Showcase Your Personal Brand with LinkedIn Comments

One of the easiest and quickest LinkedIn ways to network with people you want to connect with – or those whose radar you want to get on – is to engage in their activity on LinkedIn. You can easily do this with LinkedIn comments.

In fact, you can create a really powerful personal marketing strategy on LinkedIn just by commenting alone.

First, follow various people on LinkedIn:

People who are (or may be) hiring decision makers at your target companies/organizations
Executive recruiters
Influencers in your industry
Others relevant to your job search

Then be on the lookout for updates of theirs in your LinkedIn stream that you can intelligently comment on.

Short and sweet is fine, but strive to comment as often as you can

Your comments don’t have to be long – even a few sentences can have a big impact – but they should be meaningful and hopefully prompt others to chime in.

The more commenting you do, the more top-of-mind you’ll be with the people you want to make aware of you.

Besides getting your name in front of these people, you’ll make them happy. Your compelling comments can help generate more comments, views and reactions to their updates.

And the more you comment on people’s posts, the more likely they will be to comment on yours. They’ll want to reciprocate your kindness in commenting.

Your LinkedIn comments will help you:

Extend your online presence
Increase brand evangelism
Expand your network
Stay top-of-mind with people who can help you meet your career goals

Regularly posting brand-reinforcing LinkedIn comments is a powerful way to accomplish those things. Since you probably won’t be writing more than a paragraph or two, at most, it’s also quick and easy.

LinkedIn comes to the rescue offering several ways and places to post your comments on relevant topics.

First, two cautions:

1. NEVER post snarky comments on LinkedIn, or anywhere else. Ranting and raving against people reflects badly on you, and marks you as an undesirable candidate. Always be respectful and professional in any of the content you share with people.

2. If you’re job hunting under cover, don’t put anything in comments that will “out” your job search.

3 Places for LinkedIn Comments

1. LinkedIn Comments in Updates

Have you noticed the steady march of posts moving through your home page stream on LinkedIn?

People are updating their networks on what they’re doing, reading and thinking about. Consequently, they’re hoping others will like, share, react to and comment on their posts.

It’s time to dive into the action yourself.

Note that updates in your stream are different from updating your profile with new content.

2. LinkedIn Comments in Group Discussions

Haven’t gotten involved much with Groups? If you’re actively job hunting, now’s the time.

Active involvement with LinkedIn Groups is a terrific way to communicate your brand directly to key decision makers at your target companies or organizations.

Search the thousands of Groups on LinkedIn to identify relevant ones to join.

One good tip is to look at the LinkedIn profiles of people with similar job titles as yours to see which Groups they belong to. Also check out which Groups people who work at your target companies belong to.

Along with starting new Group discussions, commit to regularly posting comments to existing relevant discussions. Choose topics that will allow you to position yourself as an industry thought leader and subject matter expert. Strive to demonstrate the value you offer.

Be careful with the Groups you’re active with. If you’re job hunting under cover, avoid Groups that are focused on job search.

3. LinkedIn Comments on Pulse Articles

You may not be aware that LinkedIn allows members to publish articles on its Pulse platform. In essence, this is blogging without the hassles of maintaining your own blog.

Lots of people on LinkedIn have lots to say. Therefore, they’re providing relevant articles and information on a variety of topics where you can post compelling comments that drive conversation and support your thought leadership.

How do you find Pulse articles to comment on?

“Follow” people who work at the companies you’re targeting and other people you need to network with. Do this by going to their LinkedIn profile and access the “Follow” option under their name and photo, within the “More” button (as of this writing).

When you follow someone, you will receive their posts, articles, and shares in your LinkedIn homepage feed. You don’t have to be connected to people you follow to receive these updates.

In addition, you can scroll down anyone’s profile and look for Pulse articles they’ve posted in the Activity profile section.

Following the above suggestion, check out the profiles of others in your LinkedIn network whose radar you want to be on. See if they’ve published Pulse articles.

What To Put in Your LinkedIn Comments

Leaving comments like “Great post!” or “I love this” is hardly worth the effort. Such comments will have very little impact.

Write something compelling instead.

Here’s an easy strategy that I often use that works better:

Pull a piece of information from their update itself or from something they’ve linked to in the update. Copy it into your comment saying something like:

“This piece in your article particularly resonated with me [insert piece from their article and place in quotes].”

And then briefly explain why and how it resonated.

Your short (30 words or so) explanation combined with the info of theirs you pulled will make for a substantial and noticeable comment that didn’t take long to put together.

Another good tactic: Pose a question. This often leads to more comments back and forth, which is a good thing.

Don’t forget to include @mentions and hashtags (#)

To get more eyes on your comments, mention relevant people using the “@mention” feature.

They will be notified that you’ve mentioned them.

Here’s how you do this:

Type the “@” symbol immediately followed by the person’s name.
As you’re typing, a drop-down menu will appear.
Look for their name and select it.
If you only want their first name to appear in your comment, delete whatever comes after the first name.

In addition, amplify the value of your comments by including hashtags. Read about this in my post, LinkedIn Hashtags: A Smart Personal Brand-Building Tactic.

Examples of LinkedIn Comments That Hit the Mark

Here are two good examples of brief but compelling LinkedIn comments:

On a LinkedIn post of mine about the LinkedIn skills and endorsements profile section, career coach Shelley Piedmont left this comment:

“It is an often-overlooked section of the profile. My thoughts are, why not beef it up if you can? If your network can attest to the skill, why not ask them to do so?”

And a comment of mine (with relevant hashtags) on a LinkedIn post by social media marketing strategist Tony Restell advising companies to “Focus on using the personal profiles of you and your team to get your company brand out there”:

“Important advice, Tony. In my experience writing #LinkedInProfiles for executive #jobseekers (many of whom work for the biggest brands in the world) companies often don’t encourage their employees to be active on LinkedIn (with a strong profile). It’s certainly a lost opportunity.”

What NOT To Put In Your LinkedIn Comments

I post to LinkedIn often and one thing that really bugs me is when someone piggybacks off my post to promote their products or services in a comment. It’s one thing if my post itself is about their products/services. Then I don’t mind if they chime in and provide more info about it.

But if my post is not about that, they shouldn’t dive into self-promotion.

Of course, this is just my take on things. But it’s best to play it safe and avoid such behavior that can offend or annoy whoever posted in the first place.

A Few Caveats for Commenting

According to LinkedIn Help:

Members can disable comments on their posts. This will prevent you from commenting.
Members can limit commenting on their posts to connections only. This will prevent you from commenting if you aren’t their 1st-degree connection.
When a member comments on their own post, an Author tag is displayed next to their name.

For LinkedIn Group comments, LinkedIn Help says:

“If you had previously indicated that you prefer to get email notifications every time someone comments, you’ll continue to get these for discussions up to 90 days old. If you’re new to a group, you’ll not receive an email for each new comment added to the conversation.”

Don’t Just Comment on Other People’s Posts. Post Your Own Updates

Additionally, post updates of your own and encourage others to comment on them.

Here are some ideas for posting updates:

An online article, blog post, or white paper you’ve published
An event or seminar you’re presenting, or have presented
A new project you’re working on, or just completed
A promotion, transfer or new assignment
A relevant article you’ve read (include a link to it and an introductory comment)
A comment you’ve made on a relevant blog or online article that demonstrates your subject matter expertise
Professional development, training or new certification
A significant accomplishment or contribution to your company
Activities with your networks or LinkedIn Groups
An important seminar or event you’ll be attending or have attended
A community project you’re working on

Keep the tone and information on-brand and (mostly) professional. But it’s okay from time to time to post about personal pursuits.

Get into a routine of posting updates once a week, or at least a few times a month. And get into a routine of commenting on others’ updates regularly.

And, once again, if you’re in a confidential job search, don’t post anything here even hinting that you’re looking for a new job.

Bottom Line

Include a little time in your job search schedule to post comments regularly on LinkedIn. Try using some, if not all, of the 3 places I’ve noted. You may be surprised by the valuable connections this will help you make, leading to landing a great-fit new gig.