Insights
05.01.2021

The next steps to a better LinkedIn

Slide2

LinkedIn is an open door for developing relationships, connecting with your market and promoting content to your network and targeted audiences. Its uses have become popular in the insurance industry with the majority of insurance professionals part of the network. But it's easy to create content that sucks — posts that don’t keep readers scrolling and reach the high levels of engagement you were aiming for.

So how do you ensure you're maximising the power of the platform? We’ve taken our experience of running social media campaigns for our insurance clients to give you 5 tips to make LinkedIn work harder for you.

1

Recycle your posts.

Only 7-8% of your company page followers will see any one post. This improves only slightly when posting from your personal page where 10% of your connections are likely to view your post.

Top tip: Repost the same content every few days or weeks. Keep the same content circulating to allow maximum distribution and a higher likelihood of more people interacting and engaging.

‘Pin’ pieces of content to the top of your company page. This feature allows 1 single piece of content to sit right at the top of your profile, meaning if someone were to view your page, no matter how old the post is, it will be the first piece of content they see. This allows more people to see it, therefore more engagement.

2

Mix up your content.

Due to the current working from home culture, personal content is getting higher levels of engagement. This makes it trickier to engage at a company level.

Top tip: Try mixing up your content between serious thought-leadership, promotional and relatable posts, ask questions and build interaction. A/B test what works best for you vs your objectives. The algorithm is not smart enough to understand the content of a post and determine if it's “interesting”, so it will be based on the interactions of users with the post (along with other criteria such as external links, videos, and images that can also influence its effectiveness).

3

Increase your dwell time.

Dwell time, as it sounds, calculates how long a LinkedIn user spends looking at your post. The LinkedIn algorithm looks positively on longer dwell times and promotes your post to more of your network.

Top tip: Use video. People are visually driven. You should be posting stuff that grabs user’s attention and video certainly does this.

4

Decide what content works best for you and your audience.

The ultimate goal of LinkedIn is to attract a bigger audience to your network, while also having high levels of engagement from those that already exist. You need to find the right genre of content which works for your connections ultimately leading them to engage with your posts more.

Top tip: Experiment with different pieces of content. Try some A/B testing on different kinds of content and different approaches to the text.

When you click ‘Start a post’, LinkedIn now gives you some options on which kind of posts you want to create. Try some of these out:

  • Poll
  • Video
  • Image
  • Share that you are hiring
  • Celebrate an occasion
  • Add a profile
  • Offer help
5

Improving your engagement rates on LinkedIn by improving your SSI score.

SSI or social selling index score measures how your company uses the ‘4 pillars of social selling’ on LinkedIn based from a scale of 0-100. It measures how effective you are at establishing your professional brand, finding the right people, engaging with insights and building relationships. If you manage a score of over 70, then you'll likely have higher levels of content distribution.

Top tip: To increase your SSI you should:

  • fill out all profile sections - headline, summary and experience
  • include a photo as well as a cover photo
  • increase your endorsements and show off your skills
  • add rich multimedia content highlighting you as a thought leader
  • carry out advanced people searches
  • view who’s viewed your profile
  • follow relevant industry or topic hashtags
  • join relevant groups (and engage with them)
  • comment on and share other people’s posts.

There are no set answers and there never will be on how to achieve 100% engagement from your audience on a network that's always changing. But we'll continue to chase after it. In the meantime, these tips will help to boost your LinkedIn performance in a range of ways.

LinkedIn’s algorithm is regularly updated. The above tips were factually correct as of December 2020.