For the third post in my “B2B Social Media Strategy Crash Course” series, I’ll be focusing on how B2B companies can succeed on LinkedIn. If you missed my last post about Twitter you can check it out here, or see my first post about general B2B social media best practices here.
Honestly, LinkedIn didn’t come naturally to me the way that Twitter did. I’ve been using Twitter since 2009 (not for business, but frequently enough that I knew the platform like the back of my hand -- so when it was time to start using it for business in 2012, after a little studying up on how to incorporate the tool into my marketing plan, it almost seemed like second nature to me). LinkedIn was complicated for me. I understood how to use my own account to enhance my career, and there was plenty of research available in that category, but I struggled to find resources that really explained the best practices for succeeding on LinkedIn with a company profile.
There’s tons of vague resources out there, but I wanted specifics – and the difficulty I had finding them is actually what prompted me to write this B2B social media strategy series in the first place. After lots of research, I found the best of the best and since I’ve implemented these tactics, our numbers have made it obvious to me that they’re working.
The reason I was so focused on making sure I was using LinkedIn to the best of my ability is because I understood the potential it has for driving leads if it’s utilized correctly:
Clearly, LinkedIn has huge potential – so here’s how you can utilize it:
As I mentioned in the previous section, on top of using your company’s page to share content, your employee’s profiles are also a very valuable resource when it comes to engaging with prospects and generating leads on LinkedIn.
By utilizing your employee’s profiles, you’ll be able to post your content in relevant groups and participate in discussions, which will drastically expand your reach and impact. It might seem like it would be a headache to try and manage so many different profiles and pages, but in the last section of this post I’ll use screenshots to show you how effortlessly this can be done if you utilize an automation tool.
Here’s how the numbers break down as far as where content is posted and how it converts:
In the beginning of this post, I mentioned how difficult it was to find resources that explained, in detail, how to best utilize LinkedIn for business, and this was the main aspect of LinkedIn that I was looking for information on because I just wasn’t clear on the best practice for posting in groups.
I was unclear on, specifically:
I had almost given up, when I stumbled across this video, which is less than 10 minutes long and answered all my questions so perfectly that I nearly jumped for joy – it’s definitely worth a watch.
Before you post anything, put yourself in the shoes of your buyer persona, and ask yourself if it’s an update that you would want to receive. If the answer is no, you obviously shouldn’t post it, and it might also be time to re-evaluate your content strategy.
The following types of updates are great to share on LinkedIn:
Important statistics:
Here are a few statistics to consider when scheduling posts:
Please keep in mind that these statistics are nothing more than a guide – as I advised in my first post, it’s incredibly important that you analyze your own data to figure out what works best for you and appeals to your buyer personas.
Another topic I mentioned in my first post is that we use Hubspot to execute our social media strategy. I can't imagine how time consuming it would be to try and implement the strategy we have in place without using some type of automation tool (probably because it would be impossible unless I spent my entire day focusing on just social media, and only one social media network at a time). I'm not saying it's not possible to go without such a tool, but it's definitely less efficient and it definitely wouldn't be a very enjoyable process.
I'm going to use screen shots to show you exactly how I execute our LinkedIn strategy. (Reminder: In my last post I explained that Hubspot isn't the only option, it's just what we prefer. The last post in this series will discuss this topic in more detail).
In order to utilize employee accounts and publish to groups based on what you learned in the video I shared a link to earlier in this post, we’ve linked some of our employee’s accounts to
our Hubspot social media tool
We write and schedule all posts in advance. First, we select which accounts will be posting the message, along with which groups the message will be posted in:
Write our message:
Attach a blog post:
Select the time and date we’d like to schedule the post to be published:
Now we’re ready to schedule our posts:
We can then see our scheduled posts:
See previously published posts:
Engage and respond from any account right within Hubspot’s Social Inbox:
Check back next week to see the next post in our B2B Social Media Strategy Crash Course, which will focus on Google Plus!
A few helpful links and further reading:
White Paper: Maximizing Your Company Presence on LinkedIn
The Ultimate Cheat Sheet for Mastering LinkedIn
Answers to 17 LinkedIn Questions You Were Too Afraid to Ask
Free Guide: An Introduction to LinkedIn for Business
80% Of Social Media B2B Leads Come From LinkedIn [Infographic]
The Best and Worst Times to Post, Pin & Tweet [Infographic]
How to Build Authority on LinkedIn in 15 Minutes a Day