The power of LinkedIn: turning ‘lurkers’ into ‘likers’

Last month, a few of us at Wildfire joined a workshop hosted by Maverrick, a social selling training and consulting company, to learn about how we can help our clients harness the power of LinkedIn to find, connect and build relationships with their leads and prospects.They kicked off the session with some fast facts: LinkedIn is seeing double digit growth year on year and 50,000 users from the UK join LinkedIn each week. However, a huge proportion of these users are ‘lurkers’ – they like and comment on other people’s posts but never post anything themselves.This is a huge problem. LinkedIn makes most of its money from advertising, so it needs active users and new content to secure advertising revenue. In a nutshell, the longer your profile keeps users engaged, the more LinkedIn will reward your profile with greater visibility so you can effectively reach your target audiences.So, how do we go about doing that? I’ve shortlisted the key takeaways from the session to give you a flavour of some of the best practices:

• Building a community: it sounds simple but regularly liking and commenting on posts authored by the people you want to engage with makes it very likely they will then view your profile. On top of that, if they engage with your comment, you will trap them in your ‘content bubble’ for 72 hours. How? The LinkedIn algorithm cleverly marries the two profiles together, so you’re more likely to see each other’s content in your feed over the next few days.
• Timing is everything: post daily, particularly between 7-8am. These are the posts that will receive the most engagement. Why so early? This is because your post is public for the highest number of waking hours. It takes two hours for LinkedIn to index and rank your post, so it should be ready to roll at the start of the business day.
• The content sandwich: there are two types of posts; promotional (news about the company) and engagement (industry news stories, personal and interest and humour). The people within your network who know you are likely to engage with your promotional posts, but the issue is that the ‘lurkers’ won’t. They are more likely to respond to engagement posts that relate to wider industry news stories. So, it’s important that you sandwich promotional posts between your engagement posts.

For the best results, and to build stronger relationships with the people that matter, you should consider combining these techniques with more traditional PR and media relation activities and our digital executive programme service. Get in touch in to find out more.