Small Steps to Establish Thought Leadership

The dawn of a new year brings with it thoughts that this will finally be the year where we do That One Thing we’ve been meaning to do for the past few years.

It might be writing that novel.

It might be learning how to cook.

It might be learning a new language.

Or it might be finally time to become a thought leader in your industry.

After all, there are a number of benefits to being a thought leader in your space, and those reasons are not just a vanity play to boost your ego.

Not only does it help build credibility and trust for both you and your company, but a thought leadership campaign done right keeps you in the minds of your audience and potential customers, which has obvious financial benefits down the road.

But to become a thought leader, it takes skill and commitment, and they must go hand-in-hand.

Don’t know where to start? Here is a bit of guidance to help you down the thought leadership path.

Show Up Regularly

We urge all our clients to participate in conversations on social channels. It doesn’t have to be every single platform. Instead, it’s best to focus on one or two. And they should be the ones where your audience is.  

For example, if you’re on LinkedIn and Twitter, establishing yourself as a thought leader requires you to actively participate in sharing your point of view on topics most relevant to your audience.

This can be as simple as blocking off 30 minutes on your calendar twice a week to share an article on LinkedIn or Twitter with your connections. It’s important to not just share it but add your own perspective on why you think it’s relevant, interesting, or helpful.

Either way, you have to show up and participate if you want to be viewed as someone who has smart ideas to share. Over time, your peers will begin to expect your insight, which will keep you top of mind on certain topics. 

Save Your Content

Make sure you save the articles and content you want to share at a later date all in one place so they are easy to find when you are ready to share.

I use Pocket to save articles. Pocket makes it even easier to save the articles with browser shortcuts for Google Chrome that get saved across your PC and mobile device. So no matter where you are browsing, you have the ability to bookmark the article and retrieve it later from your Pocket repository.

This allows me to spend less time thinking about where I found the article, and more time thinking about what I want to share.

Schedule Your Content

 If you want to make it even easier to show up, schedule your content ahead of time.

There are a number of free services out there that allow you to schedule articles and thoughts ahead of time, so we urge you to take look and see if they are a fit. Buffer and Hootsuite immediately come to mind, and there are a lot more for you to choose from.

 Once you decide on a scheduler, it would behoove you to set time aside to populate your week with content; a sort of “set it and forget it” philosophy. (But we have to warn you: if a crisis arises that will dominate the conversation across all industries, we highly recommend turning off your scheduled content.)

 With a week’s worth of content scheduled to go out, you can rest easy knowing you are participating in the conversation while going through your day-to-day tasks.

Becoming a thought leader in an industry doesn’t happen overnight. But if you decide to invest the time – “time” being the key word in this case – the benefits will far outweigh the negatives of sitting on the sidelines.

And in today’s business climate, you can’t afford to sit this one out.