How to build credibility on LinkedIn and enrich your business’s social media presence

How to build credibility on LinkedIn and enrich your business’s social media presence

By Ready For Social | Oct 28, 2021

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Is your business’s social media presence attracting potential customers? Many aspects of business now take place online, from meetings to shopping, and a rich social media page is as important as having a coffee machine available for clients at your corporate headquarters. Engaging on social media can strengthen your company’s reputation. Seventy-one percent of people who have a positive experience on social media with a company are likely to recommend the brand to their friends and family. And there are plenty of opportunities to engage. Worldwide, each internet user spends an average of almost 2.5 hours on social media daily. 

One of the best places to spread your company’s message is LinkedIn. Although other channels can work, a strong corporate LinkedIn page is an ideal foundation for your online activity. Simply creating the page isn’t enough—you need to utilize key strategies to make your presence dramatically more influential.  

 

How to post on LinkedIn  

Of course, your corporate profile should include your company’s contact information and a description of what makes you unique. But posting valuable content regularly will take your presence from static to dynamic. Instead of posting only about your own business, offer information that will interest your audience even when they aren’t in the market for your services. Try using the 4-1-1 rule. For every six posts, four should help educate your audience with news on the industry at large. One should contain information on what your business has to offer, and one should provide value in the form of a promotion, sale, giveaway or contest. Through an approach that isn’t self-centered, you broaden your network and ultimately attract more potential buyers. 

When finding news and information to share, look for articles that speak to the importance of services like yours, as well as innovations that are transforming your industry. This approach helps to show you understand the direction of the branch and are attuned to changes that affect its future. It’s also essential to select and cite reliable sources of information, which lend you a sense of authority and credibility. 

When posting about the company itself, customer testimonials, shared with their permission, are some of the most powerful tools for attracting interest. They introduce variety to your feed, and praise often sounds more authentic when it comes from someone without any stake in your organization. Requesting
feedback from customers will not only show you how to improve but
also provide content that you may be able to post online to showcase your success.
  

 

Use analytics to refine your posting process 

Once you’ve tried creating a few types of posts, make sure to utilize LinkedIn’s tools for assessing their performance. Check the metrics that are listed as Update Highlights on your corporate page. You’ll be able to see your total likes, shares and comments over the past 30 days, as well as the percent change from last month. These can give you a broad understanding of whether your overall strategy for content is effective.  

The engagement rate is an important metric. It provides the sum of interactions, clicks and new followers divided by the number of impressions, with impressions being the number of times one of your posts appears for at least 300 milliseconds on a registered user’s screen. These analytics allow you to tell you how many people were interested in your content, proportional to how often it was viewed. If you received a high number of impressions but a low engagement rate, it might indicate that your content was successfully distributed but not especially interesting to users. It’s a signal that you should rework your posts. If you have a high engagement rate but a low number of impressions, the content is likely strong, but you need to use tools such as hashtags and mentions to improve the reach of the posts. 

To learn how to refine your posting habits, take a look at the section Update Engagement for a detailed breakdown of each post’s impact. Make sure to watch out for patterns regarding which types of posts perform best. A certain topic, such as 5G internet or workplace culture, might be especially popular, or you might notice that longer, in-depth posts work better than brief ones. It depends on your network’s preferences.  

 

Improving your reach on LinkedIn 

 If your total likes, shares and comments or your total impressions are low, you may need to make your content and profile more visible. Make sure to use strategic keywords so that your company profile will appear in searches. For instance, Thought Horizon helps businesses build relationships with potential customers on social media. We make sure to include the phrase “social selling” on our LinkedIn page because it’s the term used in the marketing world for this service. 

It’s also smart to think carefully about the keywords in your content and use about 2-3 hashtags per post in order to boost their visibility. Another tip is that LinkedIn is used the most in the morning, so sending content out between 9 and 11 AM will ensure that it will be at the top of the lineup when most people are browsing.  

 When multiple people collaborate on a post added to your corporate page, mention each contributor in the post’s text. This will ensure it reaches their networks as well as the company’s own followers. For the same reason, get all your employees on board with your business’s social media development. Each employee is a potential advocate for your company. Encouraging them to share your posts will widen your business’s online reach while also giving them convenient content to post on their pages.  

 

How to engage on LinkedIn 

Beyond providing your own content, engaging with others’ posts will help your company build its network. It’s a little complicated to interact with posts on LinkedIn as your company, but it is possible. You can start by navigating to the corporate page, for which you need to be an admin, and then view and interact with posts through the Community Hashtag Feed. By liking, commenting on, and even sharing posts about new developments in your industry, your business earns a reputation for friendliness and being in tune with your field and its community. Engaging with your clients’ posts is especially important. In addition to strengthening your relationship with them, offering support online will help their posts gain traction, and their success is your success.  

LinkedIn receives substantial traffic from business people and offers opportunities for connections that shouldn’t be missed. It can help your company build a network and a reputation for being helpful, knowledgeable and trustworthy. Producing high-quality content is important, but you should also know how to promote it effectively, tailor it to your audience and engage with clients and other industry members in addition to seeking attention for your own work. 

How do you currently use LinkedIn, and what are your tips for success? Let us know in the comments section. 

Photos by Daniel Öberg on Unsplash; Tim Trad on Unsplash; Wynand Uys on Unsplash; Mario Álvarez on Unsplash; and Rolf Erik Lekang on Unsplash.