Here’s the secret sauce to boost likes, shares and leads to personal profiles and Company Pages on LinkedIn

As an agency we use psychological, tactical and technical tricks to get the most out of the platforms and audiences we manage and the content we create. At Rhetoric, our background is in public relations, and we use digital PR tools and strategy to build audiences, engagement and leads for B2B clients on LinkedIn.

As PRs we have many techniques to ensure relevance, timeliness and reach. Every single thing our team does day to day is designed to get the maximum impact on LinkedIn. So, if you’re looking to shake up your strategy and implementation in 2021, keep reading.

Content Strategy for LinkedIn

Month to month generating insightful, on-brand value via content is an absolute time suck. And that’s putting it politely. It ends up being the bane of many a business owner or digital marketing exec’s to-do list.

To get over the dread you feel, ensure you have a simple, signed-off Content Strategy which will offer a framework and consistency on what you post and when, while offering as much value to your end user as possible.

Make sure you have a solid mix of content. Every month offer value-packed articles, informative and relevant news links, photos of staff, on-brand client testimonials, share wins and anniversaries and other news you might have. Examples of real-world examples below on what gets most engagement.

Use Exec profiles ALWAYS

One of our key successes has been to leverage key executive profiles for our clients. So not only are we using Company Pages but we’re using executive profiles in a couple of important ways.

First up, when posting on your LinkedIn Company Page ensure your staff and key executives know the post has been published so they can go and engage with it in an authentic way. Or better still, ensure you have access to executive profiles, to log in and like and share on their behalf. The algorithm favours posts which are gaining traction in the first half hour of posting, so, if you do nothing else, this should be a key way to build your audience.

Get CEO buy-in

The CEO’s profile on LinkedIn is crucial. Either spend time with the CEO or partly manage the profile yourself. This involves sharing Company Page content, regularly, updating ‘Featured’ profile section and commenting positively on others’ posts.

Ultimately, LinkedIn is a social platform. All articles must be written by individuals and not a corporate entity. The same content you share via the Company Page will not do as well as if you post it from the CEO or other key executives and I have the data to prove it. One post we did recently for a client gained 1,900 impressions via the Company Page but 14,000 impressions via the CEO’s.

Also, on personal pages you’ll be able to dive into more analytics. Here’s an example from my profile on how to grab data per post 👇👇

This had 2,800 views under the ‘like, comment and share’ bar (you can only see this if you’re the actual user). Click on views and it’ll give you insights into who’s seen the post, which companies, level of seniority, job role and location, similar to an article.

You will not get this level of detail on your Company Page for each individual post. Clicking ‘show stats’ will only give top line information ie: impressions, reactions, engagement rate and click through rate, but not who saw the content as shown above.

Great content

For organic reach, you’ve just got to create great content and use eye-catching imagery. Here’s our top three which works every time for virality:

• Anniversaries of business formation
• Award wins
• Team pics of staff doing what they do
• Charity donations, campaigns or corporate social responsibility projects

There are ways of presenting the above too which can increase impact. Steer clear of formal, handshakes and get nice shots (phone cameras perfectly acceptable) of key staff, close up, looking happy and engaged.

Incentivise your staff to get involved in bringing to attention exciting projects they’re working on, tenders won, client successes and events they’re attending. A strategy one of our clients use is to pay team members $100 per article they write.

Mix up content with short form posts and longer in-depth insights from staff and executives in the form of articles. Thought leadership and giving insights into how your organisation works and what you deliver in a non-salesy way, is a great lead-gen tool. See your web traffic spike as you publish.

Storytelling

As a PR agency storytelling is key for all communications work we do across all platforms. Giving information which is less corporate messaging and more behind-the-scenes builds trust, shows your humanity and the core values of your organisation.

Spending time with staff and listening to their experiences and insights into their roles can be a great way of information gathering for your storytelling. For example, your CEO went on a trip to Silicon Valley, interview them and find out their key insights, any funny things that happened. How they felt on the trip can be more of a gem for your post or article than what they learned.

If you’re in a technical field, explain in laypersons terms small parts of how your products or processes work. Use imagery, photography or diagrams to help explain and tell the story behind the process.

Interview and profile one team member a month. Ask questions to get funny, insightful or creative answers.

With a membership organisation we’re working with we’ve been profiling female engineers and putting together branded presentations (which can be uploaded to LinkedIn as ‘files’ in a post) and are easily scrollable. The campaign has generated over 3,000 impressions over three posts, while offering members a value-add to their membership offering profile opportunities to their staff.

On-brand

We’re using Canva on the daily creating images, GIFs and videos which align with client branding.

Remember LinkedIn is ‘social’ media. As humans we’re wired to respond well to other people, so ramp up photography which incorporates your people. Intersperse articles, research links and sales messages with those of your team. Your team members on site, having meetings, looking into the camera.

Also, ensure you reflect your company’s core values via your content. For the content we create we’ll be aligning one post each for each value, such as: innovation, collaboration, creativity. These can be showcased in several ways and helps build brand value.

Put yourself in your client’s shoes

When creating content we put ourselves in the heads of our clients audience every time. From a nerdy twenty-something who’s a gamer and Star Wars fan to a 30-something female lawyer who is into personal development, true crime podcasts and wants to get the best out of working from home. Get into the skin of your target client, put imagery up of them to get into their headspace and post more light-hearted content, which we like to share on Fridays.

Tapping into emotion is key to boosting engagement, use holidays to frame content around, for example, get your teams to submit summer holiday photos to add as a montage at the end of January, showing a work hard, play hard culture.

Have a list of key upcoming events you can piggy-back on, a key PR tactic, Chinese New Year, Back to School, Valentine’s Day etc. Timeliness and relevancy will get more engagement.

Post in the morning

Whether you’re using a scheduler (like Buffer) and have uploaded all of your posts for the month, to posting manually, always post on LinkedIn in the morning. Ideally, we’re aiming to hit feeds on morning commutes or as and when people log in, in the morning. So 7-10am. We’ll sometimes post at lunchtime but never in the afternoon.

We post content manually when there is more than one photo, video, a file, a link to another LinkedIn post or when we need to tag people or companies.

Post regularly

We mix content up. We’ll post ten to fifteen posts a month for a client on their Company Page, often we’re prescheduling via Buffer and bulk writing with end of the month sign-offs required from clients.

As stories or content ideas come up during the month we can create new content ad-hoc and fit around the schedule. Content can be articles of interest, showcasing staff, clients, testimonials, articles written by staff or ideally by the CEO or key executives or those with larger followings.

Any award wins, company anniversaries, merger announcements of big milestones for the company and philanthropy and corporate social responsibility or charity donations or campaigns work well too.

Measurement

All marketing needs clear objectives and goals and a way to measure success. LinkedIn offers top-line metrics in a couple of taps. Create one-page reports and show senior leadership results or show to your team to boost engagement and highlight how their efforts are working.

You may think you’re bombarding, but you’re not. Most people aren’t seeing your content in their feed. The data shows that the more posts you put up the most eyeballs you’re accessing.

But, you don’t just want any audience. We invited a CEO’s relevant contacts (you can invite up to 100 contacts in a session last month. 70 per cent accepted the invite and in one month the page had a 10 per cent uplift in hyper-relevant contacts to the Company Page and a web traffic uplift too….and that’s just using one exec profile.

There is so much you can do with your social accounts that will really make an impact in 2021.

With some minor tweaks your brand building and lead generation will be the envy of your competitors. Showing innovation publicly in how you manage your key corporate platforms is a threat to any competitor.

Ensure you have a system in place, whether you outsource, assign to a member of staff or set time aside yourself monthly to assemble content for the month ahead.

If you’re assigning to staff ensure they’re incentivised via KPIs or financially so that it doesn’t drop off the radar once novelty and the enthusiasm fades.

And be honest with yourself, if you didn’t regularly post last year, will you this year. If they answer is a probably not drop me an email and we can chat to you further around your needs.

Good luck and feel free to reach out if you have any further questions at jenny@rhetoricpr.com.au, 0428 212 434 or follow be for more Page-boosting content at https://www.linkedin.com/in/publicrelationscontent.