Be a LinkedIn Leader

LinkedIn continues to be the most successful B2B social media platform, with over 950 million members and  63 million companies listed on the platform. They’re all using it for everything from recruitment to personal and company brand building and social selling. 

No doubt, you and your business are also on LinkedIn, but how do you stand out and how do you ensure you’re putting your time and money into activities that will have the biggest impact?

In this article, we will provide 5 great tips to help you use LinkedIn effectively to boost brand awareness and increase reach.

Tip 1 – Save time with new LinkedIn tools

LinkedIn has introduced a number of new features and tools to save time and maximize your performance on the network. 

We all know that time is precious so anything that can help you to post in a few clicks and increase your reach is worth trying out. 

The latest LinkedIn features you can take advantage of include:

• Scheduled posts – You can schedule posts for free and choose a future time and date for them. This means posts can be created in batches at times that suit you and on a day or time that works best for your audience.
• Company pages can follow each other – Following is no longer restricted to just members: companies can now follow each other and LinkedIn will recommend Pages for your business to follow. This feature is great for keeping an eye on competitors and creating a feed of your clients/customers pages to support their activity more easily.
• Suggested posts in the feed – You may have seen content popping into your feed as Suggested or You Might Like. This is LinkedIn’s TikTok-style algorithm alerting you to topics, people and businesses it thinks will interest you. It’s a great way to keep up to date and see new ideas or trends with little effort.

Tip 2 – Mix up media with video and audio

We all know that video is an integral part of your social media content but how do you ensure your videos hit the sweet spot? 

Recent research from VidMod analyzed almost 10k LinkedIn video posts and has plenty of insights to help you maximize your video creation efforts. You can check out the full report, but my personal favorites are:

• Shorter videos work best – Videos between 7 and 15 seconds have 54% more engagement and 6-10 second videos have 15% more click-throughs
• Mix your media – Test overlays and different color combinations can increase click-through rates by up to 72%
• Make it personal – Include people and CTAs early in the video to increase view-through rates by over 100%

But don’t just use video, mix your content further with Audio Events. Brands like Mastercard have been creating events like this to share their thought leadership in real-time, offer Q&As, and engage actively with their community. 

This audio event from Mastercard looked at ‘Building Campaigns that Last’ and featured high-profile speakers from the brand and creative agencies. 

Tip 3 – Integrate personal and company activity

There has been a dramatic increase in the number of individuals using their personal brand to support social selling in their business. 

It serves to humanize a brand by showing a face rather than a logo and can help to build more meaningful relationships and build brand awareness. 

This tactic is extremely effective, as the old adage of ‘people buy from people’ translates into much higher reach and engagement rates from personal rather than company profiles. 

Consider which employees you can use that have a presence on LinkedIn to take advantage of 75% lower lead generation costs and 78% higher sales performance.

Tip 4 – Use micro-influencers

Micro-influencer marketing has exploded for B2C on channels such as Instagram and TikTok. But LinkedIn is a great place to use influencer marketing as part of your B2B strategy. 

These influencers should be experts in their field (the word micro equals niche) and have strong credibility and reach your target audience. They could work for you, or you can find them using social listening tools, hashtag and mention analysis, and wider research of your target audience. 

Remember that influencers will only partner with businesses that complement their own personal thought leadership brand building. 

Finally, think about how influencers who operate on multiple channels could widen your business exposure on platforms such as TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube as well as LinkedIn.

Tip 5 - Boost your Social Selling Index (SSI)

LinkedIn’s Social Selling Index (SSI) is a formula that assesses how good a user is at ‘selling’ on the platform. It ranks your performance on LinkedIn against others in your network or industry and helps you understand if your content resonates with your audience. 

Knowing your SSI helps you to work on several factors to become a better seller and gauge engagement. The best ways to improve your SSI score are:

• Create a professional persona
• Engage with LinkedIn insights
• Use LinkedIn tools
• Seek out meaningful connections

The higher your SSI score, the better you are at driving engagement so it’s a good way to challenge yourself to create content that engages.  

Use Social Media to Drive Leads & Revenue

There's a huge opportunity to grow your brand and customer base using social media marketing. Our short Social Media Marketing track will teach you how to gain customers using social media, how to design social content, brand storytelling and the importance of customer experience, and how to build social communities. Sign up today. 

Related

• 7 Easy Steps to LinkedIn Success
• 5 Key Elements of a Killer LinkedIn Summary (& 5 Great Hacks)
• Walkthrough: LinkedIn Ads & Insights with Cathal Melinn