If your customers are on LinkedIn then your team needs to be as well but how do you balance the personality of your team members with the need to build a professional brand? In this article, we’ll show you how you can support your team to improve their LinkedIn presence and support you in building a professional brand.
-
Contents
Align Your Team and Company Goals
One of the easiest ways to confuse your audience is for your team and you to post different content with a different purpose. Sometimes a remedy for this can be to ensure that your team all understand why they are using social media and what you are trying to achieve. Involve your team in setting SMARTER goals for themselves and the team as a whole that can feed into the wider company activity as well as build their own profile. Encourage them to share ideas and contribute to the company’s LinkedIn presence as a whole.
-
Encourage Personal Profile Building
LinkedIn is unique as it showcases both personal and company profiles. Unlike Facebook, where personal profiles are still largely protected from users outside of your chosen network, LinkedIn promotes personal profiles. Each of your team’s personal profiles should represent both themselves and the company. About sections should be a combination of who they are and what they do but they are very often neglected and not kept up to date. Encourage your team to check them regularly and to approach them strategically making sure that they are using appropriate keywords for your audience. A useful exercise can be to ask team members to check each other’s profiles and provide feedback. It’s easier for someone else to be objective than when you are writing about yourself.
-
Encourage Activity to Build Their Presence
Fundamentally, LinkedIn is networking online and good face-to-face networking is all about two-way conversation. LinkedIn shouldn’t be treated any differently. It isn’t and shouldn’t be treated as a place for broadcast. To successfully build a presence your team should be encouraged to share and start conversations. They should be sharing insights and ideas based on the community that they are looking to connect with. Building a presence means creating content of their own as well as commenting and connecting with other people’s content. Encourage them to share ideas and task them with creating new content. Content could be posts, articles, videos or even live broadcasts if they (and you) are feeling brave. If they’re competitive then get them to check out their SSI and see if they can improve it by creating regular content.
-
Help Them To Expand Their Network (And Influence)
Your team should be encouraged to connect with not just each other and other colleagues but also others within the industry. If they meet someone networking or at events then they should reach out and connect with them on LinkedIn. Reaching out to potential clients on LinkedIn should be part of their strategy but they shouldn’t connect and then bombard their new connections with sales and meeting requests. In the same as real life, simply bombarding someone with a sales pitch is unlikely to work. They need to build a relationship first by commenting and learning more about their contacts. A personalised message that talks about how much they liked an article or acknowledges content that they have created is a much more powerful way of getting a contact to be interested in what they have to say. Personalisation can make a real difference but if you don’t know enough about them it won’t work. Receiving a cut-and-paste message that clearly shows they haven’t even taken the time to read your bio is the fastest way to get someone to ignore you.
-
Provide Training To Improve Skills
Social media use comes with a certain level of assumed knowledge. It’s assumed that if you’ve created an account on a platform then you know how to use it but understanding the intricacies of a platform takes time, experience and, like most digital marketing, experimentation. New and existing team members may not have the skills or knowledge to improve on LinkedIn. Reluctance to post is often a reluctance to admit that they don’t know how to create content or know what they should be doing. Training, either internal or external, can help to fill the gap. Like the other platforms, LinkedIn is always evolving with new tools or changes to the algorithm so even the most seasoned of your team may benefit from a refresher and encouragement to try new tactics or a new approach to content.
If you need help upskilling you or your team on LinkedIn then we’d love to hear from you. Our social media trainers can deliver training online or face-to-face and we can create a course that matches your industry and skills.
