LinkedIn is a powerful tool for networking and building relationships with potential customers, partners, and employees. It's also a critical distinction for B2B marketing, as it allows you to improve your company's branding and visibility.
This article will explore how you can improve your LinkedIn presence organically by building engagement among employees, partners, and networks beyond your own.
If you use HubSpot's social media management software, you should already have all the analytics tools you need to measure the health of your LinkedIn presence. Here are a few metrics you should pay attention to.
You want to make sure that your company's LinkedIn page is being seen and interacted with by as many people as possible. The more engagement your page receives, the more likely it is to be seen by other LinkedIn users.
Reach is the total number of people who see your content. On LinkedIn, this metric is also known as "impressions." You can measure the reach of individual posts to determine how far-reaching they are and how many new LinkedIn users have seen them.
Reach is most often expanded by garnering shares of your content, as this enables people in other LinkedIn networks to gain an impression of your content. For example, if only your current followers are seeing your content, your reach won't change. But if one of those followers shares your post on their page, you'll be able to reach an entirely new network of people.
Another important metric to keep an eye on is engagement. This measures how many people interacted with your company's LinkedIn content. Engagement is typically measured based on reactions, comments, and shares.
Typically, your level of engagement will be a fraction of the number of impressions you get with a post.
Engagement is often seen as one of the core objectives of posting on social media, as it means people are finding value in what you post. If people are commenting, it means you've started a good discussion. If people are sharing, it means they believe others in their network will find your content valuable.
Finally, you should monitor follower growth. Gaining followers gives you more opportunities to convert social media users into leads, prospects, and customers.
If you aren't gaining followers, there could be an issue with your LinkedIn strategy. For example, if you only post "sales-y" content on LinkedIn, you aren't likely to get many followers. Most people will only follow you if you can offer them something of value, such as research, insights, news, or even something entertaining.
Now that you know what social media analytics to monitor, let's talk about how you can improve your company's LinkedIn presence.
Often, companies rely on a social media manager or content director to be the sole poster of their LinkedIn account. Employees and other stakeholders may list themselves as being affiliated with the company on their personal accounts, but they may not post on the company's behalf.
This is a missed opportunity to boost engagement considerably. One of the best ways to improve your presence is by building engagement among employees, partners, and other stakeholders within your company and network.
According to Ryan Gunn, Senior Solutions Consultant at Aptitude 8:
"The key to having a successful organic presence on LinkedIn, as a business, is employee buy-in. If your employees are engaging with your posts with likes, shares, and comments, and are creating their own posts that tag the company page, you will be able to exponentially expand your reach."
If only one person at your company is posting on LinkedIn, that limits your presence considerably. It also creates the image that your company is static rather than organic, dynamic, and full of ideas.
"Without the amplifying power of employee engagement, LinkedIn's algorithm makes it very difficult to organically reach your audience," says Gunn.
Ask your employees if they are willing to use their LinkedIn profiles to engage with and share company posts, as well as LinkedIn live events and webinars. Encourage them to create their own content and post on the company's behalf as well. This will help you spread your reach across your employee's network.
LinkedIn has long been viewed as the least lively of all the media platforms, as it caters only to businesses and professionals. As you can imagine, posts on LinkedIn don't go viral as often as those on other platforms.
However, that's been changing recently. LinkedIn is now home to multiple influencers who hold considerable sway over their audience. Their posts often get thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of comments, shares, reactions, and impressions.
According to Aptitude 8 CEO and Founder Conner Jeffers:
"Linkedin is quickly becoming the influencer network of businesses. I would predict that these 'micro-influencers' like Kyle Jepson in the HubSpot ecosystem start having brand presence and drive behavior akin to the domain rush or the original Instagram handle competition."
Engaging with LinkedIn influencers by commenting and sharing their posts can help you reach a larger audience. You can also partner with influencers to share your content. This helps the influencers' audience view your content, and your company, as valuable and trustworthy.
With time and effort, you or your team members could even become influencers themselves. Generally, you'll need to do the following:
If you can amass followers this way, you'll start building a community centered around your company's ideas, insights, or even philosophies. This is challenging to do, but it could completely transform your company's reach.
And as Jeffers says, "Your reach on LinkedIn is critical to your growth."
LinkedIn is a powerful tool for businesses to connect with potential customers and partners, but you need a strong presence to get real value from it. You also need powerful analytics tools, like those offered by HubSpot, to measure the results of your LinkedIn strategy.
To learn more about how you can make LinkedIn and HubSpot work for your business, contact us today at Aptitude 8!