How to Leverage your Business Leaders Profiles for LinkedIn Business Growth
In a recent blog post, we discussed four key strategies for using LinkedIn to drive business growth. Today, we’ll dive deeper into one of those strategies: leveraging your leaders’ and experts’ personal LinkedIn profiles. Business leaders tend to have a large, loyal, and relevant following—and can do more to boost brand awareness and build credibility in the industry than a company page alone could accomplish. They can also serve as an effective vehicle to humanize the brand and build important relationships.
The Importance of Active LinkedIn Business Leaders Within Your Organization
LinkedIn is the primary platform organizations utilize to learn more about a potential partner’s approach, culture, and reputation. As a result, LinkedIn is highly saturated with content—but most of it is ineffective or irrelevant. This is good news and bad news.
Bad news: It can be hard to break through the noise and reach your target audience.
Good news: Publishing insightful, high-quality content can help you stand out, grow your following, and establish credibility for your brand.
You already know to push this meaningful, thought-provoking content on your LinkedIn company page as a first step. But are you using your business leaders’ LinkedIn presences to amplify and contextualize your posts? If not, you are missing out on a significant opportunity for showcasing solutions and building trust among key company audiences.
By capitalizing on your business leaders’ individual networks, you can extend your digital reach to larger groups. The people following your leaders and experts on LinkedIn are likely already interested and engaged in the type of resources your company is providing—increasing the likelihood that you’ll gain positive feedback and returns. If your leaders’ network connections then react to or comment on these posts, LinkedIn’s news feed setup ensures that their entire following will see this engagement and be exposed to your content.
LinkedIn currently boasts at least 750 million users and 8 million C-level decision-makers, many of whom are connected to each other by shared interests and similar career paths. Imagine how far your brand could reach if your leaders actively shared your company’s perspectives and publications with their respective networks.
Utilize a Content Strategy for Personal Posting
Some business leaders will be invested in crafting and sharing content, while others may need a bit more education and encouragement. Regardless of where on the spectrum of social media expertise and excitement your leaders fall, you should provide recommendations to help navigate and inspire them. Importantly, this guide should not be a prescriptive list of actions for them to follow but rather a set of simple suggestions, strategies, and tips to help leaders maximize their time and effort on LinkedIn.
Your guide should include:
- High-level information about the various ways to share content on LinkedIn—and what types of content tend to generate the most interest
- Read this LinkedIn article for general ideas, and review your company page metrics to generate more specific insights
- Guidelines around aligning with company voice to ensure a cohesive brand and presence
- Important topics and trends in the industry that the audience will care about (Note: revisit and update this section as the healthcare landscape shifts)
- Thought starters and/or ideation exercises to help leaders determine what they want to share. These could include:
- What is something you wish people talked more about in the industry?
- What is your point of view on new developments or influential changes?
- What lessons have you learned as a healthcare leader?
- What are you an expert in?
- What are you grateful for?
- What are you trying to impact or change in the industry?
- What is your vision and philosophy for your work?
As you get a sense of how savvy your leaders are on LinkedIn and how their connections are engaging, you can shift your support accordingly to meet their needs and grow their influence. No matter who you’re working with, keep authenticity at the forefront. For personal posting to make an impact, leaders’ network connections must be able to resonate with and trust them.
Develop the Routine and Stick With It
After authenticity, consistency is the next critical component of a successful personal posting approach.
Empower your leaders to stay on top of LinkedIn posting by helping them select a regular, realistic posting schedule. While once per day for at least 30 days is the best practice for optimizing reach within the LinkedIn algorithm, some leaders will only be able to manage three to four days per week. Generating daily posts can seem intimidating, so allowing some wiggle room in frequency is okay, particularly at the start. Hootsuite also recommends not posting too frequently—an issue that could arise for overly excited social media newcomers—so make sure leaders are sharing a new post no more than once every three hours.
Create clear reminders to encourage habit development and keep the initiative from training off. Biweekly or weekly check-ins can help leaders dedicate time to planning their posts. Daily calendar blocks or recurring tasks in your project management system can keep leaders on track even during busy days. Turning on LinkedIn notifications can trigger leaders to quickly and easily engage with other users and businesses via comments, likes, or shares.
Be Part of the 1%
Did you know only 1% of LinkedIn users are posting quality, consistent, and valuable content? By activating your business leaders on LinkedIn, encouraging their voices, and engaging their networks, your organization can reach a broader audience, build your brand, and generate overall business growth. Remember, each leader is different in their comfort with social media, level or area of expertise, and available time. Across the board, however, authentic connection, relevant content, and reliable posting are the three keys to success.
