A LinkedIn Strategy you can rely on.

Now that summer is over, and you’re feeling well-rested, it’s time to get motivated. If one of your goals was to improve your LinkedIn presence you’re in the right place! The best course of action is a good plan that you can stick to and not have to fiddle with until the new year.

So we have some good, strong, steadfast advice for you. We’ll explain how to put together a plan you and your colleagues can easily understand, get to grips with and implement.

First, you want to think about your aims. 

What were your aims for 2019? Did you achieve them? Great, pick some new ones. Still working towards them or lost sight? That’s ok there’s still time to get back on track.

Next, you’ll need to decide how many posts you want to put out per week. Make sure it is an achievable amount so that you can maintain consistency. We’ve all been guilty in the past of biting off more than we can chew only to give up completely when it all gets on top of us.

Once you have answered these questions you can begin to brainstorm topics that will help achieve your aims. 

Example

Let’s say you’re a recruitment agency and you aim to attract new clients, improve interactions and gain followers in your local area. You’ll want to use these aims to cherry-pick the content that will appeal to these audiences and adapt your approach to improve the number of interactions you gain.

Aims:

  • Attract new clients.
  • Improve interactions on your posts
  • Gain followers in your local area
  • Posts per week: 7

Topics:

  • Testimonials of clients for who you have found work or employees 
  • Recent news articles (must be relevant to the industry, and even better if they’re local)
  • Blog posts
    • Tips for advertising job opportunities
    • Tips for interviewers/interviewees
    • CV writing
  • Business news
    • Stats on how many people you’ve found work for
    • The business expanding locations or services
  • Employee highlights
    • Away days & activities
    • Sharing in successes

When it comes to getting stuck into building the post schedule, it’s a good idea is to plan for the month ahead, but keep some flexibility should you want to react to a relevant trending topic or news item. This will also stop your content from getting stale, staying on top of current events keeps your social media hat on your head and ideas flowing for the next month’s topics.

The approach

Now, it’s easy enough to have a plan of what subjects you’re going to cover but it’s your approach that will either make you or break you. For example, you could find a news article that is relevant to your industry and is local then just share it, but you’re likely to not see anything back. Or you could take that same article, summarise it in the post and then pose a question to your audience asking for their opinions, and open up the floor to a healthy debate!

So we’ll now share some tips and tricks that will help you squeeze the most out of your talking points.

Ask questions

As we mentioned above questions are the most powerful tool you can use when it comes to composing your post. Ask a well-thought question at the end of your post, honestly asking for people’s feedback and you will see interactions begin to flow more naturally. Be brave with it too! Even if the responses might not all be positive you’ve got people talking.

Write more

You have more characters to play with in LinkedIn posts compared to other social media platforms, up to 1300 in some cases, so make sure you use that space. It doesn’t have to be an essay but enjoy the freedom to use your words. This isn’t Twitter, spoil yourself, say it all! Summarise the article you’re linking to, give the full testimonial rather than a teaser, you’ve got the room to elaborate, use it to give a wider picture of your business.

Use links better

Research suggests that removing the link preview and using an image or video instead improves the chances of your post doing well. This seems to be because people are bored of posts just linking to articles, all the more reason to try and write it all down. Also LinkedIn doesn’t like it when you send people away from their website, so it can help the algorithms to skip putting links into posts at all and instead add them to the comment sections.

Make it visual. 

According to a study from 2019 including at least 1 image in your posts more than doubles your views so adding something visual really counts. It can’t just be any image though so step away from the puppy memes. Attaching a relevant image or native video (a video uploaded straight to LinkedIn rather than linked to from YouTube) will make your post more eye-catching and attract more interactions. When using a video, it’s also a good idea to include subtitles, these will entice people into watching in full, as until a viewer clicks into the video no sound plays. 

Tag tag tag. 

Tagging people in your posts opens up exposure to their connections and followers, which can drastically increase your views. Make sure you only tag people who will appreciate it though! Think about quoting someone, or listing attendees, congratulate a team on their work or tag friends who you think will enjoy the content. 

Hashtags.

Don’t be afraid to use hashtags. As long as you don’t go crazy with them hashtags are a great tool. LinkedIn even allows users to follow hashtags, making them a great way to get discovered. 3-5 seems to be the best amount to use and either at the bottom of the post or dispersed into the text (as long as it makes sense) works just as well. Try a mix of industry-specific and popular hashtags to see what works for you.

Work together. 

For company pages, the best way to get the interactions rolling is to get colleagues to like, comment and share. This will widen your audience to their connections and followers, which, as company pages can’t engage with posts themselves, is essential to be seen outside of existing followers. All the more reason to get colleagues involved in the plan and nerd out over how thorough it is!

We hope you’ve learnt some new tricks by the end of this and feel super prepared to kick 2019’s butt. Remember that the more you stick with it the more you learn about what works and what doesn’t. After all, if you don’t try you’ll never know! But honestly the take-home message really is consistency and if you can master regular updates everything else is just a small step on the road to an amazing 2020.