This informal CPD article on Leveraging your team for more brand exposure on LinkedIn was provided by JC Social Media, leaders in delivering training courses on all aspects of social media since 2011.
LinkedIn is a powerful social network but some brands find it difficult to gain traction on their business’s page. If you feel like you’re doing everything right but your content simply isn’t attracting the kind of attention you’d like, it might be time to get your team involved. In this article, we’re going to look at why doing the basics right might not be enough and how you can improve your reach.
Get the basics right first
As a precursor to the next tips, it’s important that your business’s LinkedIn page is set up for success. Your business page should be complete and optimised with great copy and profile images. After this, you need to ensure that the posts you’re sharing are high-quality. If you’ve not been consistently sharing content with great images and compelling copy, this might be the first thing to address. However, if you’re happy you have the basics in place but you’re simply not gaining traction fast enough, it’s time to look to your network of employees.
Why your team is valuable to you
Like most platforms, LinkedIn uses an algorithm to determine who sees your page’s content and how prominently. Posts that attract engagements such as clicks, likes, shares and comments will perform better than those that do not. This is because these act as signals that the content is well-suited and is interesting to those individuals and, therefore, this content is likely to be relevant to others too.
Once your team begins to engage with your content, your content will be shown to many more people, even if wasn’t actually ‘shared’ by a team member. This is likely to inspire further engagement from those outside your network and the effect snowballs. People are more likely to like or comment on content others have too – the simple rule of social proof. To boot, it’s also a great way of showing solidarity between team members.
Get your team proficient and looking the part
You must ensure your team is sufficiently equipped to aide your LinkedIn efforts. There’s no point asking people to get involved on LinkedIn if a) they don’t know how to use it and b) their profile looks unprofessional.
If you have the resource and expertise in-house, host a LinkedIn basics session in order to get the team up to scratch in basic functionality and profile optimisation. Ensure everyone’s profiles are as uniform as possible – the main things to address are:
- Profile pictures – try and make them all similar in style
- Header images – you could have a company-wide header image they can use
- Headline – ensure there’s a uniform structure across the company
- Summary section – make sure this is well-written and comes across well as an ambassador of the company
- Current position – this one relates the most to the company so make sure this is well explained
Brand strength comes from consistency so if every one of your team looks like part of the same organisation, that’s a huge improvement.
Clearly communicate what you want
Ensure your team members know that it’s part of the marketing plan to increase the LinkedIn page’s exposure. Depending on the size of your team, you won’t need all of them to like, comment or share everything you post but a handful of engagements will get the ball rolling.
Ideally, you should put a plan in place for each piece of content and convey clearly who you’d like to engage with it. Don’t leave it to chance how many people are going to engage with the post – it’s easy for the entire team to leave it to everyone else so nothing gets done!
Still not convinced LinkedIn’s one of the team?
Remember that there are some things that only personal profiles can do – commenting on status updates and getting involved in LinkedIn groups cannot be from business accounts. These two tactics can be very effective at increasing exposure for individuals and content amongst members of your target audience. Being strategic about how individuals get involved in meaningful conversations on LinkedIn alleviates the pressure on the company’s LinkedIn profile to grow itself.
Final words
Gaining traction for your business page on LinkedIn is not easy, especially if you don’t have a nationally-known brand or your team is small. Investing time and resource to produce great content consistently is great, but it can be easily amplified by a bit of cohesive action from your team.
It only takes a few seconds for someone to log in to LinkedIn and like or share something, but you’ll see a dramatic uptick in all the major indicators. Give it a go for a couple of months and see how your page grows and your content reaches more people.
We hope this article was helpful. For more information from JC Social Media, please visit their CPD Member Directory page. Alternatively please visit the CPD Industry Hubs for more CPD articles, courses and events relevant to your Continuing Professional Development requirements.
