LinkedIn Social Media Guide

­LinkedIn is proving to be a core B2B communication tool for businesses to engage and market to customers. We’ve seen success for clients over the last few weeks who have utilised LinkedIn to target a quality audience in a professional context. It allows you to market directly to influencers, decision makers, and executives who can act on new opportunities.

To help clarify the different options available on LinkedIn and provide advice on how to use it, we have pulled together a summary of the key tools and how to use them to your advantage.

In this blog we’re covering:

• How to grow your followers
• Matched and lookalike audience advertising options on LinkedIn
• How to use Inmail on LinkedIn

How to grow your followers – our how to guide

1. Engage your employees

Your team members are key when it comes to growing a page following. Encourage them to spread the word. Get employees to share and tag your page in updates, this allows them to share the information with their networks and boosts your visibility. Make sure your employees tag your business in their work experience and job title. Each time your new employee makes a new connection on LinkedIn the new connection will be prompted to see your page.

2. Invite contacts through page admins

The page admins are able to invite their own contacts to like the business page using the following steps:

• Log in
• Select admin tools
• Click invite connections and you will see a list of people who do not currently follow the page
• You can select the contacts you want to invite, to like the page (you can invite up to 50 contacts a day)
• You can also search for specific people in the search bar.

3. Add a LinkedIn Button to your website

By adding your company’s LinkedIn link and icon to your website, this will drive any website traffic to click on your social media channels leading to a follow.

4. Add your LinkedIn page to your email signature for maximum exposure

Think about how many people you email daily. By placing a LinkedIn icon in your email signature, it creates a simple way to lead prospects to your social media channels.

5. Complete your companies LinkedIn profile

Make sure your LinkedIn company profile is complete. When it is complete it’s more likely to show up on the homepage.

6. Regularly add fresh content on your page

Keeping the flow of content will give your page more visibility on members’ feeds. If you don’t post regularly at the moment, start by raising to two posts a week, this will allow you to see the lift in engagement which will turn into greater reach. Make sure your content is appealing to potential followers. People want something they can engage with so end a post on a call to action.

7. Use hashtags

Look at the topics that are trending. Use 3-5 relevant hashtags for each post to reach new audiences, as this will fill the relevant pages with your content and make it easier for interested members to discover your brand. Click on the hashtags you’ve used and see what other people are posting. By seeing this you can interact by commenting and liking other’s posts and further exposing your name.

8. Encourage engagements on your posts

When members engage with your page content by ways of reactions or comments, it exposes that content to a wider audience through your following. Consider what you can do to encourage comments on your page posts through different calls to action. It could be ‘Like if you think we should’ or ‘What are your thoughts on’ these will encourage a response. LinkedIn threads and relationships will grow stronger by you commenting back and interacting with the people that engage.

9. Share visual and video content on the regular

It is well known on social media that people are more likely to read a post if there is something visual attached to it. By using unique imagery and videos this will help you stand out more on the feeds. People love seeing culture, using your employees and people your audience will know, will heavily grow engagement. Utilise photos from your latest events or what’s been going on in the business.

We have found that LinkedIn content performs really well by using these extras

• A descriptive caption help provide extra context
• Add emojis, questions and bullet points to switch up the look and feel of the content

10. Join discussions in LinkedIn Groups

LinkedIn groups often hold in-depth discussions on various topics and services. If key people within your organisation engage in these conversations demonstrating their expert knowledge, it is a great way to engage with others, to be seen as an authority on a subject and promote awareness of your brand.

Matched and lookalike audience advertising options on LinkedIn

LinkedIn’s lookalike audience combines the traits of your ideal customer with their member and company data. This will help you market to a professional audience similar to your existing customers, website visitors and target accounts through ads. Once your lookalike audience has been added to a campaign, you can also select additional targeting facets, like job function and company industry, to further refine your target audience.

How do you create a Lookalike audience for your next ad campaign?

LinkedIn Matched Audiences is a set of targeting capabilities that gives you the unique ability to combine LinkedIn’s powerful professional data with your own first-party data to reach the right audiences on LinkedIn. With Matched Audiences, you can retarget your website visitors, securely upload lists of companies or email addresses, and integrate with your contact management platform.

How to use InMail on LinkedIn

InMail allows you to directly message another LinkedIn member that you’re not connected to. If you have a Basic account, you can only directly message LinkedIn members that you’re connected to. You must upgrade to a Premium account to use InMail.

You’re allotted a specific number of InMail credits based on your subscription type. You can find the number of InMail credits you have from your Premium subscription page.

InMail messages can have up to 200 characters in the subject line and up to 1900 characters in the body. It’s important to keep in mind that your email signature is counted in the total number of available characters.

The content of your InMail is only as good as the title. This is where the “social” of social selling comes into play. Research your prospect to identify something personal that you can reference in the subject line to pique their interest. This is where you can use the common ground you both have to start a conversation and begin to build the relationship.

We hope you find these tips helpful and if you are looking for more support in setting up and promoting your business on LinkedIn please email us at: ideas@fwx.co.uk