Professional Social Media and Innovation: How You Start Leveraging on Your Innovation through Strategic Content Creation on LinkedIn

Have you ever considered what role professional social media could play in conjunction with your innovation? My name is Ilkay Özkisaoglu and am a community architect on LinkedIn. Building communities that drive innovation for the good of society is what made me to become active on LinkedIn. One of the most important aspects that caught my attention was the level of personal branding that was sort of completely new to me, as someone, who worked as a sales director for the past 14 years and who knew only about classic one-way advertising or how to build a corporate brand at least. This personal branding is quite an exciting tool, because it makes the person more relatable and enables a better connection to the ideal customer than a corporate brand would do. With a critical action learning approach on LinkedIn content creation I found that I am better able to address one of the major issues of any innovative undertaking, which is the implementation of the innovation on the marketplace. Why is it that I am so overly certain that innovation struggles more with the implementation rather the creative part? Through my coaching practice, being assigned by the European Agency for Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (EASME), I noted that benficiaries’ innovative CEOs, creatively live, learn and work on their innovation, but often fail both in understanding the market developmental side and gaining track on the innovation with potential customers. Although everyone thrives for innovation, it remains a struggle to develop markets with innovations. There are a variety of reasons that I have identified in my coaching praxis why this is. Subsequently, I would like to explain the issues and show how these issues can be tackled by using professional social media, i.e. LinkedIn. What sets LinkedIn apart from classical media is the fact, that you are now able to communicate directly with your ideal Customer on business matters. Engaging through different forms of content, be it text, documents or even video resonates with your audience in an unprecedented way. Do not fall victim, though, that this is a self-entertaining medium. Using LinkedIn to its full potential requires time and effort, in both creating content and engaging with the community, but it pays of well. Actively creating content and building a niche community will generate a constant stream of warm leads for you. If you would work on your personal brand and expert status like me, you would be frequently invited to campaigns and offered speaking gigs, since the work on LinkedIn has reinforced your innovation authority in your niche sectors. LinkedIn can assist you to gain momentum with your innovation roll-out with scaling, extending and mobilizing your network. Start your LinkedIn journey, right after having completed this chapter.