With a rapidly growing user base of 610 million professionals, LinkedIn provides organizations with unique opportunities. Beyond being a prime place to share content and showcase thought leadership, LinkedIn performs almost 3 times better than Facebook or Twitter for generating visitor-to-lead conversions. Creating and maintaining an up-to-date LinkedIn Page is crucial for any marketing strategy.
At a glance, running your LinkedIn Page might seem pretty simple.
But growing an engaged following on LinkedIn is apples and oranges compared to any other social network.
As a certified LinkedIn Marketing Partner, Sprout is now the second company to release “real-time” notifications for comments in the Smart Inbox, making it even easier to build connections with your consumers. “We are continually looking for ways to collaborate and happily worked with LinkedIn to roll-out this new feature so brands can more quickly and easily connect with their customers,” says VP of Global Partnerships, Andrew Caravella.
And given the platform’s best practices and new slew of business features, there’s perhaps no better time to revisit your LinkedIn presence for optimal engagement.
Below we’ve broken down the anatomy of the perfect LinkedIn Page whether you’re looking to optimize your current profile or start from scratch.
Creatives and copy for your LinkedIn Page
First things first: businesses need to cover the basics of their profiles. Although setting up your LinkedIn Page is straightforward, there are some important decisions to make in terms of optimizing your creatives and profile copy.
Choosing a logo and cover photo
Chances are you already have the creatives on deck for your logo and cover photo. In addition to your tagline, this is what users will see “above the fold” when checking out your business.
Unlike Facebook or Twitter where you might use a cover photo of your team, clean and colorful imagery is your best bet on LinkedIn. When in doubt, keep it simple.
Here are some examples of optimized LinkedIn Pages which take different creative approaches to their profiles.
For starters, MailChimp uses a yellow color scheme and a minimalist background that’s on-brand. Nothing fancy, but effective nonetheless.
Drift’s cover photo actually promotes an informational product which is totally fair game on LinkedIn. This tactic shows off their expertise and also serves as a call-to-action for anyone who lands on their page.
Meanwhile, Zapier uses their cover photo to hype up the fact that they’re hiring. This makes perfect sense given that LinkedIn is top spot to recruit talent. Unlike the two previous examples, Zapier uses a text-only version of their logo.
The approach you take to your creatives is totally up to you, though we recommend coming up with a cover photo that’s exclusive to LinkedIn for the sake of giving your profile some flavor.
And just as a refresher, here are the social media image sizes to remember for your LinkedIn Page.
- Logo (300 x 300 pixels)
- Square logo (60 x 60 pixels)
- Cover image (1536 x 768)
Filling out your LinkedIn profile
Any given LinkedIn Page contains a series of subsections. Businesses should ideally fill all of these sections out 100%, with the exception of the “Jobs” section if you aren’t hiring.
About
This section highlights your organization’s basic information, including a brief “About” blurb and a place to list industry-specific keywords in the “Specialties” field. The information here is more akin to a Facebook “About” section versus a stylized Twitter or Instagram bio.
Life
The “Life” section is an opportunity to show off your organization’s culture. Here you can highlight your organization’s values, provide a snapshot of your workers’ day-to-day lives and explain what separates you from other organizations in your space.
Jobs
If you’re hiring via LinkedIn, this section will aggregate and house your job listings.
People
The “People” tab will populate based on which workers have your organization listed as their employer. There’s also a brief demographic breakdown based on your employees’ location, education, roles and skills. This section is valuable for potential prospects and people interested in reaching out to your organization.
Coming up with an effective LinkedIn content strategy
LinkedIn is a unique beast when it comes to your content strategy.
How so? Well, consider how your LinkedIn Page needs to simultaneously speak to totally different audiences.
Current customers and prospective ones? Check.
Employees and recruits? Double-check.
Industry players and competitors who want to watch your latest moves? Yep, they’re checking you out, too.
Part of the beauty of LinkedIn is the freedom organizations have in terms of what they can post, though. Here’s a breakdown of some of the most common types of content we see on LinkedIn Pages:
Question-based content
Picking your followers’ brains is a smart move to encourage likes and comments on LinkedIn. Oddly enough, text-based posts can actually stand out on LinkedIn in a sea of articles and external links.
Articles and industry-specific posts
Unlike other social networks where posting article after article might be looked down upon, doing so is embraced on LinkedIn.
There’s no better place to drop your latest link, granted you couple it with a meaningful caption. Here’s a good example of a conversational caption from Hubspot that eventually leads readers to click through to a new blog post.
Resources and case studies
Considering that 80% of B2B leads come from LinkedIn, publishing your organization’s resources, freebies and lead magnets is a no brainer. This does double-duty of signaling your influence within your industry while also serving as a helping hand to your followers.
Event coverage
Attending an event or conference? Take your LinkedIn followers along for the ride. This sort of behind-the-scenes content is authentic, easy to create and is a welcome change from solely promotional posts.
Employee showcases
Recognizing your employees on LinkedIn allows you to show off the human side of your business. This example of employee recognition from Lemonade managed to score great engagement while also highlighting their organization’s values.
Culture-centric content
Again, not everything on your LinkedIn Page needs to be promotional. Whether it’s off-the-cuff office content or examples of your organization giving back, anything that shows off your organization’s culture is a big plus. Doing so is powerful for positioning and making an emotional impact on your followers.
Best practices to maximize your LinkedIn engagement
Now that you have an idea of how to fill out your LinkedIn Page and what to post, it’s time to think about how you’re going to maximize your profile’s reach.
Want more followers? Looking to attract the attention of industry players and influencers? Here’s how you do it.
Get your employees involved
Okay, this is the big one.
Employee advocacy is the absolute best way to grow your LinkedIn presence and exponentially increase your content’s reach.
Think about it. When you restrict your organization’s content to your Page, you’re only being seen by your current crop of followers.
But let’s say you have a few dozen employees with a couple hundred followers each. Even if there’s some overlap between your page followers and theirs, this enables your posts to be seen by thousands who’d otherwise miss out on them.
Rather than manually have employees post organization content, platforms such as Bambu or LinkedIn Elevate allow organizations to curate and amplify social content within a single platform. This encourages a uniform approach to sharing content that ensures that as many eyes are on your organization as possible.
Prioritize video content
Video content is quickly taking over social media itself and LinkedIn is no different.
LinkedIn released its video capabilities in 2017 and has been stressing the importance of video ever since. It’s no surprise that video content is among the most popular and LinkedIn and appears to be prioritized by the platform’s algorithm.
From educational video to commercials, organizations should step up their video production ASAP in an effort to stand out on the platform.
Come up with a consistent content calendar
Consistency counts with just about any social network.
Based on our data regarding the best times to post on social media, engagement appears to shift between mornings toward the late-afternoon throughout the workweek. Typically we see most organizations post at least once daily, although we encourage businesses to experiment with frequency.
Having an understanding of your timing and frequency can help you put together a comprehensive content calendar specific to LinkedIn. With the help of Sprout, you can then publish directly to your LinkedIn Page and schedule your content alongside your other social profiles.
Stay tuned for opportunities to connect
Whether your content strategy focuses on posing questions or sharing thought leadership, your audience is expecting to hear from you. 55% of consumers say that liking or responding to a consumer’s post on social media helps brands connect with consumers.
Now with “real-time” notifications for comments in the Smart Inbox, it’s easier to create connections with your consumers with more ease. Think: shorter response times when cultivating conversations or answering questions directed towards your brand. Acting quickly in those moments inspires more engagement from your audience.
Understand your analytics
According to Sprout’s 2018 Social Index, audience insights and data-driven strategy should be the top priority of any organization looking to thrive on LinkedIn.
In other words, you need robust analytics.
What posts are your top performers? When are you scoring the most shares and followers?
Although the platform has adequate native reporting, a third-party reporting solution like the one we offer at Sprout can dig even deeper into your LinkedIn analytics.
For example, Sprout is capable of tracking impressions, engagements and clicks to clue you in on what’s working and what’s not. Based on these numbers, you can fine-tune your LinkedIn presence accordingly.
And with that, we wrap up our guide!
Does your LinkedIn Page look like a million bucks?
Growing on LinkedIn is truly a one-of-a-kind endeavor versus any other social network.
As a result, you need to know exactly how to properly run your Page.
From creatives and content to understanding your data, these pointers can put you on the right path toward building a more engaging profile.
We want to hear from you, though. What has your organization’s experience been like on LinkedIn? Are you experiencing more engagement than usual these days? Let us know in the comments below!