LinkedIn has became a great platform for B2B marketing and personal branding in the last few years. Yes it has been around for a while, but the userbase has shifted and is now more powerful for local businesses and professionals. There are many ways to use LinkedIn, but today we are going to cover LinkedIn for local B2B marketing and personal branding.
Why LinkedIn?
LinkedIn is content deficient right now. That means there are more users than there is content which is a good thing for your personal and business pages. If you post valuable content, you will be rewarded. Posts on LinkedIn have a lot longer shelf-life than other social media platforms. Most social media platforms, you'll get all your engagement within the first couple hours you post up to a couple days after that post has been posted. With LinkedIn, post continue to reach and gather engagement for 2 weeks all the way up to possibly 4 weeks after you post if that post has value to your followers or connections. The final and possibly most important reason we love LinkedIn is because of the user base. People on LinkedIn are business professionals wanting to network. They want to be motivated and inspired. They are on LinkedIn with a "working" mindset. This means when you share a little bit of the work you do in a networking manner, you are speaking to a more targeted audience than on other social media platforms.
Suggestions for personal page versus business page
One of the questions we get asked a lot is when and what to post on your personal page and when and what to post on your business page. In our experience, we have found that LinkedIn users don't engage with business pages at the rate that they do with other LinkedIn users personal pages. That doesn't mean to shelve your business page, it just means you need to be patient. We believe you should use your personal page on a more regular basis with posts and engagement that are directly about you while using your business page to post articles, recent work, value-added content and more to show your expertise in your particular industry.
Personal Page
Since LinkedIn shows almost every engagement on your connections feeds (this means likes, shares, comments, and of course posts all show up on your connections feeds), you have a lot more opportunity on your personal page to show up often in those connections feeds. Like other platforms, LinkedIn rewards individuals who use their platform on a consistent basis. With that in mind, we recommend liking, sharing, and commenting on posts at least once a day during the business week. By liking, sharing, and commenting, you are helping your fellow connections reach a larger network and they are more likely to reward your efforts when you post. But LinkedIn always comes down to you posting so we also recommend creating your own post at least once or twice a week. You can use your own posts to help you gain thought leadership in your area of expertise and to keep your connections up to date with your professional life.
What kind of content should you post on your personal LinkedIn page?
Knowing what kind of content your connections will resonate with is a difficult task. The best way is to start posting. LinkedIn does a great job with analytics for your personal page that allow you to know what types of post your connections enjoy engaging with. We have found that people enjoy interacting with motivational posts that are personal. Don't just post that quote from that book you're reading, but explain why you find that quote important. Don't be afraid to get personal on your personal LinkedIn page, but keep it relevant to your work life. If you take your kids to see a project you worked on, share it. If you have something happen in your personal life, like having a child, and it's directly affecting your professional life, share it as well. Most of all, share authenticity. Yes, we know. You always hear "be authentic." It is sort of a cliché, but when done correctly, it works. Being authentic means knowing what is true to you and not hiding that. If you have a passion for building houses, share that passion. And finally, be transparent. Share the wins, but also share your failures. Allow people to see that you believe in what you're doing and you believe in helping others learn from your mistakes.
Business Page
First and foremost, we want to acknowledge that our Captivated Content page only has 148 followers as of writing this article. We have also manage local business pages that have over 1,000 followers and helped grow that following. But we don't believe followers are the best way to keep score on your business page. It's the quality of engagement that matters. If you have a large team, having those team members feel proud to share the content you are posting on your business page is important. For local businesses, having the community engage with your business page with likes, shares, and comments is also a huge win. And of course, having your fans, current customers, and potential customers engage with your posts from your business page helps establish more authority in your industry.
What and how often should you post on your LinkedIn business page?
As mentioned above, business pages take more time to grab followers. One of the best ways to improve your business page is be consistent. Create a schedule for posting content to your LinkedIn page and stick to it. We recommend posting at least once a week. This can be value-added content like a blog article with tips and tricks, behind the scenes content of a project, case studies, or even a little bit of sales information.
What NOT to do on LinkedIn
We have found some things that don't work as well on LinkedIn. We recommend NOT connecting with every connection request. Only connect with those who bring value to you and your local network. Also, LinkedIn is NOT a sales platform. It's a networking platform. Don't be the person who connects with someone and tries to "sell" them your product or services right after connecting. LinkedIn is about creating virtual relationships that can develop into real-life relationships. No one likes to be sold to and presenting a sales pitch as soon as you connect with someone will more than likely turn them away from working with you in the future. Trust us, we have experienced losing out on work because we were using LinkedIn the wrong way when we started.
We are still learning to best utilize LinkedIn. There are professionals and pages out there that have more information than we can provide, but the one call to action we want to leave with you today is if you are not on LinkedIn or your page has been sitting dormant, we recommend getting started. If you are in the B2B realm, LinkedIn should be one of your most used social media platforms.
