Over 774 million users use LinkedIn as a social media platform – and if this isn’t enough reason to include LinkedIn in your strategy, then we will give you some more. As LinkedIn is often a forgotten social media platform, we will try to show you how important this powerful addition to your social media strategy can be. 

What makes LinkedIn so special as a social media platform? 

The platform focuses, especially compared to other social media, on building your brand online, it focuses on networking, building careers, connecting and sharing ideas. Its emphasis is on the growth of your company and your brand. For those who want to take their business to the next level, this means that the focus should not be solely on Facebook, Instagram and Co. as LinkedIn perfectly complements the big players of social media.

It is a professional social media platform that focuses on content marketing, among other things, which means the better and more professional the content you put out there is, the more successful you’ll be on LinkedIn. If other users will start to like and share your content, you’ll profit from a wider reach on the platform and more views on your business page. 

You’re not sure what Content Marketing is? Don’t worry – we got you.

Content Marketing aims to provide real value and is there to help the community you’ve buildt. Your content should answer specific questions that relate to your business field or help reoccurring problems your clients face everyday. Content Marketing can be blog posts and articles, as well as videos that explain a certain topic. 

And you can be smart about it: the content of Content Marketing, for example, a blog post can be reused as a social media post for Instagram or Facebook. In most cases, this blog post can be divided into several social media posts, so that the content is successfully recycled. Be smart and work less!

What are the advantages of focusing your social media marketing strategy on LinkedIn?

• You will have an easier time targeting your ideal client because LinkedIn allows you to target your audience with different filters like profession, education, location and other factors. A focused reach will help you increase your importance within your niche, as your engagement will rise. 
• The platform prides itself with a general high engagement rate – as most of the users are professionals who are actively looking for information and engage with your content out of real interest. 
• Connection is key on this platform – LinkedIn does not only help you to connect with your ideal client but also with potential new employees or business partners. Showing and marketing your brand on this platform will help you grow your company in the long run. 
• You’re able to write whole articles about a topic of interest instead of only creating a social media post. This means you can pour your knowledge about a certain topic into a whole article, which then can be liked and shared by the whole LinkedIn community. By providing quality content, you’re more recognized as an expert in your field. 
• LinkedIn offers business pages an extensive amount of analytics: you’re able to filter trough your results by money spent on campaigns, impressions, clicks and shares on a post, click-trough rates and many more.

The set-up of your LinkedIn Business Page

So now that we hopeful drew a clearer picture on why LinkedIn is so important, let’s run-through the set up of your business page. LinkedIn made this process really easy and we promise you, it will take you less than an hour. It’s important to answer all the questions and to fill out your whole profile, as LinkedIn guarantees 30% more views on your page when your profile is completed. 

After setting up your business page, you can start to invite people to follow your page. But don’t rush out the invites, you only get to send out 100 invites! So be careful and send out your invites with a little strategy in mind. However when someone accepts your invite and follows your business page, you get that invite back and are now able to send it out to another person or company.  

However, before sending out invites, you should build up content, so people actually have something to look at when they visit your page for the first time. LinkedIn suggested a posting schedule of 2-5 times per week, while the best days are between Tuesday and Friday during business hours. The platforms optimized content strategy is the 5-3-2 rule. We’re gonna explain that one for you: 

• You should share 5 articles from other people with your follower that are interest for your niche and your clients.
• You should create 3 original content about your brand and what services or knowledge you have to offer; this can be articles, blog posts, graphics, videos or whatever you want.
• The last 2 posts should be fun things like employee announcements, what’s going on inside your company or funny things your niche can relate to; it’s supposed to help your brand to build character.

Now that you know a lot more about LinkedIn Marketing, we hope that you consider including it in your social media marketing strategy, as it is a helpful tool to build and grow your brand. Let us know in the comments if you have any questions – we’re happy to answer them for you!