LinkedIn is good for business leads, so “they” say. You have yet to see it before you’ll believe it, though. You’ve been posting this and that on your LinkedIn profile for a while, but haven’t even generated Likes, never mind leads. Your company LinkedIn page is dead in the water with something like eight followers, and you have absolutely no idea how to do anything with it. Sound familiar? We’ve got a few secrets to share with you, which we hope will give your social media marketing a new lease on life.
- Make your profile attractive. On LinkedIn’s company pages, the only option you have for branding is the image and logo at the top of the page. The “elevator pitch” goes right to the bottom and nobody reads it unless they look for it. Use your profile image to brand your company, products and services for visitors to see upfront.
- Post often. While the newsfeed on LinkedIn doesn’t move quite as fast as Facebook’s, it still moves. Your post is only top of the list for people following you until it’s replaced with something else. By the next day, it’s disappeared. And whether you post daily or weekly, make sure that you post on Mondays if you’re targeting the B2C market – that’s apparently the day on which consumers look at the site, and more clicks are generated than on any other day of the week.
- Publish between 9 am and 12 noon. Both LinkedIn and Twitter get the best responses during this time frame, compared with social media marketing on Facebook, which gets its highest rate of click-throughs towards the end of the work day. This may not really apply to retirement community marketing, but you have to evaluate how many of your target audience are represented and advised by adult children – to whom it will apply.
- Keep it brief. You have to assume that people who are reading it on LinkedIn know a bit about the topic, or they wouldn’t be reading your post. Too many people make the mistake of feeling like they need to explain everything in detail. Research from Compendium shows that between 21 and 25 words is the ideal length for a B2C LinkedIn update.
- Don’t ask questions. Seriously. This might sound odd because on Facebook, asking questions is considered the best way to engage with followers. Not so on Twitter or LinkedIn, where research showed that B2C updates received 45 percent fewer clicks if they contained a question mark. It appears that users come to LinkedIn to find answers of their own, not to respond to questions.
- Use hashtags carefully. The B2B market loves them, but B2Cs not so much, and retirement community marketing falls into this category! LinkedIn posts containing hashtags garnered 20 percent fewer clicks than posts that didn’t.
- Exclamation marks work! Surprisingly, since LinkedIn gives the impression of being a conservative medium, B2C posts containing an exclamation mark got 27 percent more clicks while B2B posts got 26 percent. Consumers find information exciting, apparently, so make sure you use it.
Using social media marketing effectively is half the battle for website lead generation, so if you have a company page on LinkedIn, these methods should help you to leverage it for better results.
