Use LinkedIn to Link Up
LinkedIn is a great tool for professional networking, recruitment, research and content publication; while most of us use our personal profiles to retain connections with old colleagues and make new connections, businesses can also use their company page as a marketing tool. LinkedIn adds new features reasonably regularly, and one of the recent changes is the ability to export follower data from your company page. The export doesn't include follower names, but it does include location, job title, seniority, company size and industry. This data can give you a valuable insight into the types of people following your company page.
When you have this level of insight into your company followers you can use this to inspire and inform content and events. Should you realise you have a lot more executive level followers than you thought, you might consider creating content they will want to read and use this to strengthen your follower base. You can also see data related to your follower count and how it has grown. By using this output in tandem with the dates you published certain bits of content, or published an event you can see the effect of these actions on your follower count.You can also go back further in time and see how global events have affected your follower count – for example a big jump in followers at the start of lockdown would be expected as more people were working from home. This would also allow you to see whether any changes or significant events have gained you any new followers or not.
LinkedIn Events is a feature that was re-launched earlier this year, and both personal profiles and company pages can host events (so sole traders or consultants can hold online events as well as large corporations). Once an event is published it will appear on your page and in the news feed. When followers click this link they'll also see all your other upcoming events, allowing you to promote events in the future organically before making a concerted push to get attendees signed up.If you post a public event LinkedIn provides a registration form (pre-populated with that user's LinkedIn data) making event registration a doddle (the form also includes an “opt out of further information” option so you can still abide by GDPR rules). This data can then be downloaded ahead of the event. Your online event, if hosted on LinkedIn, will be available as a video after the event finishes; meaning that new followers can still access the content even if the event predates their date of following.
Finally, large companies (with 200+ employees on LinkedIn) will soon have a “My Company” tab which will be visible to all current employees of your company (ex-employees can be removed by contacting LinkedIn). Within the My Company tab your staff can see trending content from co-workers, news from the company and even add new colleagues straight from that tab. Although some businesses may use online collaboration platforms for project management and to keep in touch, this LinkedIn feature encourages professional networking within the company which is great for multi-site businesses, especially now that working from home has become the norm and we're all missing the water-cooler conversations.
