It’s unavoidable, social media is one of the fastest growing forms of communication in the world, and it’s moved from the personal into the business world. You should always be thinking about how you can integrate social media with your marketing strategies, and one of the most underrated but important platforms is LinkedIn.
Why LinkedIn?
LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network, boasting more than 500 million users worldwide. Like Facebook, LinkedIn allows you to add contacts to your network, communicate with them and find out about new opportunities, as well as building relationships with your business peers. A LinkedIn profile helps you to increase the visibility of your business, as well as building credibility for yourself as a business professional.
On top of this, LinkedIn is:
- An excellent CRM tool.
LinkedIn allows you to connect with all of your contacts and see what they are doing in real time. You can link your profile to your outlook and other contact lists to help you to find your contacts and connect with them, allowing you to view their interests and behaviours and helping you to market to them more effectively.
- Great at building traffic to your site.
Although Facebook is more widely used than LinkedIn, figures show that business content is shared far more on LinkedIn than Facebook, making it a much more useful form of social media for those businesses hoping to expand their reach.
- An abundant source of new talent.
Over the past few years, according to LinkedIn research, social professional networking sites have seen a 73% increase in job recruitment, whilst internet job boards have increased by just 15% and real-world recruitment agencies have noted a decrease in use by 16%. If you need new staff for your business LinkedIn is an invaluable tool.
- A way to establish thought leadership.
Using LinkedIn groups to distribute content and ideas, alongside recommendations and a strong business network, you can present yourself as an influencer in your industry, and establish respect and trust that outside of the web could take years to do.
How to create a successful LinkedIn profile
Complete your profile fully, making sure that you have added:
- Logo
- Company description
- Company type
- Industry
- Company size
- Website
- Location
This may seem fairly basic and obvious but you would be amazed at how many people leave out these details. Not only does this de-legitimise you as a business, but it also makes it harder for people to find you if they are looking for a company like yours.
Post consistently
Your network and followers can only stay engaged with your business if you keep them engaged. According to LinkedIn research, businesses that post once or more a month have been found to gain followers 6 times faster than those who post less frequently.
You should aim to post once a week, in order to really hold people’s attention and ensure that they don’t forget about you in the meantime. You can post more but make sure that you can maintain the frequency once you have begun. You could always schedule posts using the posting schedule tool so that you can prepare them in advance and have the posts go out at an opportune time.
Make sure that your posts include:
- A striking image or images to grab attention and make the post easier to follow. People tend to get lazy and stop reading long, unbroken chunks of text.
- A caption. Help readers to understand what they are about to read so that they can decide if it is interesting to them.
- Interesting content. Work out what your followers will be interested in hearing about and don’t drag it out unnecessarily. Make it short, sharp and to the point, with some humour or something else to hook the reader.
- Hashtags. These will help to expand your range and potentially bring in new followers. Go for hashtags that relate both to what your content is about, but also to your industry.
Reshare content
Social media algorithms change all the time, and chances are that even your most top-performing content has only actually been seen by a small percentage of your followers. For this reason, it is worthwhile re-sharing content on a consistent basis. Not only does this ensure that you always have enough content to keep your feed fresh and interesting, but chances are that it will perform well again with an almost completely fresh audience.
Make a note of content which has done well and schedule it to repost in a few weeks or months, so that your feed doesn’t feel repetitive.
Get your staff involved
Your network will ideally include contacts and potential customers, but also the people that already work for you. Whatever size your company, by having all of your staff members signed up, with fully completed profiles, you’ve just increased your reach many times over. With your company name and information displayed on each page, this also makes your company far more prominent in search results both within LinkedIn and all over the web.
A study by Statista found that 42% of LinkedIn users have between 300 and 999 connections, a potential reach of thousands when you add them together. Keep your business network active on LinkedIn to keep it fresh and active on the feeds of your individual networks and you could be seen hundreds of thousands of times a day by business peers and potential clients.
Cross-promote
Whilst LinkedIn is a great resource on its own, a business website is still key and will offer you an exceptional marketing tool in its own right. The best way to get these tools working together on your behalf is to cross-promote by adding a LinkedIn ‘follow’ button onto your website or email signature. You should think about adding any other social networks that you have to your blogs and emails in the same way, as your website and emails are the only web-based marketing tools that you have that aren’t at the mercy of social media algorithms.
Don’t mistake cross-promoting for cross-posting, which is where you set one post to replicate across all of your social media platforms. In order to create traffic to all of your platforms, each one should offer something different. So, tell people that the post is there, but not what it is, adding intrigue that should hopefully get them heading over in no time.
Using LinkedIn effectively requires practice and precision, as well as a good degree of persistence. MaxWeb can lighten the load for you by designing your LinkedIn profile so that is search friendly and visually appealing. In addition we have a posting service that means that we can design and post content on your behalf at regular intervals, so that you always have a prominent profile which is very important for making your content rank high within LinkedIn.
To find out more please call us on 0151 652 4777 or email info@maxwebsolutions.co.uk and ask to speak to our website development team.
Posted on Friday, March 15th, 2019 in Social Media.
