Last month we shared some tips for franchise professionals to increase their impressions on LinkedIn and build a personal brand as a thought leader on the national or local level. These tips included details on posting every day, posting from your personal profile rather than your company account, and sharing links to your website in comments instead of in the body of your post. Gaining views and engagement are critical to growing your audience, so we’re sharing more advice on LinkedIn posting.
- Get engagement early. More likes, comments, and shares in the first hour after you post an update will compel LinkedIn to show that post to more people. Try posting at a time of day when more of your friends and colleagues are typically online, to maximize your visibility.
- Don’t edit your post within the first hour. There is some evidence that edits flag your post to LinkedIn as content that may not be as valuable. Leave it alone!
- Don’t simply reshare a post from your brand, as fewer people will see reshared content. Take the extra minute and go to the original content (blog, article, video) and create a brand-new post.
- Get a second-degree contact to engage with your posts. This is hard to get, but the more helpful and valuable your posts are, the more likely these friends of friends will engage.
- Be careful with too many hashtags. The jury is still out; many marketers think that LinkedIn is throttling back reach on posts with numerous hashtags.
- Tag. Tag. Tag – to an extent. If your content is truly about certain industry pros or colleagues, tag them. Their connections will see it and they will get alerted anytime someone else engages. But don’t just tag the people you want to pitch. They likely will find this very annoying.
These tips will help amplify your engagement, but you must start with the most important part: good content. Is your post completely self-serving or is it interesting to those seeing it? No one wants to share your sales or promotional material, but they will gladly engage with your content if they find it valuable.
– Jack Monson
Jack Monson is the host of the Social Geek Radio Network, home of the number one podcasts in Franchising including The Franchise News Podcast and The Facebook Franchise Podcast. Monson is also the Chief Revenue Officer at Social Joey and has been working with franchisees and small businesses in social media marketing for 13 years. For more information, visit socialgeekradio.com, or email jack@socialgeekradio.com.