This article has been written by Kaushik Chakraborty, SVP and Head - Digital Marketing and Alternate Channels, UTI Mutual Fund.
The more I interact with people across different levels of seniority and success, the more I witness the huge amount of ignorance and fear that exists around social media.
It is for this reason I thought of taking up the most neutral, professional and controversy free social network – LinkedIn, for discussion today. My attempt is to evaluate ways of using the LinkedIn platform for the benefit of the user.
LinkedIn is an open architecture professional networking platform with features that aid an individual’s professional development but serve a purpose for corporates too.
Relationships matter more than ever, as today’s professionals seek out ideas and insights from the people and brands they trust. As such, they devote a lot of time to reading the news and keeping in touch with their networks through LinkedIn. In fact, members spend an average of 9.8 minutes per day on social networking.
Through building and cultivating relationships on LinkedIn, successful connections can lead to revenue. According to LinkedIn, 50% of its members said they’re more likely to buy from a company they engage with on the platform.
Engage the team
If you, as an adviser, are driving awareness for your brand or are scouting for new leads, getting the team involved on LinkedIn is one way to success.
Ask your employees to interact on the network. This will not only increase the company’s visibility to new customers and potential hires, but will establish a culture where employees are actively engaged with the brand.
This is as simple as getting employees to add the company to their LinkedIn Profile or share company updates with their network. Just be sure that your employees are familiar with all of LinkedIn’s features as well as your brand’s key messaging before setting them loose on the platform. Better yet, give them an easy way to share curated content with a tool designed for advocacy.
Create emotional connections
To break through the noise of any social network, you need to be especially relevant to your followers. Talking to an audience isn’t effective; you have to connect and build lasting relationships. Typically, such connects can only be built through a well thought out content strategy. The content strategy should focus on four key areas:
- Professional benefits
- Social benefits
- Emotional benefits
- Self-image benefits
Connecting with the audience through these areas will typically yield twice the impact of traditional business values. While doing this, one can also target the relevant audience through various services of LinkedIn.
Follow best practices in publishing
Each social network has its own strengths and weaknesses. What works on one won’t necessarily have the same result on the others. For this reason, it’s necessary to familiarise yourself with LinkedIn’s publishing best practices.
- When it comes to building engagement and trust through status updates, LinkedIn recommends following the 80/20 rule: four updates for the benefit of your followers for every update promoting your company. This guarantees a well-balanced stream of rich, insightful content.
- It’s also worth noting that, on average, companies that post 20 times per month reach at least 60% of their unique audience. Adhering to a consistent posting schedule can lead to increased engagement from your followers. However that does not mean that one should post without thought or reason.
- There are no set formulas for what kind of update should be posted when for best results but in general many experts tends to believe that weekday posts during business hours works best. In that Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays appear to be better than Mondays and Fridays.
- Posts with links drive twice the engagement than posts without.
- Images are loved by users and on an average result in a 98% higher comment rate.
- Links of youtube videos that play directly in the LinkedIn feed typically result in a 75% higher share rate.
Join a LinkedIn group
LinkedIn Groups provide a place for professionals in the same industry or with similar interests to share content, find answers, post and view jobs, make business contacts, and establish themselves as industry experts.
Deploy LinkedIn tools
Some which can be used by businesses are:
- Content Marketing Score – This is an analytical resource that offers insights into the impact of your paid and organic content on LinkedIn. It enables you to know how well you’re engaging your audience over time, and with this knowledge, you can fine-tune your strategy for more powerful results.
- Lead Accelerator – Lead Accelerator helps you do just that by using display and social advertising to attract and nurture prospects anywhere they travel online, across multiple devices.
- Slideshare – Acquired by LinkedIn in 2012, SlideShare is the world’s largest community for sharing professional content. As a member, you can easily upload and share presentations, infographics, documents, videos, PDFs and webinars. It’s a popular content format on the platform and one that LinkedIn itself uses regularly in its blog posts and product announcements.
The views expressed are of the author and not the organisation he represents.
