With 2 new members a second, LinkedIn remains a powerful international platform, used by 106 million active users a month to connect and share information.
Companies use LinkedIn to raise their profile with key influencers and stakeholders, make positive connections with potential customers and recruit new staff. LinkedIn company pages are a fast growing tactic. But social media managers responsible for pages often report growing followers is slow, and it can be challenging encouraging any engagement.
We work on the social media for commercial architecture practice HLP UK Ltd, recently taking company follower numbers through 200, from setting up the page around three years ago. The firm has had around 10 employees throughout that time. This year social media has generated 16% of the overall web traffic and Linked in is responsible for two-thirds of that.
In the last three years, we have discovered that there are two keys to success with this channel – great content, and proactive colleague engagement.
To create successful engaging, sharable content for a B2B audience, clarify your target audience and think about the reasons why, from a professional standpoint, they would be motivated to engage with your posts. You could share:
- Use of a new technology, or illustrating how the company has a USP using a particular technology and the benefits for new clients.
- A successful project recently completed, team members will be keen to engage and show their involvement. Business partners will be motivated to show they played their part in delivering the project for the client.
- Timely news, for example, your company’s involvement in delivering a new store that opened at a new shopping centre launch to maximise third party engagement.
- If there is a particular trend or legislation coming up in the sector share, your service offering.
- Use striking eye catching unique images, optimised to the correct LinkedIn post size using apps such as Canva.
Don’t be afraid to reuse content. We found that client case studies consistently receive high engagement, from the HLP team, client and contractors, and can bear repeating.
In addition, a mixed content strategy will help keep your audience. Nobody wants to hear a company talk purely about itself, so do find other curated content that enhances the messages and brand image you want to convey for your client.
But great content is no use if it isn’t seen. Key to gaining reach on Linked In pages, is to encourage employees of your business to grow their own follower numbers and then to engage themselves with the company page content. At HLP we used the following steps to help:
- Covering the importance of LinkedIn in the induction of every new employee, including help to set up a profile if they don’t already have one.
- Sharing tips including making personal profiles relevant and visual, and providing coaching to employees that need help.
- Emphasising that it is acceptable – even encouraged – to spend company time on the platform.
- Early on, when we had a lot of younger employees with low follower numbers, we ran a competition for the team to grow their number of personal followers. Small prizes given out in team meetings provided enough motivation for the team to connect with former school friends, university lecturers and recent employers.
- Directors lead by example, using the platform every day, and commenting on and sharing all the company posts.
- Tracking the web traffic generated from Linked In each month, and if it drops, reminding the team of the need for their support.
- With particular important posts, for example, job advertisements, directors have contacted key contacts with high followers (including clients) and asked them to share the post.
Most importantly we’ve learned to accept organic growth of an engaged, relevant following takes time, to keep creating new content and keep the team motivated and engaged.
