Engagement rates on LinkedIn have grown rapidly in recent years. Usage is at an all time high. We’ve put together a guide to get the best out of LinkedIn as an individual, as an organisation, and how to have the two work together in the most effective possible way.
LinkedIn Pages (for companies and organisations) are a valuable tool for organisations to share news, advertise jobs, and engage with current, former and potential employees.
LinkedIn Profiles (for individuals) are a fantastic way to build connections, engage in professional conversations and networking, pick up work-related tips and ideas, as well as the more traditional use of finding job opportunities. Content from profiles tends to be favoured by LinkedIn’s algorithms. This is why it is so important for companies to support employees to be active on LinkedIn.
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There are complicated, and sometimes expensive, employee advocacy tools to help companies manage content for employee’s personal profiles. But LinkedIn itself offers two great ways to help employees share company updates via their personal profiles.
The My Company tab allows you to suggest text for employees to share on their personal profile. Page admins can draft text and add images or videos, which employees can then edit and share via their own profiles. This feature makes it super easy to share content without people having to cut and paste from an email or message and, particularly for videos, without having to download and upload files. Because the posts are shared from a personal profile, they are also likely to reach a larger and wider audience. Here’s how it works:
Got a key message on your company page that you want staff to engage with? You can alert your employees to a company page post. They’ll get a notification within LinkedIn. But you can’t customise the message, so if you can, it’s worth finding an alternate route to explain to employees that you’ll be using the functionality and how their engagement helps you reach more people. Note, this can only be done within LinkedIn, not via management tools.
If you are preparing to launch a company LinkedIn page or looking to grow your followers, there is a new tool to help. Any individual on LinkedIn can now invite their connections to follow pages. Share the link to the page you would like someone to invite connections to follow. Here, they’ll see options including ‘Follow’ ‘Visit Website’ and ‘More’. If they click on ‘More’ they will be able to invite up to 50 of their connections at a time to follow the page. Note this only works for LinkedIn pages that have less than 5000 followers. Why not test this feature and invite your own connections to like pages that you think they would find interesting or useful. And then share these steps with anyone who could help you to grow your page.
In late 2022 there were more than 150 million subscriptions to newsletters on LinkedIn, up 4x year on year. All newsletters are an opportunity to share insights and value with an interested audience, doing this via LinkedIn is especially useful. This is because people get in-app and email notifications when you publish a newsletter. They are also a fantastic way to keep in touch with people. Even if they move companies and change email addresses, they’ll still be getting your updates without having to resubscribe with new contact details.
All LinkedIn pages can follow three hashtags and then view and engage with a feed of content containing those hashtags. Pick three that are most relevant to the audience you want to reach so you can find and join conversations as your page. As a page admin you can also comment as your page on many of the posts that appear in your personal LinkedIn feed, but this does depend on the settings for each post. LinkedIn is also rolling out the ability for pages to follow other pages.
Whether you are writing for a personal profile or a company page there are three key things to keep in mind:
Share updates that are relevant, timely, and useful.
Plan posts that demonstrate your personal skills and experience, or your company’s specialisms.
Do share news, links to articles, and posts from other people and pages, but always add your own thoughts.
P.S. - don’t forget to engage - it’s as important, if not more important, than posting. Good social media is all about being social.
Find out more about how we help organisations with Employee Advocacy: equipping front-line, senior, or expert voices within an organisation to engage effectively online.
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