It’s likely while you were in college or applying for jobs you were told to make a LinkedIn account to better network yourself since it’s seen as a professional social media platform. Most people will connect with friends, classmates, and acquaintances and never think twice about the platform once they have a job. However, LinkedIn is gaining popularity fast and many brands are setting up pages to engage with their target audience in a more professional setting. This means your favorite brands and companies may try to engage with you via LinkedIn. But what does LinkedIn engagement look like?
Professional vs Personal LinkedIn Accounts
First, let’s break down the difference between professional and personal accounts. A professional or business page belongs to a company or corporation and is most notably a B2B account. A personal account is what you set up for yourself to network and apply for jobs. For the sake of this blog, we’ll be discussing engagement with B2B accounts. A typical business or company page will naturally have a lower engagement rate than a personal profile because “most people are more likely to resonate with a personal brand with a human face than a corporation with a logo.” A big part of this is encouraging employees, especially those in the C-suite, to comment, react, and share the company posts to drive more people to view the company page. Not only will this increase interactions with the posts and the page, it will also create facial recognition for your company which will help consumers remember you.
LinkedIn Engagement Tools
Luckily LinkedIn has built-in engagement tools available for you to utilize if you don’t want to subscribe to a third-party tool. On your company page, there is a tab called ‘Analytics’ and it measures page updates, visitors, and followers. The page updates track all the impressions your page gains; anytime someone clicks on a post, comments, likes, or visits your page it will be listed. The visitor tab tracks viewers who aren’t in your network or aren’t followers. These are the people who you want to start interacting with because they are potential clients and customers. While the followers tab shows how the people who follow your page interact with posts. These tabs will also help you understand your target audience and how they behave.
Keep in mind that to grow your network you may need to engage outside of your following. In order to do this you should be engaging with everyone you can, whether or not they are in your network, target audience, etc. A great way to do this is to be paying attention to keywords and positions that go along with your company. Once you find someone who fits your target audience you should follow, connect, and interact with them. This will help build brand awareness and your network.
Creating and Sharing Interesting Content on LinkedIn
One of the biggest parts of social media is creating and sharing interesting content. People are more likely to interact with profiles and content if it piques their interest. Since LinkedIn is seen as a more professional platform people don’t typically think of posting anything other than blog post-style content. Posting videos, and links, or offering intellectual property can be great first steps. You need to almost force people to interact with your posts and they won’t unless you give them a chance to. Try ending blog posts with a question to start a conversation in the comments. When your posts get comments make sure you’re responding to every comment as well. The LinkedIn algorithm will track your responses as new comments and this could help bump your post higher on people’s feeds. As with most things, trial and error is a big part of engagement, especially when you are targeting a specific platform. It’s important to understand what your target audience will respond to and that will dictate how you choose to interact with your audience.
Posting Consistently on LinkedIn
Another big part of engagement on LinkedIn is posting consistently and writing consistently. A mistake many people make when posting on LinkedIn is trying to sound too professional. People respond better when you write the same way you would speak to them. While it is important to stay professional on LinkedIn, it doesn’t mean you should come across as sounding robotic. It’s really important that you seem vulnerable with your brand and come across as a real person. People are overly wary of bot and spam accounts and it’s important to stray away from that. You also want to post consistently. On LinkedIn you want your company or brand to become a value add. This means people can count on you for valuable, knowledgeable, and consistent posts. Another trick to consider is offering behind-the-scenes content. People enjoy seeing what a company or brand does behind the scenes and these types of posts tend to gain more interactions than normal posts because this again allows your company to be viewed through a new lens that will stick in people’s minds.
It’s time to start connecting and engaging!
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