LinkedIn audience and how to engage with them
LinkedIn can be a vital resource for small businesses – but only if you use it well. You will need to invest enough time to engage your audience and to stay in their mind.
By offering compelling, relevant and high-quality content, you can help to drive business your way. There is no doubt that LinkedIn can be an extremely powerful way of increasing knowledge about your brand and getting people talking about what you do.
Your content stream
Use updates from your company to establish your firm as an insightful brand and leader of thoughts. Showcase your expertise and share a wide range of content, including company news and relevant and insightful articles.
Offer value to your audience
You want to use LinkedIn to grow or cement the foundations of your business, of course, but this will not be achieved by simply bombarding your audience with posts about how great you think you are. To cultivate an engaged and committed following, you should aim to offer four posts focussing on industry trends or thought leadership for every one that promotes your business.
Consistently post
Come up with a regular schedule for posting and try to stick to it. In this way, followers will feel confident that they can rely on your posts to keep them up to date and informed about the latest industry news and trends. Businesses that post around 20 times each month are known to reach a minimum of 60 per cent of audience members on average.
Mix content formats
Maximise engagement with both your posts and your brand by utilising a mixture of formats when it comes to your content. Make use of the power of rich media, such as videos and photos – which can dramatically increase shares and comments – alongside the likes of links to articles and SlideShare presentations.
Actively encourage engagement
Prompt followers to act and respond to your posts; each share, like or comment will increase your reach across the LinkedIn network. You could post an inspiring quote and ask followers to like your post if they agree with its sentiment, for example, or they could share their favourite quotes.
Respond to comments
Responding to comments will make your audience feel heard and valued. It will boost engagement, continue conversations, enhance your reputation as a leader of thoughts, and help to build loyalty to your brand.
Strive to improve
Make use of the analytics on your company page and monitor the reach and engagement elements to assess what is working with your audience. Aim to test different times, days, formats and topics to see which get the best response.