LinkedIn for Business: What you need to know
With 740 million professional users, LinkedIn is a networking playground to build brand recognition for your B2B company and generate high-quality, meaningful leads.
As LinkedIn puts it, ‘Do business where business is done – when you market on LinkedIn, you reach customers ready to do business.”
And it makes sense, doesn’t it? It’s essentially a virtual networking event. When users are on the LinkedIn platform, they’re already conditioned that they’ll be reading about business, that they will stumble across promotional content, ideas, solutions, thought-leadership pieces.
They’re likely to be on the platform during business hours too, or at least during their working week, when business is front of mind and decisions are made.
This is why, you should be considering whether LinkedIn is a worthwhile marketing strategy for your business and tapping into this amazing (and free) resource to capture new leads and position your brand and executive team as an authority in your field.
First, you should be determining whether your target audience is hanging out on the platform. LinkedIn isn’t going to be for everyone. Social media marketing is best done when you’re focusing strategically on 1-2 of your best-performing platforms.
A restaurant, for instance, isn’t likely to benefit from LinkedIn, but a corporate firm is more likely to because their key target audience is actually there and expects to see them there also.
If you do decide LinkedIn is worth exploring, we’ve put together the below tips and things to consider to help get you started or help improve your existing presence.
LinkedIn for Business – Personal Branding vs Company Page
A common theme that comes up when we meet with new clients that are wanting to market on LinkedIn is whether they should leverage their personal brand and network they have built thus far or grow a Company Page.
LinkedIn was set up initially as a personal networking platform, and always will be individual driven. People like to buy from people. And that personal touch will never fade.
If you’re a sole trader, your personal brand is probably going to be more impactful for marketing on LinkedIn.
However, for small to medium sized businesses, listed companies and organisations looking to scale, we typically suggest a multi-pronged approach to LinkedIn for the best results.
Creating a free company page your team can cross promote among their personal networks is a great option.
So how do you build your company page effectively? Growing a presence on LinkedIn and generating leads ultimately boils down to consistency and high-quality authority-driven content that provides value to your audience.
According to Linkedin, once a company page gains its first 150 followers, “their opportunity for growth becomes exponential”.
Hitting the first 150 is going to be pretty easy to do, when you invite your own network. LinkedIn allows you to invite 100 people at a time, which resets once a month, or tops up each time a user accepts your invitation request.
Educating your executive team and sales staff to become your ‘Company ambassadors’, in sharing content your Page posts, and inviting their networks to like the page, is also going to help grow your page.
Optimising your LinkedIn Profile
Optimising your LinkedIn page is fairly straight forward. You should be filling out as many fields as you can, uploading a clear easy-to-read logo (300 x 300 pixels) and professional banner image that is the right dimensions (1536 x 768 pixels), claiming a custom URL with your company name in it, adding in all your company locations, and using the right keywords in your tagline and About section to help get found.
There is also the option to add a custom button to your profile to get visitors to take action, including: visit website, contact us, learn more, register, or sign up.
And if you’re feeling even more adventurous, you also have the option to create spinoff ‘Showcase’ pages focusing on divisions within your business. But this isn’t essential, only really for larger corporations that would benefit from segmenting content.
Content Strategy
The next step is putting together a content strategy, comprising the various content pillars you will be using, how often you will be posting, the best times to post, and the types of content you will be sharing.
As a general rule, you should be using a visual element with all of your posts, where possible. According to LinkedIn, if you add an image to your post, it is 98% more likely to receive a comment. Images with people in it, surprise surprise, do really well also.
Video content also gets five times more engagement. But you don’t have to be investing in professional polished videography. In this pandemic world where Zoom chats have become the norm, videos you post on LinkedIn can even simply be snippets from interviews your team has done sharing their knowledge.
Once you’ve determined a strategy and start rolling out your content. Regularly checking in on your LinkedIn page analytics can show you what is working, and what isn’t so you can refine for the months ahead.
Engaging as your Company
On Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, when you are logged in as the company, you can engage with whomever you like, which makes building a following a lot easier.
With LinkedIn, this is still possible but more limited. The way you can engage (like, share, and comment on other posts) as your Company rather than your personal profile is via ‘Community Hashtags’. As your page, you can elect up to three hashtags that you can then click on and engage with posts using that hashtag. You can change these at any point. The key area here is to do your hashtag research so you’re engaging with posts within your target demographic and hashtags that get a lot of relevant traction.
Adding hashtags to the end of your LinkedIn post is also another way to be found. LinkedIn recommends using 3-5 per post. But you do have the option to add more. Tip: don’t add too many otherwise your content presents as spammy.
Scheduling Software for LinkedIn
Another avenue you may consider is LinkedIn scheduling, so you can ensure consistency by scheduling your content a week, fortnight, even months in advance.
LinkedIn unfortunately does not facilitate scheduled posts, but there are third-party paid websites that have this functionality. Our personal favourite is Hootsuite.
At Fabri Communications, we offer LinkedIn social media management.
If you’d like to learn more about how we can help you build your LinkedIn presence, contact us for further details.