Getting plenty from LinkedIn? How much do you know about your account? Maybe it’s time to up your game…
by Alan Ferguson
Before analysing any social media account I have some basic advice: Post a LOT, vary the post length, time of day, day of week, links and images. Because the thing is you need to go heavy to give you a wide enough spread to analyse. Otherwise, you could potentially end up making bad decisions.
Also, don’t just do it once as a one-off - analyse your accounts every month, build patterns over a year or across seasons.
And this applies to LinkedIn too.
We’ve a decent LinkedIn page, with plenty of activity, so there's something to really get my analytical teeth into.
Here’s my top 5 LinkedIn learning points
- The longer the post the better the engagement rate. It is essentially a blogging platform, not a micro-blogging platform like Twitter, so give your story some juice, rather than just using it for click bait.
- Monday to Thursday works better than Friday to Sunday. It is a business network – that is obvious. Interestingly, Friday’s engagement does drop as, I would guess, people are more interested in what they are doing at the weekend. I would debate the point of weekend posting at all.
- Bring Champagne to the LinkedIn party. I heard this line about Facebook last year but it applies to ALL social media. If you do not make it interesting and creative you might as well not bother. Put the effort in.
- Offering a service generates interest. For example ‘we can help you’, ‘we have X services for you’, ‘we can support you with Y’. It is LinkedIn – it’s all about selling the value of the service you are providing and these types of posts will and do work.
- Ask questions to generate engagement. And, for example, share other posts e.g. ‘There has been an announcement by X, what do you think of this for your business and how can we help you with it?’
If you’ve found any other interesting stats or have learning to share then let please let me know – I am on Twitter at @AlanFergs – and use the hashtag #BetterLinkedIn.
Alan Ferguson is web manager at Central Bedfordshire Council
image via the National Archive of Holland
