Boost your LinkedIn strategy by empowering employees, creating engaging content, and sparking conversations that extend your brand's reach.
The value of employee advocacy
Create content that extends beyond your followers
Encourage users to engage in active conversation
LinkedIn is all about connections. It’s the one platform where people consistently share their professional developments, opening the opportunity for you to shamelessly talk business. It’s a legitimate source for generating leads, making your posts’ reach essential for people to discover your business page.
Want more eyes on your business’ LinkedIn page? Inspire employees to become champions, create content that extends beyond your followers, and encourage people to engage in active conversation.
The more your employees have emotional ownership of your business, the more your audience trusts you. In fact, 87% of millennials feel more connected to a brand when they see its employees share about it on social media. Consumers want to see the people behind businesses, not just those who run the brand account. When it comes to LinkedIn, content shared by employees receives eight times more engagement than content shared by brand channels. People most often have social media, including LinkedIn, to see what their friends and acquaintances are doing, with brand posts making an occasional appearance in their feed. With employee advocacy, your posts have a higher chance of being seen and connecting with your target audience.
In order for employees to become brand champions, you need to ensure they have an above-and-beyond experience. Listen to their wins, their struggles, and be supportive. Employees want to know that their employer is listening to them. In addition, share your brand story with them. This will let them connect with your business on a deeper level and gain passion for the values your brand holds near.
Many businesses incorporate employee advocacy programs to create brand champions. This is a strategy that motivates employees to share content about your business on their social media accounts. Employee advocacy programs have the power to increase brand awareness, inspire networking opportunities, drive leads, and more. Often, companies provide some sort of incentive in return, but regardless, 72% of engaged users say they would post about their company if content was written for them. This way, employees don’t have to worry about straying too far away from essential messaging while trying to stay authentic.
If creating an employee advocacy program isn’t your business’ style, we recommend tailoring your content to make it easily shareable by your team: Get team members involved with content creation and post photos and videos that make them feel proud to share with their followers. Allow employees to share their thought leadership on your page so they feel more compelled to share it. Make the objectives of social media engagement clear to team members so they know the power it has to boost business.
Are your employees ready to take the step toward being brand champions? Not sure where to start? Encourage them to try these methods:
We used these strategies for the LONDONmiddlebury LinkedIn business page and doubled our follower count over the course of six months. All it takes is a group of passionate team members who are ready to be advocates for your business.
The LinkedIn algorithm focuses on the types of content and the profiles users interact with, catering their feed to feature posts of the same nature. The algorithm’s main purpose is to increase engagement across the platform. So, how do you make sure your content is appearing at the top of someone’s feed?
Your LinkedIn feed should be a balance of posts that engage your current followers and appeal to people who know nothing about your business. Who is the dream customer you want to find on LinkedIn? Put yourself in their shoes. What types of content do they like to browse? What conversation topics most interest them?
On LinkedIn, tagging users and brands improves your post’s reach. Doing so will send a notification to their account, encouraging them to respond. Often, it also will show up in their connections’ feeds.
When you’re creating content for LinkedIn, consider how you can elicit active conversation. When someone likes or comments on a post, it often gets pushed to their connections’ feeds. Create content that inspires people to give their opinion. This method has a wide range of styles, from one-sentence questions to an extensive post sharing thought leadership. Here is an example from HubSpot:
This is a simple, straightforward post, yet it warranted over 100 comments from LinkedIn users. Posts like these are a lighter lift while still inspiring many users to get involved in the conversation. Now, let’s see a different post from Girls in Marketing:
This post is significantly longer than the HubSpot example, yet it received over 1,000 votes on its poll. This type of post takes significantly more work to create, but it also gives the brand more of an opportunity to share thought leadership with users.
Both of these methods are valuable in different ways, and both spark conversations amongst users. You only get 200 characters to capture the attention of your audience before the “see more” link appears, so it’s essential to use your first two sentences to inspire scrollers to continue reading.
Another great way to expand your LinkedIn reach is to prioritize shares— this is a method to get directly onto the feeds of sharers’ connections. If it fits your brand, posting memes and humor in your posts are the ones that will get the most shares. Most often, these are posts that are the most relatable to your audience.
Lastly, it’s important to stick to the 80/20 rule. This means that only 20% of your content should be promotional, while the other 80% focuses on creating value for your audience. Avoid overwhelming your audience with outbound links— if you’re posting five days a week, allow one post to link to your website and the other four to drive conversations.
It might be hard to build followers at the beginning, and there’s no shame in investing in LinkedIn Ads to help your page grow. The ads might be as straightforward as calls-to-action to follow your page or promoting your most popular content to your target audience. Digital advertising is a valuable way to create initial brand touchpoints— afterward, potential followers can do their own research about your brand and choose to follow.
To maximize your business’ LinkedIn presence, focus on empowering your employees to become brand champions, creating posts that spark genuine conversations, and striking the right balance of promotional and value-adding content. This way, you can effectively leverage LinkedIn to drive brand awareness and generate leads.