother me as much as all the other platforms do.
So I know that you talk and you work a lot in the area of thought leadership, and that’s a term that’s thrown around a lot. So in your own words, what do you consider thought leadership to be, and specifically how it might relate to what we’re talking about on LinkedIn?
Kaila: Yeah. You know, thought leadership can be a buzzword now, right? Because everyone flings it around, but it means something different to everyone. And when I talk about thought leadership, I also want to talk about the misconceptions about it as well. And that one being that you have to be this big CEO at an enterprise or Fortune 100 company in order to be a thought leadership, and that’s not right.
Anyone who has experience, anyone who has any sort of expertise, you can be a thought leader, and with that, it’s just sharing your experience. It’s helping educating people. And with the founders that I work with, they are so smart, and they’re so knowledgeable about their specific product. They just don’t know how to communicate it well in words, in copy, that’s going to translate over to people. So they think, hey, I have this really cool SaaS product, but I don’t know how to talk about it. And then I’m like, “Okay. Well, let’s talk about your prospects. What’s a pain point? What’s a challenge? How is your product helping?”
And then with that, that becomes the thought leadership because you’re guiding people. You’re hitting challenges that other people experience every day, and not only that, you’re helping them. Or, you know, from leaders themselves of, hey, if you’ve made struggles being a founder, use that and help other people.
You know, it’s interesting because with thought leadership, it can go multiple different ways, but really it’s just leaning on your expertise and being willing to communicate that with other people to build that community.
Rich: I’ve seen some experts talk about when you want to be known for something, that’s all you should talk about. Like, if you’re that SaaS founder, that you should just be talking about, even if you’re taking it from a prospect’s perspective, only talk about that.
And then I hear other people saying that it’s like, “No, you should talk about your struggles of being a leader or you should talk about this or talk about that.” Do you feel that there’s some sort of perfect ratio out there of how much on-brand things you should be talking about or on thought leadership topics versus just sharing a little bit more of your personality or perspective on a platform like LinkedIn?
Kaila: That’s a really good question, because I think it needs to be a healthy mix. In order for someone to follow you and care about your product, you have to be willing to give something else. I’m not going to follow you just because you’re an owner and you own this product. Tell me why.
What’s interesting enough, maybe what’s some situations that’s going to make me build that trust or even willingness to want to follow you? Because once I follow you, then I would like to see that middle-of-the-funnel to bottom-of-funnel content to where you can start talking about your product.
Now, there are situations with very large companies, they don’t need to do this. But with small business owners, you need to first get eyes on you and start building that trust and start building that relationship before it leads to more of that bottom of funnel pushing your product and sales and demos.
So people follow you, they want more than just that because they want to feel like there’s more to read and more to engage with. I think, if you want a percentage, a healthy split, you should be posting a couple times a week if that’s realistic. So it should be easy to kind of hit a product post and then a lesson post, and then, hey, here’s an event that I went to and all these people that I met. And what it does is it kind of humanizes not only your brand but yourself, too. Because people are going to start trusting or kind of leaning towards you if they kind of see that face behind the product.
Rich: Okay. Now, I know I’ve worked with a number of people especially business leaders who are not comfortable sharing their thoughts, sharing themselves on a social media platform, even one that might be as buttoned up as LinkedIn.
So what advice or what mind shift do people need to have to be able to get past that hesitation and start posting on LinkedIn?
Kaila: Yeah. I work with a lot of different leaders, and this is a common thing. They’re a little hesitant or scared to post, scared of saying the wrong thing or maybe feeling like they don’t have the space to say it. And first, everyone starts somewhere. And my recommendation would just be to do it, to hit that send button to post it online.
A blocker that I see people have is they say that they don’t have anything to share or why would someone care about what I have to say? And it’s because we’re all human, and we all care because someone is going through the exact same thing, and someone’s going to care.
Whenever we face those challenges I kind of step back and I ask them, and I’m like, “Okay, what kind of content do you like to read? What kind of content makes you stop?” And then it gets that ball rolling. And they’re like, “Okay. Well, I’ll stop for this,” or, “I like X, Y, and Z.” And then I’m like, “Okay. Well, tell me about a client call that you had.” And then we start talking about these calls, and they see that those align.
And so I’m like, “Okay. You don’t have to start small. Start sharing, I had this call with a client and we talked about X, Y, and Z.” And it’s like starting to hit those pain points because more likely than not, if your client has experienced this problem, so has someone else. And naturally, your product will be that solution. So it doesn’t have to be a hard sell. It doesn’t have to be a hard call to action. But if you’re talking about those things, you can naturally start bringing in your product, and that’s going to feel like a more full funnel strategy and make you feel more comfortable, because you’re not just talking about yourself. You’re also talking about how you can help them.
Rich: Do you find that there are certain strategies, whatever type of content you’re creating, that gets more engagement? And I ask this because I’m fairly comfortable on LinkedIn, and I get decent engagement. But I have a few friends on there who it seems no matter what they post, 100 people are going to respond to that post.
And yes, I get it, they’re more popular than me. But the bottom line is they must be doing something different. So what are some of the things that you see that raises engagement, that gets more comments on your posts?
Kaila: Yeah. So there’s a couple of different areas here, and I’m going to speak from one, just my personal self. I write content for marketers, and I’ll do a funny, relatable, hit a pain point but in a funny way meme. My meme posts, they get thousands of engagements. People are drawn to them because it’s relatable. And once they engage with my content, LinkedIn has an amazing ecosystem to where they’re more likely to see my content that I post next, even if they don’t follow me.
So it’s a way that I like to look at that full funnel strategy. Top of funnel, how can I get someone just to see my post or engage with it without following me? Once they see that kind of work or way down. But that and then any of my tips or any time LinkedIn, so once again for myself I am a head of content on LinkedIn, so I talk about the platform, when they have shift change. AI is really big right now, so how does that play a role in your content and with LinkedIn? It’s anything that’s kind of trending or buzzwords, what’s getting engagement? And then how can I use what other people, the formula, but twist it to make it my own, and it still works well.
So lessons, tips and tricks, any type of relatability is going to get someone to engage. Things that also work well, which people don’t always love, is posting events, posting about themselves. One, it helps humanize you. Introduction posts do well if someone’s never done them because it kind of shows, hey, this is the person who I’m following. This is a little bit about them. Here are some pictures for me to swipe through. People really enjoy those, too.
Rich: So wait, on the introduction post, are you saying introducing your audience to somebody new or introducing yourself?
Kaila: Yourself. So you know, oftentimes we just kind of start posting and we kind of forget that X amount of followers don’t really know who you are. Well, what’s the best way for small business owners to close deals is just once again start building that relationship and that trust, and you’re going to do that by showing more of yourself.
So I always encourage people, hey if you haven’t done one, do one. Those typically are the top performing post within a quarter, half a year, even the full year, because people just get drawn to a human face. And they also, at the end of the day, LinkedIn is a community platform. It’s based on human connection, and people want to connect with those other humans. So it’s something that does spark more of that top of funnel I see you, I’m going to engage with you, and then hopefully lead down the line of getting new followers, too.
Rich: All right. Now, when it comes to the format of the content, you mentioned earlier sometimes you’re watching videos there. There’s a lot of different ways of creating content. I’m sure it’s a healthy mix, but do you have any recommendations about the type of content that we should be creating, the formats of those content? Should I be posting things that are written content? Should I be creating videos and posting them as well? How does that all fit into the overall strategy?
Kaila: Yeah. Okay, I’m going to give an answer of an ideal situation, and that’s going to be having a mix. Have your text-only post, have your video post, have long articles. Long articles right now, especially with LinkedIn’s newest algorithm shift, and now we’re also starting to account for AI, which is a totally different conversation. LinkedIn is the number one most cited platform for professional inquiries. And so with that, they’re pulling from post and long-form articles.
So it’s all these different things that you have to now start considering when creating your content, especially as a small business owner, because you have to start thinking about visibility. When I’m talking about a post itself, a hook is one of the strongest points of your post. It needs to be 150 characters, no line breaks, and that needs to tell a person, A) get their attention, and then B) tell them what they’re about to read.
Because LinkedIn rewards dwell time. So if someone hits that ‘See More’ button and they start reading it longer and they’re on the post, LinkedIn says, “Hey, this post is relevant, so I’m going to push it out to more people so that the post keeps getting seen.”
Posts that often get skipped, LinkedIn kind of hides a little bit and doesn’t push it out as far. Your hook should be interesting. It should be telling the… You know, don’t rage bait people. But it should be getting their attention and making them want to read more. And then readability is a big thing.
You know, oftentimes I see people and they kind of post as they would a press release or a long… It’s just a whole lot of wall of text, and that’s not really easy to read, and we have to remember that LinkedIn is a social platform at the end of the day, and we have to keep in mind both desktop and mobile. So if someone’s scrolling on their phone and you have a text wall that’s this long, I’m not going to skim through it or read it, so I’m just going to keep going. So we have to make sure it’s going to be accessible to the readers as well.
Rich: I want to circle back to something you had mentioned earlier, and I jotted down a note on trends and things like that. I’m curious, how do you stay abreast of what’s, quote-unquote, “trending” on LinkedIn? Is there a specific place you go, or is it just because you’re spending enough time on the platform that you know that this week we’re talking about Elon Musk suing OpenAI, or whatever the main topics may be of that week?
Kaila: I am in the platform every single day, and I work with a whole lot of different companies and thought leaders, so I’m constantly seeing content, I’m scrolling the feed, I’m seeing what’s picking up from other people. And not only that, I do a lot of research on my own as well. I have to. It’s my job.
I don’t expect small business owners or other marketers to do that, because they have a whole lot of different other work to worry about. But I am studying the platform every single day, and so with that, it’s just I will always see those trends. Or if something shifts, I can now tell when algorithm changes before some type of report drops.
I’m like, “Hey, across four accounts, I’m seeing a dip in impressions here. Let’s keep an eye on it.” So I’m looking at performance. I’m seeing what’s happening outside of my clients as well, and just kind of taking a note and keeping it all in.
Rich: All right. Now Kaila, I know that you work with both personal profiles and company pages. In all my years on LinkedIn, I’ve yet to find one engaging company page, including my own. What is the secret to a company page that doesn’t suck?
Kaila: Yeah. This goes back to, especially for B2B brands, is that we forget that there are humans behind the business. So oftentimes people are creating content for other businesses, and it can read boring. And so you have to remember that you’re writing for those other people.
And so I like to humanize a brand. I like to have personality because people are more drawn to that. Your company page should not sound like a PR page. It should not just sound all corporate. Let’s talk like we’re talking peer-to-peer.
And with that, we’ve done amazing work at SpeedWork. We have done, for one company specifically, we have helped them grow over 150,000 followers for one page. And with that, it’s a SaaS product, so it’s not necessarily sexy. It’s not something that’s going to draw you in immediately. But how can we create a formula and a strategy and work on the tone of voice to get people to want to engage? And in my opinion, that’s the biggest move is that you have to humanize it, and you have to create content that are going to make people stop and want to read it. And that’s my biggest tip for people.
And people now, there’s so many different things going around saying, “Oh, company pages are dead,” and that’s not the truth. Your company page, you still need to be… if you want to spend more time on a personal page, totally understandable, and you should do so. But you should still be posting on a company page. People are going to it. People are now starting to use LinkedIn to do research, and if you’re not active, they’re going to move on.
And this is going to be outside of the question, but your company page, I think of it as a one-stop shop. I want to be able to scroll your LinkedIn company page and see who you are, what you offer, how you help people like me, and then also social proof. And what is 10 to 15 different clicks on a website that someone would have to do in order to find out all that information, but you’re doing it in one scroll.
Rich: All right. Now, you teased earlier that LinkedIn is becoming a very cited source for AI- tools, large language models. So does that change the way that we should be thinking about our own LinkedIn content strategy and especially, you mentioned long form articles?
Kaila: Yes. This is a long answer. This might have to be a second podcast. But yeah, AI now is playing a role heavily on LinkedIn, and especially with small business owners and marketers. Their number one goal is to get seen and to get a call on the calendar so that they can start converting, and AI is great with that because there was a stat, and I think it’s 5 million people use AI, and half of them don’t even know it, and I think that was on a weekly basis or daily even.
Because when you’re googling, AI is on the top of Google, right? It’s that short summary. ChatGPT, Claude, there’s so many different options, but people are going to those answers instead of just Googling and clicking on a couple of links. They’re going straight to AI saying, “Hey, this is who I am. This is my problem. How can you help me? Find me the best solution.”
And LinkedIn is now the number one most cited for professional inquiries, and that all comes back to your content. So now when we’re thinking about LinkedIn content, we’re having to think about what’s still going to work well for engagement so we’re not sounding too AI, but is going to get pulled by AI and also get pushed out for LinkedIn?
So you’re thinking about three different strategies in one, and that does shift a little bit. We start thinking about keywords. What are phrases? There are a ton of different tools, HubSpot is one, to where you can have it do a AEO search, and you can kind of say, “What’s the best LinkedIn agency?” And it’ll tell you if you’re ranking in the answers on the different platforms And LinkedIn long-form articles is cited 60% to that.
And the reason that I say that both personal and your company page still matters is because half of the tools are pulling from company pages, and the other half is pulling from personal profiles. So if you’re not posting on your company page as well, I bet your competitors are, and that’s lack of visibility for you and your brand.
Rich: All right. So to help train up those AI platforms so they recommend us and our businesses more often, make sure that content is going everywhere, including the long-form articles and company pages and personal profiles as well.
Kaila: Yep.
Rich: Check. All right, excellent. Now, a lot of this sounds like a lot of work. Some people, I know, comes naturally to create videos, to create content, post it up to platforms like LinkedIn. That’s not true for everybody.
So realistically, if we do not have a big team, and if we don’t have somebody like SpeedWork behind the scenes, what does a realistic LinkedIn routine look like on a day-to-day or weekly basis?
Kaila: Yeah. LinkedIn rewards consistency. So if you can just create one to two posts per week is going to help still get you active on LinkedIn, and maybe just one long-form article. So with LinkedIn, I have people who have tried, they’re like, “Okay, I’m going to go ahead and I’m going to post every single day,” and they do that for two weeks, and then they get burnt out, and then they don’t post for a month or two.
And so then when they post again, they’re like, “Hey, I have no engagement.” And I’m like, “Yeah, because you stopped.” LinkedIn then has to start learning who you are again and start pushing you out after you’ve already built up that momentum. So I would say a realistic cadence would be one to two posts per week and then having one of those as long-form content. Copy-only posts work well for personal profiles.
You don’t have to do some fancy graphic. You don’t have to whip out your phone and do a video, it can just be your thoughts. And then kind of going back to AI. It is said by SEMrush I believe, or ProFound, that the most cited people on LinkedIn are people who have five to six posts per month on your profile. So just a couple of times is enough, and it doesn’t have to be this big production, especially when thinking about video.
I have teams like, “Oh, our camera guy is offsite.” And I’m like, “Well, you have a phone. Just whip it out.” It doesn’t have to be this production because people are craving more, they just want people to be authentic, and if it feels too polished, then it doesn’t seem relatable. And if it doesn’t seem relatable, people aren’t going to engage.
Rich: All right. You’ve mentioned long-form content a number of times. So I just want some clarification on this. Is long-form content specifically when we click on the article option rather than just putting in a post, or is it just… okay. So that’s literally how you’re defining long-form. Thank you.
Kaila: Yes. Yep.
Rich: All right.
Kaila: Yep. Long-form content is LinkedIn articles, which is different from LinkedIn newsletters. But the cool thing about LinkedIn newsletters is that it’s one of the only things on LinkedIn if they subscribe, then you get sent a notification when you publish via the inbox and then also your email, so in that notification tab.
And it’ll show you open rates. It’ll show you article views. It has a lot of good data. And I know that some people are having better success with LinkedIn newsletters than they are their own newsletters for email campaigns.
Rich: Yeah, it’s a great way of getting in front of a new audience.
Kaila: Yeah.
Rich: Now you mentioned some metrics, so that’s great because my next question was going to be, I know SpeedWork is a LinkedIn advertising agency, but on the organic side, how can we measure whether our organic LinkedIn activity is actually driving business results?
Kaila: Yeah, you know, it’s so interesting because when you think about organic, we as marketers know how important organic is. It helps build up those leads, it helps keep people top of mind. But when looking at ROI, you can’t see a cost per lead. And you know, whether it’s using tools where you can kind of see this is the dark side of social to where they’re following our page, they’re engaging. But kind of tracking their user journey.
If you don’t want to use a tool, then just keeping in mind and you’re asking people where they came from. A lot of times LinkedIn is going to be that one. I get people who send me DMs all the time, like, “Hey, I saw this post, I resonated. Can I have a call?” So there are ways to track it without having to spend more money on more AI tools to do that for you.
My biggest thing would be if you don’t have on your call booking, “How did you hear about us?” to definitely do that, and if you’re not the one doing sales, then asking them as well. But engagement in general I try not to just focus on vanity metrics, because we can get so caught up on the large following or the engagement itself. But I would rather have 300 followers who are interested in my product, and at one, at one time they are going to be interested.
Because that’s the other thing, is that when people on social, not everyone is in the same buyer’s journey at that time, right? They might not need you yet. But with social, they keep you top of mind. So eventually when they do, you’re going to be the first person that they think about. So yeah, just making sure that you’re staying consistent and not focusing on those vanity metrics as much as what conversations that you’re having behind the scenes. Are people sending you messages? Are you getting booked calls? I think that’s the true factor and the success of your content.
Rich: I think that’s all good advice, and I would just add, although I’m not as consistent about this as I should, we do have UTM codes here at flyte new media. And when I’m promoting something like an upcoming event that we’re putting on or whatever, we drop specified or specific UTMs into those URLs so that when we look at our GA4 reports, we can see this came from Rich’s LinkedIn account, or this came from flyte new media or Agents of Change account as well.
If you want to go that extra step, it doesn’t cost you anything but a little bit of time, so that’s another way in which you can track if all this great advice is working for you.
Kaila: Definitely.
Rich: Kaila, if somebody listening wanted to take one concrete step this week towards building a stronger LinkedIn presence, where would you tell them to start?
Kaila: Just post. Send out that post. People get scared and people get hesitant. And it’s so funny because I have a CEO who’s an enterprise company, and you would think that this would be second nature, very natural, but he’s a little scared to do that. And I even have small business owners that are like, “No one cares what I say.” And so it doesn’t matter who you are, where you work, or the size of your following. People do care.
And so my recommendation would be just to start. It doesn’t have to be perfect. The more that you create content, the more you’re going to start building your own tone of voice and figuring out who you are as a writer for yourself on LinkedIn.
I’ll encourage you, the next business call you have, start taking notes. What are people saying? What’s happening in conversation? And it kind of goes back, I mentioned it earlier, but if these conversations that are coming up for you, it’s happening somewhere else as well. So that would be one of my biggest tips is just to do it, to hit that button, and don’t look back.
Rich: Kaila, if people want to learn more about you, more about SpeedWork, where can we send them online?
Kaila: Yeah, absolutely. You can follow me on LinkedIn. My name is Kaila Vander Horn. If you’re listening, that is a space in between Vander Horn. And you can follow our company page as well at SpeedWork.
Rich: Awesome, and we’ll have those links in the show notes. Kaila, thank you so much for your time today.
Kaila: Awesome. Thank you so much for having me.
Show Notes:
Kaila Vander Horn is Head of Content at SpeedWork, a LinkedIn advertising agency that helps B2B companies and business leaders build trust, grow their personal brands, and create LinkedIn content that drives real business results. Connect with Kaila on LinkedIn, and learn more about SpeedWork and its services by visiting the company’s LinkedIn page or website.
Rich Brooks is the President of flyte new media, digital agency offering branding, web design, and digital marketing located in Portland, Maine. He is also the founder of the Agents of Change. He’s passionate about helping small businesses grow online and has put his nearly 30 years of experience into the book, The Lead Machine: The Small Business Guide to Digital Marketing.