The most effective way to grow your personal brand or a startup brand now is through social media. To create and promote your own identity or brand you need to identify how these platforms work and how you can utilize them to make your mark in the business world. Building a constructive and powerful LinkedIn page can be a game changer for your business and brand. From connecting you to potential clients to promoting your products and services; to exchanging new business ideas – there is an enormous opportunity. According to research, 72% of business professionals in the US think LinkedIn is the most effective platform for exchanging business ideas. But the process of building a successful LinkedIn page takes time, patience, and strategy, but with the correct steps in the right direction, the target can be achieved.
Set A Goal
Before putting any information on the page, or even before creating a page on the platform, you need to identify and set a goal that you plan to achieve in a certain time. With the goal in mind, it becomes easy to chalk out the plan of action and stay focused.
Valued And Relevant Content
Engaging the right audience is the key to success through a LinkedIn page. And to deliver that, you need to put content that is relevant to the industry you are catering and the information holds enough value to be discussed and appreciated. Keeping the content quality high, helps you reach a better audience.
- Consistency – with the right content, you need to be consistent in posting the same as well. To maintain a strong and steady engagement, you need to post on regular basis at the right time. As per the algorithm, the best time to share or post anything on the platform is in the morning. But at the same time, we should always be open to experimenting. Another way to keep up with consistency is to post relevant content even if that’s not written by you. There are so many articles/ blog posts over the internet that you connect with on a professional level. You can share the same through your LinkedIn page as well.
- The 4:1:1 Rule – this is a thumb rule for content posting across all social media platforms. This 4:1:1 rule implies that for every 6 content you post, 4 of them should be for educating or entertaining purposes from other sources or published/posted by others (youtube videos/blog posts), and 1 should be aiming for soft-promotion or soft sell (like an announcement for an event/launch) and one should be for hard promotion or hard sell that comes with a call of action that convinces someone to take an action like ‘purchase’ or ‘subscribe’. Maintaining this rule creates curiosity and results in higher engagement on your page.
- Networking – though a lot of people think of LinkedIn as a strictly professional platform, networking on a personal level has proven to be one of the successful methods to grow your page and your brand. Take out some time every day to spend dedicatedly on networking. Search over the platform and list potential clients and connect with them. Brief them about your brand/business and tell them how you can help them in their business. The process takes time and patience but it gets you the right attention from the right people. Even if they don’t convert into your client, they can follow your page for the relevant content you post.
- Play with the format – Posting only text-heavy content can be monotonous for the people on your page. There should be a good blend of Texts, graphics, images, and videos. It has been proved that any content in the video format gains more engagement than text ones. Keeping a mix of formats in posting will help gain a better connection with the audience.
- Engage in conversations – to build a stronger following, you need to be doing more than just posting. Engage with those commenting on your posts, and like their comments. This way you can generate more value as a brand. Also, there are LinkedIn groups relevant to your industry that you can join. Closely observe the activities, posts, and the people in the groups to understand the industry situation and the expectation of people in a better way. Engaging in conversations in group posts, and answering the queries of people will help you and your page gain the required limelight.
- The hashtag game – Hashtags are another tool to generate more engagement on social media. Search the hashtags that are relevant to your content and to the industry you are serving and plug them into your posts. On LinkedIn, people can search hashtags to find content. this way, your content will reach more people with the same interests and ideas.
- Link your page – Linking your LinkedIn page is proven to be an effective way to grow followers. You can link your page on your website, under your e-mail signature to promote it. Also never miss any opportunity to link your page while posting for any upcoming event or announcement across other platforms as well.
- Study Analytics – To cater the right content to the right audience you need to understand the needs of the audience better. The inbuilt analytics on the LinkedIn page helps you find exactly that. You can have a thorough idea of who is following your content, their work profiles, what kind of content is getting more appreciated, what kind of content they prefer & so much more. Study analytics after a regular interval to cater to a better and bigger audience without deviating from the goal.
