LinkedIn is the largest professional sharing site with 810 million members. Originally set up in 2003 as a platform for business networking, career development and sharing ideas, it is now used for so much more. Whether you are looking for your next career move, to advertise a product or to share your business wins, LinkedIn can be a brilliant platform to communicate with your audience.
Is LinkedIn worth using for marketing?
LinkedIn may not be the first platform you think of for marketing, but it can be a really useful tool. In March 2022, LinkedIn had over 33 million users in the United Kingdom (Statista). That’s nearly half of the UK population! LinkedIn is the place where many professionals are looking to do business and make connections, and the statistics shows that LinkedIn is excelling when it comes to creating leads, which HubSpot telling us that LinkedIn is 227% more effective than Facebook and Twitter.
How do I up the engagement?
First things first, your content must be engaging. As always, when you are creating content, you should be thinking about what your audience want to see. Are you using visual elements, i.e. pictures, carousel posts or videos? These are more visually appealing and LinkedIn confirm that posts with images get 2x higher engagement. Varying your content is also a great way to keep your post interesting and naturally up the engagement. This includes your captions; make sure the text you are posting is easy to read and encourages engagement.
But it’s not all about your content! Each social media site has a different algorithm which measures the elements of a post and places it within users’ homepages or timelines based on these elements. For LinkedIn, a key part of their algorithm is Content Scoring. Content Scoring allocates a weighting to each individual interaction with the post, and the higher the scoring on a post, the higher that post gets pushed on the users’ feed. This means that the more engagement a post gets, the more engagement is generated. There are obviously ways that you can influence this, including encouraging engagement within a post, such as ‘comment below to have your say’ or ‘like if you agree’. It is also important that those who support your business are engaging with the posts, which leads us on to the next question…
Should I be liking my own company’s posts?
Absolutely! LinkedIn tell us that for companies that are active on the platform, 30% of engagement comes from their own employees. With the algorithm encouraging as much engagement as possible in order to push the visibility of your post, the more you and your employees or colleagues like, comment and share the post, the better your post will do.
Its’ also a great opportunity for networking. By engaging with your own company’s posts, you are getting your face out there, increasing your network and opening yourself up to new connections.
What tone should I be using on LinkedIn?
Linked in may be a site for professionals, but that does not mean that you need to be formal in everything you post. When creating content for LinkedIn, like for every other channel, you should think about your brand voice and your audience and not alter your tone of voice for the channel. If you have a professional and formal tone of voice throughout your marketing and communications, then by all means keep that tone on LinkedIn, but if you have a more informal or humorous tone then stay true to that brand voice across all of your platforms!
If you are not sure how to implement LinkedIn into your social media plan, organise a free consultation with us or drop us a message.