2024 is a few weeks away, and already, if you’re paying attention, you can see the tremors of trends guaranteed to change how thought leaders and experts can monetize their personal brands using LinkedIn. 

In this week’s newsletter, I break down my top 5 predictions for what will separate high-income personal brands from average users in 2024.

 1. Look for more B2B “influencers” and paid ads (UGC)

Your “run of the mill” consumer is inundated with influencers on platforms like Instagram and Facebook. Brands rely on working with these accounts as a top-tier marketing strategy. Brands also place User Generated Content (UGC) front and center in their paid ads now, instead of ads produced in-house. (Think of the “before and after” hair-washing videos you see on your feeds.)

Why do brands do this? Because they know consumers trust humans more than brands. 

This is a trend that hasn’t quickly migrated to the B2B brand space, but with LinkedIn’s rise in users and with the continued focus brands have on UGC, expect more of your favorite LinkedIn thought leaders to start sporting an “#ad” tag on some of their content. 

Do you need to have 100k+ followers to monetize these opportunities to work with B2B brands on LinkedIn? Absolutely not. In fact, a Linqia study revealed that 90% of marketers want to work with micro-influencers since they have better engagement than larger influencers. This trend is set to continue in 2024.

Creator Katie Thomas collaborated with FloQast, an accounting software, to publish this collaborative article to her highly targeted and bought in following of accountants.

2. LinkedIn Premium will get more “premium”

For years, LinkedIn Premium was the “black sheep” of LinkedIn subscriptions. In coaching hundreds of students on how to profit from their LinkedIn presence, I’m often met with the question, “I don’t understand ‘Premium’? Should I sign up for it?”

Most of the time, my answer was an emphatic no. 

At $60 USD a month, LinkedIn Premium didn’t offer the robust search and prospecting capabilities that LinkedIn Sales Navigator did, and it wasn’t geared toward recruiting like “Recruiter Lite.” 

In fact, beyond getting a gold badge and some more advanced analytics, I, a LinkedIn coach, even struggled to find the value in it.

That’s changing, though.

“Premium” is now becoming the “go-to” tool for Creators and professionals looking to build their personal brand.

Features like allowing you to push endorsements into your featured section, AI content capabilities, analytics like “newsletter” insights, and more will help you scale and monetize your personal brand on the platforms.

3. The ability to sell knowledge products through LinkedIn

It was about this time last year (2022) when I filled out a LinkedIn survey asking me what tools I’d find valuable on the platform.  

One of the choices they offered was the ability to sell products directly from LinkedIn.

Think about it like having a “storefront” on your profile, where audience members wouldn’t have to leave the platform to purchase your products. (Similar to “Facebook Shops,” an e-commerce tool Facebook introduced in 2020).

It makes sense. A wealth of professionals are advertising their expertise and knowledge products on the platform. Allowing their followers to purchase directly on the platform without leaving creates:

• Increased selling opportunities for creators
• A seamless buying experience for audience members
• An opportunity for LinkedIn to get a cut of proceeds, assuming that this is a revenue stream that makes sense for them.

4. AI will obliterate the playing field…not level it.

With AI coming out, it’s never been easier to brand yourself and create a social media following, right?

WRONG. 

According to Gartner, by 2025, a perceived decay in the quality of social media sites due to AI will push 50% of consumers to significantly limit their use of major platforms.

You have likely experienced this yourself, feeling jaded toward things like ‘deep fakes’, bots, and other low-quality content produced by artificial intelligence.

 So, no, my prediction is that the more AI is introduced, the more the playing field will become uneven. Truly creative personal brands producing authentic content like video will scale their audience, while individuals over-relying on AI for content will find themselves competing with a lot more “noise” that may all sound the same. 

5. The allegiance to one platform vs. many

Even the newest social media platforms like TikTok, have reached a point of maturation as the “fat middle” of the adoption bell curve and even “laggards” start using the platform. 

When a platform matures, so too does the type of content and engagement opportunities that come with it. You could see this life cycle in the evolution of Facebook. A platform that once offered the limited ability to post the status or a picture now supports:

• Reels
• Albums
• Stories
• “Ask for recommendations”
• Groups
• Business Pages
• Marketplace
• Facebook Shops
• Ads
• Live streaming
• and more and more and more

The takeaway?

"Posting" isn’t a strategy on any platform. There are now ample ways to engage with a platform, each with multidimensional possibilities. Consider your scrolling pattern on Instagram. Some of you may be “horizontal scrollers,” always moving through stories first, while some of you may be “vertical scrollers,” moving “down” the feed to see posts. 

You’ll notice that company websites that used to feature an array of social icons on their page have now whittled down their social presence to perhaps 1-3 favorite platforms. 

Knowing the complexity of even one platform strategy, you’d do well to lock in on a platform where your audience spends the most time and excel at the multiple engagement strategies the platform presents rather than trying to be on many platforms. If your audience is B2B, LinkedIn is the place to do this. The percentage of users it has added year-over-year locks it in as the preeminent B2B platform.

Looking for a community of high-income experts growing their personal brand online?

Join our Brand Inner Circle Community. For $250/month, you’ll get access to weekly 90-minute writing labs led by yours truly, monthly Q&A, networking, and content prompts galore.