Amplifying your corporate story on LinkedIn (to the power of 4)
We recently helped a major corporate partner push through the 500,000 follower mark on LinkedIn. As well as achieving this milestone during 2017, we also maintained an average engagement score that was 4x the industry average. Here’s how…
1. Tell your story.
As with arguably any social media channel it’s essential to have a joined up strategy, ensuring that your main (corporate) narrative is being both amplified, but also told consistently. Followers will come once they understand what you stand for and they’ll remain engaged the more they understand, trust and value the content you share. If your corporate story revolves around a set of core themes, then the majority of content you share on LinkedIn should bear some resemblance to these.
2. Know your audience.
LinkedIn is relatively well defined in terms of who is using it and why – they’re your investors, shareholders, employees, the media and prospective partners. Recent figures suggest almost half (46%) of all social traffic to corporate websites comes via LinkedIn. The main reason visitors give (60% or more) for engaging with content is that it is educational, informative and relevant to them. When asked about the main topics that drive engagement, they included: industry news / trends (89%), best practice (86%), leadership (78%), industry events (75%), product information (72%) and employer perspectives (67%).
Essentially, they’re business minded and looking for content that helps them solve a professional problem, from career choice, to supplier purchase, to investment decisions and everything in between. It’s important to to tell your story in a way that helps your audience navigate their professional lives.
3. Package it well.
With over 57% of traffic now on mobile does your content pass the ‘8am, crowded commute, semi-conscious scroll test’? Strong visuals and headlines are essential. Before your content is actually seen by your audience, LinkedIn’s newsfeed algorithm will classify every image, text, long-form post and video into one of three categories: ‘spam’, ‘low-quality’ and ‘clear’. Once classified, it is then sent to a small selection of your audience to see how well it performs before being pushed out further.
Bear in mind that any content that fails the ‘clear’ test at step one is given a lower priority in terms of audience testing, making it much harder for it to succeed. In our experience we’ve found that better performing articles – those likely to be classified as ‘clear’ – tend to include a single clear point of focus in terms of image or a strong focused headline. Don’t get too hung up on length of content - it’s a distraction from the key focus of quality.
4. Make it good.
Which brings us to the fourth point, the simple but magic ingredient. It’s your story, it’s relevant for your audience and it’s created in a way that works on your LinkedIn page – the final check is to ensure that it’s content worthy of your brand.
Content should be unique in a way that will either surprise (pleasantly) or inspire your followers – hopefully to the point of them sharing with others. Good, original content should be the focus, and while it’s fine to share the content of others, the opportunity on LinkedIn is to amplify your corporate story to the millions of potential followers out there. So tell it well, using the best storytellers you can find with the budget available.
5. Measure it.
A truly great benefit of LinkedIn is the real time data you receive about your followers and what they think of your content in general. As well as amplifying your story, the channel is a great tool for testing and improving the content you create for specific audiences. Observed in relation to your strategy, the numbers won’t lie, so ensure that these provide the context for your next round of content creation and every round thereafter.
Spending any money on social without a joined up strategy is a lot like p*ssing in the wind. LinkedIn presents over nine billion content impression opportunities each and every week, which could also mean nine billion opportunities to confuse the outside world about your story or just a very easy way to lose millions of pounds chasing clicks. Instead, integrating your work on LinkedIn with your main corporate content strategy presents you with a huge opportunity to consistently tell your story, cost effectively, while bringing on board and retaining loyal followers along the way.
Speak Case Study:
In 2017 our Content Works team partnered with a major FTSE 100 company to help tell their corporate story to the wider world. During the year we published 136 stories on LinkedIn, each in some way tied to key pillars of the main corporate narrative. We delivered over 16m impressions, 78k clicks and 32k interactions – an equivalent advertising value of $235k. Our client has now been nominated for a LinkedIn award due to the strength of its content. Please contact us if you’d like to hear more about how we can fuel your LinkedIn channel.