While social media trends have evolved over the past few years, LinkedIn is still the essential platform for marketing and business development growth, especially for B2B brands. Every marketing department and business development professional should take time to consider how to use the platform, especially if you’re concerned that your LinkedIn page is underperforming.
There are a few good reasons why a strong LinkedIn Page is absolutely essential. According to an article from Hubspot:
- 4 out of 5 people on LinkedIn “drive business decisions”
- Companies that post weekly on LinkedIn see a 2x higher engagement rate
- 40% of B2B marketers surveyed indicated LinkedIn as the most effective channel for driving high-quality leads
Improving Your LinkedIn Presence Can Go a Long Way
Investing a little attention and effort into transforming an underperforming LinkedIn profile can make a tremendous difference for your brand. Not only do the statistics prove it, we know it from our own personal experience. Last year, our team at Green Apple decided to collaborate on a strategy that would enhance our LinkedIn company page.
A year into our strategy, we’ve seen exponential growth:
- Increasing our number of followers 5x in six months.
- Increasing our reactions by 4,872%.
- Increasing the number of times someone shared our content by 2,566%
While we are constantly looking for new ways to improve our strategy, we’ve learned some valuable insights so far. Here are a few takeaways we discovered when it came to transforming an underperforming LinkedIn presence.
Common Reasons Your LinkedIn is Underperforming
Here are a few common reasons a company might struggle to create results from their LinkedIn activity:
- You haven’t identified your target audience and their daily challenges and obstacles.
One of the most common reasons a business doesn’t get a lot of traction on LinkedIn is because the content they’re creating doesn’t resonate with their audience. It’s important to consider how you want to add value to your audience when determining if you should be on any social platform — including LinkedIn. Without taking time to identify who you’re trying to reach and understand the challenges they face on a daily basis, you’ll likely waste a lot of time creating content no one cares to read.
- You lack a plan that helps you create a consistent presence.
It’s important to have a consistent presence for your brand on LinkedIn. We’ve all had the experience of stumbling upon a company LinkedIn profile that’s updated once a month or, worse, hasn’t been updated in months. Creating a LinkedIn presence but not maintaining it is often worse than not having one at all.
- You are taking a “hard sell” approach that isn’t working.
There are plenty of people who take a hard sell approach on LinkedIn. These are the people who are often pushy with their tactics or are only sharing sales-oriented content on their company page. While these efforts occasionally work, most of the time they do not. As with most social networks, it’s important to embrace the motto, “always be helpful,” rather than overwhelming your followers with self-promotional content.
- You are posting content, but you aren’t engaging with others.
LinkedIn serves as a platform to help business professionals connect and engage with one another. As such, it works best when you invest time interacting with others. If you’re posting regularly, but you aren’t getting the most out of your LinkedIn presence, it’s likely because you’re missing an opportunity to create more meaningful connections with your audience by engaging with their content as well.
How to Enhance Your LinkedIn Presence to Achieve Results
If you’re looking to take your LinkedIn presence to the next level, here are a few keys we learned from our experience:
- Optimize your profile
According to Hubspot, companies with an active LinkedIn page see 5x more page views than those with inactive pages. Any given LinkedIn page contains a series of subsections. Businesses should ideally fill all of these sections out completely, with the exception of the “Jobs” section if you aren’t hiring.
- Get your team involved in content creation.
Because LinkedIn is primarily a platform for business connections, your employees can play a critical role in broadening your reach and strengthening your network on the platform. Your LinkedIn marketing strategy should include involvement from your employees. For our team, that meant collaborating on content creation and being strategic in how we worked together to promote the posts Green Apple was sharing. Taking the time to develop a strategy for employee advocacy is an easy way for your organization to expand its reach on Linkedin.
- Use a variety of videos and images to create higher visibility.
Adding custom images can get you twice as many comments on your posts. Additionally, sharing a video drives up your engagement rate by five times. Both highlight the fact that varying the type of content you post is a critical part of your LinkedIn marketing strategy.
- Constantly test ideas and analyze your efforts
As with any marketing strategy, it’s important to test and optimize your efforts along the way. The native LinkedIn analytics data gives you an in-depth look at how your posts are performing. Schedule a time to check your performance data regularly and formulate strategies for improvement.
Turning Around Your Underperforming LinkedIn Page is Easier Than You Think
It doesn’t take magic to transform your LinkedIn presence. There are simple techniques you can use to optimize the power of LinkedIn. All it takes is a little attention and effort on the front end and a commitment to evaluate your efforts along the way. If you need guidance on turning LinkedIn into a lead generation tool, Green Apple can help. Let Green Apple Strategy craft an innovative approach to your social media channels so that you can start targeting and attracting new team members. Reach out to us today for a consultation.