Looking to boost your LinkedIn business profile? Well, you’re in the right place…
LinkedIn is growing rapidly. From both a personal and business perspective, utilising this platform opens up all sorts of opportunities these days. Recruitment, potential clients, establishing your brand, or being an ambassador for your company – there are so many ways to utilise this amazing platform.
The critical function of your LinkedIn business profile is to attract and interact with your key audience. If used in the right way, and not just as a placeholder for your business, it can be a dynamic marketing tool. You can build your brand’s awareness or even position yourself as a thought leader – all in aid to shift those just “browsing” into action.
However, with such a feature-rich and continually changing platform, optimising your LinkedIn profile can be daunting. There’s so much for you to take advantage of and get your name out there. So, we created this list to help you out with some of the more important and useful features. Small things that you can do to maximise your profile.
Let’s jump into it…
Use Visual Content.
Striking images and videos are always going to grab the attention of your audience over plain written text. At every opportunity, make your LinkedIn business profile as visually appealing as possible. You can use images about your products, your services, infographics, and industry-specific imagery. There’s nothing wrong with using stock images, however, you do run the risk of other companies or advertisers using the same images. Plus, with stock images and videos, if you don’t pick the right ones, it can be obvious that it’s stock, and therefore I could potentially come across as too easy or impersonal.
Creating your images, and taking your own pictures, will always keep your content completely authentic to your brand as well as give a unique insight into your brand or culture. If you do want to create your imagery yourself, the good news is you don’t have to be a photoshop genius anymore. With online tools available like Figma or Canva, you can quickly pick up the skills to produce professional quality imagery with ease.
You also want to consider how the images you choose are reflecting your brand. Think about the imagery you’re going to post – is it still within the brand guidelines? Think about how your profile looks from a viewer’s perspective, does it change regularly? Does it look like you’re making the effort to keep your visuals up to date and looking sharp? Make a habit of regularly updating your profile so that, to an audience, it feels alive.
Keep It Short And Sweet
Following your rich content, you’ve got SECONDS to grab your reader’s attention from the written copy. Knowing this, you need to have something that’s going grab their attention and do one of two things. 1 – really take in the message you’re putting across. Or 2 – click on your page to find out more about your business. When we say keep it short – the shorter the better or 150 characters as a maximum. This is what’s recommended.
If it’s the attention you’re looking to grab with your written copy, try and hook the audience with the messaging. Make the update personal, ask your industry a question, make it controversial (within the boundaries of professional conduct of course) thought-provoking and even call out your audience on a trending topic. Experiment with what works and what doesn’t.
To Link Or Not To Link?
Links are a massively helpful tool with online content. You can redirect traffic towards your CTA (call to action), feed the reader with stronger intent content, send them to video, send them to the contact form or even use the link to track and attribute.
LinkedIn themselves have said: “Posts with links tend to get 45% higher engagement than those without”
So, wherever applicable – use links. However, there is such a thing as using too many links. Your audience may start to feel like they’re being spammed if you’re constantly trying to get them to redirect to someplace else. There are even occasions where NOT using a link has achieved higher engagement than those that do. Peppering posts that don’t have a link, amongst posts that do, will certainly make it stand out.
The Content Suggestions Tool
A great feature, built straight into the LinkedIn platform, is the Content Suggestions Tool. This helps you discover subjects and articles your audience is currently showing interest in. This is a great way of consistently coming up with content ideas.
When using the tool, you can select industry, location, and job seniority. Once you’ve done these you’ll have a filter bar on your right and the trending topic listed in the centre of the page with user engagement. You can use these topics to help to generate ideas for your own content. Alternatively, you can simply share these posts with your own audience. This can be a really simple way to get conversations started. If you want a deeper look into the Content Suggestions Tool, check out the link below…
Watch a short video here about the content suggestion tool.
Associate Your Posts With Hashtags
This one is a classic one, but still as valuable as ever nonetheless. Through the power of hashtags, you can make your content (and therefore your LinkedIn business profile in general) more discoverable to users outside your followers. One of the most alluring things about social media is that almost any post can be found or even be made viral – at any time. The more effective you are with your hashtags, the more likely your content will be discovered.
The other thing hashtags can do is also inform your audience about the subject matter, and give context, to your post. Think of hashtags as a way of cataloguing the content into a section. For example, if your post was about raising money for a worthy cause, you could use the hashtags #Charity or #Justgiving. These would now become discoverable to anyone searching these tags or having any interaction with content using them. A fantastic way to break into and attract new communities.
Respond To Your Comments
When creating content, a great strategy is to try and come up with creative content that will encourage people to leave comments. This is obviously beneficial as your posts are getting direct engagement, but you can then go one step further. You want to try and engage with as many of the comments as possible. This will help your brand in multiple ways. Firstly, it will show that the page is managed and not just a robotic tick-boxing exercise. On top of this, creating a conversation within the comments does wonders for appearing as a thought leader.
It’s also a great way of demonstrating your brand identity. The tone of voice and language you respond with can help audiences gain a better understanding of your brand. Formal language and tone help you seem professional and reliable. Informal language and tone help you come across as friendly, personal and down-to-earth. Choosing the right tone and language will depend on your business and how you want your audience to feel about your brand.
Quirky and interesting responses are also great for attracting attention online. We’ve seen some great comments (that have gone viral) in the past from the likes of Lidl, Weetabix and Innocent for example. So, if you’re in the groove of responding and see an opportunity with entertainment value, go for it.
Boost The Best
Fairly self-explanatory, but LinkedIn has a paid element for advertising and boosting posts. It’s a great way to get your content out far and wide beyond your followers. But you might be wondering; What content do I boost and why? Well, as the title suggests, boost the best! Most companies want to boost their most engaging content, this is often industry-specific, thought leadership, customer experience or product specific to name a few. Whatever is starting to resonate with people, boost it. This is a simplified strategy, that can use LinkedIn’s targeting features to really drive towards a particular demographic or location.
Best Practices for Boosting posts
Conclusion
Well, there we have it, 7 simple yet effective tips and features that you can utilise to take your LinkedIn business profile to the next level. As a platform for generating leads, getting your brand name out there, and even finding perfect candidates for your business, LinkedIn is slowly but surely becoming the go-to place for all businesses. Definitely don’t sleep on giving your business’s profile the best possible chance. Who knows where it might take you?
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