What to Avoid When Posting to Your LinkedIn Company Page

Social Media Posting Without a Plan

Getting started on posting updates to your LinkedIn Company Page doesn’t have to be daunting, but it can be.

It can also be  a waste of resources if done incorrectly. Many organizations make the mistake of diving right in and posting messages without having a good understanding of the metrics and mechanics of LinkedIn.

I’ve worked with businesses that have gone into posting messages without a plan, posted messages regularly to LinkedIn for a month or two, and have deemed the effort a waste of time and a failure.

Avoid These LinkedIn Pitfalls 

Posting to Your LinkedIn Company Page

When you post to your LinkedIn company page company page, your message has the potential to be seen by your company page followers. Since people don’t receive email notifications when you post a message, only the page followers who happen to be on LinkedIn around the time that you post the message will possibly see the update.

This is why it becomes important to consider the time of day you post. LinkedIn gets more traffic before and after work, so post messages early in the morning or later in the day if you’d like to be seen by a larger share of your following. The messages will show up in the home feed of your followers. Your posts will also appear on your company page and can be seen by anyone who browses it. Remember: you can pin important content to the top of the page to enhance its visibility.

What are impressions and engagement rate

Just posting your updates isn’t enough, especially if your base of followers is relatively small. So how do you get your important content in front of more people? This is where impressions and engagement rate come in. Impressions are the number of times your post was seen by someone on LinkedIn. This is an extremely soft measurement.

Impressions do not mean that people have read or interacted with your content in any way. Instead, it means that your update passed before their eyes on their screens. Specifically, they may have scrolled right past it. Regardless of this possibility, impressions are important. With more impressions, you increase the likelihood that people engage with your content in some way. So how do you get more impressions? Engagement.

If a social media update gets posted on LinkedIn and no one likes or shares it, does that make an impact? The short answer is no. If you’re just posting updates for the sake of posting them instead of focusing on getting likes, shares and comments from your followers, then it’s time to reassess your strategy. In particular, consider how likeable and shareable your content is and encourage your team members to be more active participants on LinkedIn.

The “social” in social media is about people sharing information and liking content with people who are in their networks. When you like or share a post your personal network—the ones who happen to be on LinkedIn when you originally posted—will see that you took that action. This kind of social amplification will help get your company page posts out to a much wider audience if done in a coordinated fashion.

Understanding LinkedIn Social Amplification

You hear people talk a lot about content going viral on social media. While we can all dream about a piece of our content attracting an audience in the millions, your first step is getting to an audience in the hundreds or thousands.

If you’re like a lot of SMBs, you may have a relatively small amount of company page followers, BUT you may have team members who collectively have hundreds of connections on LinkedIn. This is the untapped audience that you’ll be able to amplify your messages to if your team engages with your content.

A typical message posted out to a company page following of 40 or 50 people may only get 20 or so impressions and maybe a click or two. However, if that same message is liked or shared by ten team members with 200 connections each, then your update has the potential to get out to thousands of people, dramatically increasing the chance that people click on your content.

The key is getting your team ready, working with them to build out their networks of customers and prospects, and then working in a coordinated fashion to promote your content out through your team’s individual networks. If the content is well received, the post can reach an even greater audience by getting likes, shares, and comments from people who are in your team member's networks.

Tips for Better LinkedIn Campaigns

1. Work with your team to set goals on personal network expansion— connect with each other, with customers, and with prospects.
2. Plan out your content strategy—think about what your customers and prospects want to see, NOT what you want them to see.
3. Create a calendar so that team members know when your most important content is going to be posted.
4. Like and share the content—post, like, and share in the middle of the week and at the beginning and end of the work day for optimal impact.

Posting just for the sake of publishing can be a wasteful drain of time and resources. Ensure that you move forward with a strategic plan. Also, remember to use the analytics tab on your LinkedIn Company page to understand your post performance. For top-performing posts, you may also want to consider a paid strategy. Consider LinkedIn Sponsored Updates as a way to promote your content out to a wider targeted audience.

Need help getting your social media strategy off the ground? Reach out to TSL to schedule a social strategy assessment.