All good marketers know their business must have a presence on social media. Whether your brand is new to social media marketing or you’ve been marketing your business through social media since day one, you understand the effort and time it takes to set up and maintain a social media platform.
A platform that tends to get overlooked is LinkedIn. This social platform rides a fine line of personal and professional, and posting appropriate content can be confusing and time-consuming. I had the opportunity to hear Yumi Wilson (@YumiWilson), director of corporate communications at LinkedIn, speak at the PR + Social Media Summit about how to use LinkedIn to drive brand awareness. Here are some of her top insights:
1. Post quality content
With more than 100 million users on LinkedIn in the United States alone, you never know who will come across your content. You want to be able to represent your company in the best light, post information that potential customers will find appealing, as well as position your brand as a thought leader within your industry. Yumi laid out some impressive stats to keep in mind when posting a LinkedIn status update:
- Including a link in your status update will garner two times more likes
- Including a picture in your update results in 98 percent more engagement
- Embedding a video in an update leads to seventy-five percent higher share rate
Higher like rate, engagement rate and share rates mean your update and brand name will reach more people in more networks.
We know we need to be including different types of content within our company status updates, but what posts are LinkedIn users looking for? Yumi suggests these kinds of posts to garner the most engagement:
- Company branding: inside looks and interviews with current employees and leadership
- Employment branding and career opportunities
- Tips and best practices for your industry
- Fun facts and quotes
2. Your employees are your biggest fans
It’s important to encourage current employees to interact with your brand’s LinkedIn content. In fact, your employees are 70 percent more likely to engage with your posts than non-employees are. Can you imagine the networks you could reach if only half of your company engaged with a LinkedIn update? That’s a lot of new customer prospects. Also, encourage your employees to post personal status updates and engage with other coworkers on LinkedIn. LinkedIn makes it simple to see how many people you’re reaching within your network and realm of connections to see how many people are viewing your posts. Yumi shared that an easy way to organically raise brand visibility is to have your brand and your brand’s employees share a story at the same time. This brings visibility to the post by alerting people in common networks that this is a story being discussed.
3. Engage in LinkedIn groups
It’s easy to be a part of a group on LinkedIn and only read the posts other people contribute, never commenting or posting new discussions. However, those who actively engage and regularly contribute to groups typically see four times more profile views. Group contribution is an easy way to organically increase profile views for your personal profile and for your brand page.
4. Understand the difference between personal and professional
LinkedIn can be a tricky platform to manage because it’s a ‘professional social network.’ Yumi broke down the difference between the social platforms based on the types of content expected on each network:
People use personal networks to:
- ‘Spend time’
- Find info on friends
- Find info on personal interests
- Read entertainment updates
People use professional networks, specifically LinkedIn to:
- ‘Invest time’
- Search for career and job info
- Find updates and stay connected with brands
- Monitor current business affairs
Yumi explained that LinkedIn is the perfect platform to push out content on your brand because that’s what users expect on this platform. While exploring LinkedIn, users are in a ‘professional’ mindset and are ready and willing to consume brand information, updates and other business content; however, content posted can still be fun content. Remember, just because LinkedIn is a professional platform, doesn’t mean it isn’t a social network. It’s a H2H (human to human) platform, your brand (both personal and professional) should be posting content that resonates with your audiences.