Sharing your story

Foreword

Maintaining connections on LinkedIn is akin to an evolving professional address book. Beyond connecting with known associates, your personal LinkedIn profile serves as a platform to showcase your insights, allowing you to demonstrate your expertise to a broad audience. This audience could potentially evolve into future contacts and clients.

We’ve observed that visibility on LinkedIn’s business and brand pages might be limited. Thus, the most effective way for your company to engage its target audience is through consistent posting from individual profiles, particularly those of the leadership team. Remember, B2B engagements occur between individuals. Therefore, fostering, and sustaining relationships with your senior teams can shape a successful marketing or tech PR strategy, be it for potential clients or media engagements.

Consistent and captivating content on LinkedIn ensures that your professional expertise remains a focal point. The more engaging your content, the higher the chances of it being liked, shared, or commented upon, thereby boosting your social reach. In contrast, a silent profile will naturally fade into the background.

This guide aims to enhance your LinkedIn presence. It will provide insights on crafting compelling content, devising a posting strategy, and methods to evaluate and expand your reach on the platform.

Caroline James

Digital Marketing Specialist, Berkeley Communications

How to develop a personal LinkedIn content strategy to showcase your thought leadership

Being a successful thought leader on LinkedIn is about more than just opening your account and typing your first post. To make sure your profile is engaging and drawing target customers to you, first you need to prepare your content strategy. In order to define your LinkedIn content strategy, we suggest you address these three questions:

What are your key themes?

Don’t just post about anything. Audiences follow key thought leaders because they are specialists and provide vision, knowledge and authority in their particular area. So, define a list of the key topics that you and your organisation are experts in, and the insight you can bring to your audience in these topics. Defining clear parameters can actually help trigger creativity, so a distinct list will also help you come up with ideas when you draft individual posts. Make sure to monitor your preferred media publications and hashtags on LinkedIn, or other social accounts, to see how these topics are covered and to find news and great content that will spark your opinion in these areas.

What content is high value to your audience?

Once you know what themes you want to write about, take a look at the content your audience need. What problems do you believe your prospective customers have? How can you or your brand solve those issues? What knowledge or insight do you have that would help them or inspire them?

If you know the particular organisational roles, industries or geographical areas you are trying to reach, review what content they are already reading and commenting on. Then narrow down your list of content topics to the ones that would be most useful to your prospective audience.

Who is in your wider network?

Grow your authority and your reach by referencing and mentioning related authors, media outlets and LinkedIn company pages in your posts. Before you start crafting content, review which LinkedIn authors, business partners or influencers would engage in your content and consider mentioning them when writing individual posts. Create content that will be interesting to them and encourage them to share your post, participate in your discussion or develop a sharing relationship with you. To do this, type the @ symbol in front of the person or company page’s name to alert them to your post and encourage them to share or comment.

“Regularly posting content on LinkedIn that your connections find engaging, thoughtful and interesting helps to keep your expertise front of mind and build your professional authority.”

What to post

If you look at the average LinkedIn feed, you’ll likely see it’s full of updates about new jobs, new business wins, campaign promotions or trying to achieve business objectives such as getting you to click through to critical web pages. So, to be a thought leader and cut through all that noise, you’ve got to be different. And that means embracing storytelling.

The best posts on LinkedIn:

Tell a story

Just as we recommend in our guide to being a thought leader in media content, every piece of thought leadership, even LinkedIn posts, should take readers on a journey. Show the reader how they can overcome a specific challenge by bringing the problem to life and making it relatable. Use your expertise to guide them to their resolution.

Share personal insights

Express your own interests where they will be of interest to your professional contacts. Content that speaks to wider themes such as leadership, motivation, achievements, and equality, for example, can reach beyond your usual readers. Big moments in your life and career, including events, can also perform well, when balanced with customer-focused posts.

Sound natural

Importantly, as well as covering topics that are natural for you, you should also use a natural tone of voice. Your readers are following you for your insights, so don’t try and write like an academic (unless you are one, of course!), write how you speak, and readers will respond. And feel free to use emojis if you would usually. They can be a great way to grab attention when used sparingly on LinkedIn.

Showcase your expertise

The best performing social media content is useful for your specific audience, attention grabbing and engaging. Your expertise in a particular niche will make your content credible and stand out from the crowd, so bring your specific experiences and challenges to evoke passion and provide a different take on a topic.

Bring your expert opinion to news stories

It’s recommended to share news stories or content from other sources for roughly half of your posts on LinkedIn. This helps your content stay fresh, allows you to talk about a wider range of themes and shows people that your finger is on the pulse of your industry.

This also has the benefit of letting you generate more content in less time than it often takes to write original posts from scratch. Pull out an interesting sounding top line, or quote from the article, to grab attention and let readers know what it’s about to get them to continue reading.

Be consistent

Post regularly and aim for an achievable flow of posts. Between one-three posts per week is reasonable to keep your profile active and visible, as well as balancing with your workload. It’s often useful to create a few posts in a block of time when you are able to focus on writing for example, and schedule or save them to post throughout the week.

Four tips to grow your LinkedIn reach

Develop a hashtag strategy

Hashtags aren’t just for Twitter. Use up to five appropriate hashtags for each of your posts. We suggest a variety of hashtags which are followed by large numbers and also niche ones which have small but engaged audiences. If you’re not sure about what hashtags to use, ask yourself: “what might my target audience be searching for to find this post?”

Build connections

Increasing your connections on LinkedIn will widen the number of people who may be served your posts. If you have 100 connections your visibility will remain low. If you have 4,000 connections it will almost certainly be much higher.

Keep an eye on likes, shares and comments on your posts and consider inviting connections with second and third-degree connections who you might find professionally interesting. When you invite a new connection, sending a personal message to let them know why you find them interesting to connect with will help to grow your network and strengthen relationships.

Searching

LinkedIn’s search facility is powerful but under used. It’s incredibly useful for finding content or people who have specific roles, or who work for certain companies, as well as jobs currently being advertised.

A top search tip if you’re hunting for potential new connections is to search your second- and third-degree connections within a certain category, for example your local area, to find people you might feel comfortable introducing yourself to build your network.

LinkedIn groups

Groups enjoyed a heyday some years ago but some are still vibrant and useful to join in and start conversations between people with shared professional interests. Don’t over-promote yourself and your company in these groups but share content and insights that will genuinely be of value to the members and you will get noticed.

How do you know what’s working?

LinkedIn’s insights give you enough information to inform your future content and posts. Check your “notifications” for alerts about activity around your posts and engagements. On each post you can see engagements, shares and number of views. Clicking on the “views” total under each post will bring up demographics of who has seen that post. If you recognise patterns in content that is doing well – with lots of likes, comments or shares – you know what’s working. Similarly, those with few views indicate what isn’t so popular.

Show your passion in your profile

The tips in this guide will help you shape your ideas and content into engaging LinkedIn posts and build your presence as a thought leader. But we know that maintaining consistent posts on LinkedIn takes time, often time that C-suite members and executives don’t have.

To find out how the social media strategy team at Berkeley Communications can give you back that time, help boost your LinkedIn profile and raise awareness of your brand, speak to our team about LinkedIn management and profiling opportunities.

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