Company executives are busy enough focusing on their day-to-day tasks, priorities, and job-related obligations. Adding social media to this schedule requires both weighing its importance and ensuring it’s manageable alongside everything else on your plate. Despite this, social media (especially a platform that combines both work and personal use, such as LinkedIn) is vital to the modern business scene.
LinkedIn states its mission as “to connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful.” Over 10 million C-level executives used LinkedIn as a constantly growing, transparent, upgraded resume. But LinkedIn is far more than just a platform for your digital resume. Maximizing your LinkedIn usage can give you the opportunity to build your reputation as a thought leader, grow engagement, and build your brand’s reputation.
In addition to the growing numbers of executives of all levels using LinkedIn, a staggering 87% of recruiters use LinkedIn regularly. Plus, 56% of professionals say a business executive’s presence on social media positively influences their purchase decisions. In other words, amplifying your voice on LinkedIn isn’t just good for you – it’s good for your business.
Social media is always best when it feels interactive and related to a specific community, and LinkedIn provides a space for that to happen. You can not only broadcast your ideas, business updates, goals, and more but also interact with other related companies and make professional connections. Think of LinkedIn as the ticket to your professional, digital citizenship, through which you can voice your ideas, join important conversations, and collaborate with like-minded executives.
Why Should You Use LinkedIn?
There are a plethora of reasons why you should use LinkedIn. You can utilize it as a platform to promote both your business and yourself as well as to source prospective clients and build B2B relationships. The average CEO on LinkedIn has roughly 930 connections through relevant groups. Those connections are built through consistently posting blogs or articles, sharing ideas, and interacting via comments.
LinkedIn is an improved version of your Rolodex. It can help you not only connect with potential clients or new clients but also reconnect with old ones. Are you still hanging onto the card of the startup founder you met at that business fair two years ago? Or perhaps you spoke with someone who wanted to become an intern after finishing up their undergraduate degree – but now their number is nowhere to be found.
That’s what LinkedIn is for. Instead of filling your drawers with business cards or searching for a receipt that you know you jotting down their email on the back of, you can find connections by name. Plus, you can see what they’ve been up to professionally before reaching out
Using LinkedIn also helps you rank your name on Google. If you’ve never searched your name or business on Google, give it a shot. You may be surprised at what gets ranked on the first page. Google’s search engine algorithm is a force to be reckoned with, but because of the popularity of LinkedIn, it’s likely that your page there will rank higher in the search results than your own website or digital portfolio.
Most importantly, a strong LinkedIn presence can establish you as a thought leader within your industry. Using relevant hashtags can help your post gain impressions, likes, and reposts – which in turn can help you grow your engagement. Building your reputation as a thoughtful, trustworthy expert not only makes potential clients more comfortable with your brand but also boosts your personal profile in the corporate world.
How Can You Make Your LinkedIn Stand Out?
A lot of people use LinkedIn. In fact, there are 310 million monthly users, with around 6 billion views of LinkedIn’s feed a day. Businesses with active LinkedIn pages receive five times more page views, seven times more impressions, and 11 times more clicks per follower.
So what can you do differently to set yourself apart from all of these people? The task seems daunting, but you’d be surprised at how few steps are needed to set yourself apart. Many people simply treat their LinkedIn profiles as fluid resumes. However, creating and sharing unique content is essential to getting the most out of the site.
It may seem difficult to create unique content, but unlike sites such as Twitter and Facebook where reposting is constant, LinkedIn is less saturated and more professional. Plus, LinkedIn prioritizes popular content over new content (also unlike other social media platforms). If you get traction on a post, you can see results on it for even three weeks after posting. That’s a huge difference when compared with the ever-churning wheels of Facebook or Instagram.
Posting about your business and its purpose or perhaps the services or products that your company offers are ways to keep your LinkedIn up to date. But even better is posting articles that share high-level ideas and thoughts about the space in which your brand operates. Not everyone who post articles on LinkedIn is a top-level executive, but 45% of LinkedIn content readers are in top executive positions. Posting interesting, readable content helps optimize your profile so that it appears more often to readers outside of your existing connections.
Why Does Growing LinkedIn Engagement Matter?
Growing your engagement on LinkedIn is extremely important in utilizing the platform’s professional connection function. You want to make sure that your profile isn’t just a one-time-only click, but something that is shared and viewed often for regular updates. Growing engagement can get you more connections, meaning you’ll show up more often on more people’s feeds.
Having a well-maintained LinkedIn presence helps to establish yourself as a thought leader who takes time to help others stay informed about your industry and your brand. It proves that your brand is not just any run-of-the-mill internet company, and it establishes brand trust, loyalty and recognition.
Plus, it’s very inexpensive in comparison with what you’d spend on paid advertisements. Like most social media platforms, LinkedIn is a great place to grow an organic following and boost your brand’s (and your own) profile without spending too much.
How Can Full-Service Media Management Help?
A lot of professionals already have a LinkedIn profile they log in to every now and then, but it's difficult to consistently update and utilize all of the features the website has to offer. That’s where a team like WriteHQ’s can help make your LinkedIn stand out. We can not only create eye-catching graphics but also build a personalized social media calendar and write effective articles to help your page shine and establish you as a expert thought leader.
If you’re looking to make your LinkedIn posts appear on feeds nationwide, contact WriteHQ for a quote today.
Comments