Need a Social Media Strategy? Is your company looking to make more connections online? Social media is a great tool to get your brand name out there. When creating a social media strategy, you need to be able to figure out your goals, what type of message you want to send, and how to get it out for fans/followers to take in.
Linkedin is the right social networking site for business to business as well as business to customer, both corporate and personal. It is a practical step by step guide in achieving your social media goals on Linkedin. By following all instructions you will build an effective profile, share valuable content and boost your network. A great strategy will draw attention from the right people resulting in a wider network and new opportunities. As your blooms so does the fruit from it. This book will help you set up your profile, properly manage and create relationships with connections, grow your audience of followers and give you resources for content sharing thus enabling visitors to
How the LinkedIn Algorithm Works
LinkedIn has been relatively open about how its algorithm works.
- An AI bot checks your content to ensure that it isn’t spam. If your content fails this test, it is unlikely to be served to many peoples’ feeds. Only share high-quality material on LinkedIn.
- Your post will be seeded to a trial audience. The algorithm will then examine the engagement of those initial people. If they show little interest in the post, then it is unlikely that LinkedIn will show your post to many more people.
- If your initial audience favored the post, giving it a reasonable number of likes and shares, then the LinkedIn algorithm will do further checks to ensure it isn’t spam, and that the results are credible for your audience network. They will widen the circle of accounts to whom they feed the post.
- Assuming your post is still performing well, human editors will eventually become involved. They will read the post and decide whether it merits boosting to a broader audience.
Tips to Crafting the Perfect LinkedIn Marketing Strategy
Define Your LinkedIn Marketing Goals
Marketing on LinkedIn is no different from any other social marketing. You need to begin each campaign by defining and setting your goals. You need to ask yourself why, precisely, are you undertaking this LinkedIn marketing campaign? What are you hoping to achieve from it?
You want your goals to be SMART – Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely. In particular, you need to ensure that you can use some suitable metrics to measure the success of your campaign.
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Some common goals (expressed generally here, not fully SMART) include:
- Increasing your brand awareness (probably best measured using data on your LinkedIn Page analytics)
- Building leads (LinkedIn is after all the network where you are most likely to find potential business decisionmakers/customers)
- Engaging with your target audience (again you will find data on this in your LinkedIn Page analytics and less tangibly in your participation in LinkedIn Groups)
- Selling your product (perhaps less common on LinkedIn, but still possible indirectly)
Perfect Your Company Page
Like many social networks, LinkedIn has two types of pages – personal pages where people list their past jobs and successes, and company pages. Once any manager or employee adds your business as a place of work, LinkedIn will create a company page for you. However, unless you add content and fill in the gaps, your company page will look uncared for and unclaimed.
An attractive, informative company page is essential for any business on LinkedIn. It will be one of the most likely places for your target audience to visit on LinkedIn. You should imagine it as being a virtual store, whether you sell items or just use LinkedIn to build brand recognition.
Your LinkedIn company page is a perfect place to narrate all the positive stories about your business. You can use it to highlight your team and any awards you have won. Ultimately, LinkedIn is a network about people, so you should use your LinkedIn company page to emphasize the public faces of your organization.
Anybody who wants to learn about your business on LinkedIn will make a point of searching for your company page. It is one of the most common ways that people research about your company – what you do, what you make, where your offices are, who your senior management and executive are.
You will want your LinkedIn company page to reflect all the branding you use elsewhere. It should include your official logo, your colors, your fonts, and links to your website URL. Think about the types of questions your potential customers would ask and preempt them by including the answers on your company page. As with all your online assets, you need to carefully consider the copy you use on your LinkedIn page, including relevant keywords in your text.
Make sure you continually update your company page, however. If you want to be considered a serious force on LinkedIn, you need to publish relevant, informative, interesting content regularly.
Create and Share Useful Engaging Content
Like all social media, you need to be social on LinkedIn. You can’t consider it set-and-forget marketing. There is little point having people following your account if they receive nothing in return. They would gradually forget about you, adding you to many other followed-and-ignored accounts.
It is important to remember that LinkedIn is a more “grown-up” and serious social network than many of the others; it is probably not the ideal place to share your cat memes. However, it is a perfect site to create and share blog posts that will interest your target market. LinkedIn is particularly suited to Thought Leadership type articles, allowing you to demonstrate your expertise in your niche.
Although you can share links to posts you have uploaded to your existing blog, studies show that LinkedIn’s algorithm favors material published on the platform, rather than promoting links offsite.
LinkedIn allows you to create blog posts within the platform, leaving it. The LinkedIn Publishing Platform allows members to write, edit, and share articles on LinkedIn, although it is not yet available within their mobile app.
You don’t have to create original content for all your LinkedIn posts. You can share other articles that you come across that you feel will be of value to your target audience. Remember, the overall goal of your LinkedIn account is to be of use to your target market, and collating other people’s relevant content can achieve this as well as your original pieces.
Define Your Goals
The type of content you publish and the approach you use to distribute it on LinkedIn depends on your final objective. That is why it is crucial to outline your goals at the onset of your LinkedIn marketing strategy.
Typically, you may want to target one or more of the following goals:
- Build brand awareness
- Generate qualified leads
- Strengthen brand reputation
- Engage with your target audience
- Sell your product or service
Understand Your Audience
Once you have a clear idea of your marketing goals, it is time to define your target audience. That’s a prerequisite for developing a solid LinkedIn marketing strategy.
You can outline your audience on the basis of different parameters such as job title, geographic location, industry, etc.
Let’s say your goal is to sell an ebook on influencer marketing for brands. In this case, your target audience may consist of marketing professionals. They may have job titles such as “social media manager,” “social media executive,” etc.
You can use the analytics section on your Company Page to learn more about your followers and page visitors.
It can be useful to help you gain meaningful insights about your audience and the type of content they prefer. This, in turn, will help you tailor your LinkedIn marketing strategy to cater to the needs of your audience.
Optimize your profile
This may seem like the most basic step, but it’s easy to overlook when you’re focusing your efforts on the more advanced LinkedIn marketing tactics. Whether you’re marketing through a company page or your personal account, it’s crucial that you make certain profile improvements that’ll increase your chances of getting noticed.
Start with a high-quality profile picture that’s relevant to your brand. A photo on your profile gives you 21 times more profile views. While company pages can use the brand logo as a profile picture, high-resolution professional headshots are ideal for personal profiles. But this may vary based on your industry and brand personality.
Other ways to optimize your LinkedIn profile include adding your current position, which can get you up to five times more connection requests. And don’t forget to include at least five relevant skills, as this might help you get 31 times more messages from recruiters and other LinkedIn members alike.
For those setting up a company page, our detailed guide on how to build the perfect LinkedIn page shows you the step-by-step process.
Conclusion
If you want to see tangible results from your social media strategy, you can’t afford to ignore the 750+ million users on Linkedin . With a strong Linkedin profile ( the most comprehensive social media profile available), you can find new clients, partners, and employees. And with in-depth knowledge of the platform, you can engage your prospective customers more effectively.