Linkedin guide: how to use this network like a pro?

Understanding How LinkedIn Works

What Is LinkedIn and Why Use It?

LinkedIn is the premier social network for professionals. Most people use LinkedIn for recruitment purposes—either to find a job or to find that perfect candidate—for networking to develop their network, increase their visibility and find clients, or as social proof of their expertise by sharing relevant content.

LinkedIn allows you to showcase your professional journey as well as your company. It's a true online resume that offers you numerous opportunities thanks to your subscriber list that you need to leverage to gather maximum data (name, position, function, company, industry sector, etc.).

Thanks to all this information, you'll be able to select people who are part of your target audience and connect with them to convert them into leads more easily. You can also subscribe to LinkedIn Premium to access additional features and reach your target audience effectively.

The LinkedIn Mindset

Using social networks isn't always simple—they're all different and so are their communities. There's therefore a need to adapt to each one's mindset to fully benefit from them. LinkedIn is dedicated to professionals, so the community's mindset is much more structured than on other social networks.

And if you're on LinkedIn, it's because you're there to "do business." The value of this professional social network is to allow you to connect with your potential prospects. So the approach you'll adopt won't be the same as if you were on Facebook or Twitter, for example.

You're not going to talk about your vacation in Mauritius with a photo of your cocktail in a coconut. Everything you publish on your company page (this also applies to your LinkedIn profile) must make you credible in the community's eyes.

Inbound Marketing: Essential on LinkedIn

Today, users are looking for content that makes sense and meets their needs. You must now think inbound marketing—a marketing approach based on a content creation strategy that attracts visitors and converts them into leads, then into customers, by accompanying them throughout their journey.

Adopting an inbound marketing mindset forces you to create quality, useful content for your audience. You must approach communication differently and not practice self-promotion. All the actions you'll take on your company and personal LinkedIn pages must add value and help your prospects solve their daily (professional) problems.

When someone visits your page, they're curious and want to know who you are and what you do. If, at a glance, this person realizes you have nothing interesting to offer them—no value—they'll leave your page. The more your content is judged relevant by your target audience, the more you'll attract their attention and the more your expertise will speak for itself.

How to Leverage LinkedIn's Potential

Creating a LinkedIn Communication Strategy

Define Your Target and Work on Your Personas

From one social network to another, you won't reach your target the same way. It's therefore important to clearly define your target and personify it by developing your personas. If you don't know what a persona is yet, I invite you to read the article: Everything you need to know to develop your personas.

The idea is to understand your target well enough to create publications with appropriate vocabulary that encourages them to follow you, react, and click on attached content.

Create a Communication Plan

This is when you'll need to show organization. To simplify the term "communication plan," it's nothing more than a publication schedule for short, medium, or long term. The goal of a communication plan is to organize upcoming publications based on content type.

Don't forget to:

• Include your personal LinkedIn profile

• And your LinkedIn company page

• Define objectives

• Vary content

• Post on the right days

Respect LinkedIn Algorithm Requirements

To make a good post, you must meet its algorithm's requirements, otherwise LinkedIn will "penalize" your content very quickly. Let's look at these requirements:

What LinkedIn Likes:

• Content with engagement: The more your content is judged relevant for your network, the more the algorithm will favor you in the news feed. Comments are the most valued in terms of engagement.

• Content liked and commented within the first hour following publication. Obviously, the higher quality your content, the better your chances of meeting this criterion.

• Good timing: If you post on the right day and at the right time, LinkedIn favors your post's visibility. Similarly, LinkedIn pays particular attention to Dwell Time (time spent by a user on your post).

• Platform engagement: LinkedIn likes when you engage on its platform, doing your best to attract your target and interact with the LinkedIn community.

What LinkedIn Doesn't Like:

• External links in your posts: Each post published with an external link will be penalized by the algorithm. However, you can put external links from your publications in comments.

• Posting the same articles repeatedly: LinkedIn tends to penalize those who publish more than one post per day and may consider it spam if you post more than twice daily.

• Post shares: LinkedIn doesn't really like post shares, or it's the least appreciated interaction by the algorithm.

• Too many hashtags: The more numerous they are, the less targeted they'll be, so it's better to limit yourself to two or three hashtags per publication.

Leverage LinkedIn Influence to Stand Out

Every social network has its influencers, and LinkedIn is no exception. These content creators remain professional influencers, engaged in a cause, responsible for a company, or independents and entrepreneurs.

These B2B influencers are experts in their field. They share their expertise on LinkedIn and have gradually acquired a position as thought leaders with significant visibility that you can use to your advantage. By using their services, you'll stand out from your competitors and more easily attract your audience.

This type of partnership is increasingly popular because, in addition to increasing your traffic, you benefit from a pro's influence expertise designed for your LinkedIn network as they know how to interest their community—and therefore the one that concerns you too if you've thoughtfully selected the influencer based on your sector.

Few companies offer this type of service in influencer marketing. Fortunately, we know some good addresses, including Années Folles, with a bonus video so you can discover a bit more.

Analyzing LinkedIn Performance: Statistics

Traffic-Related Statistics

Visitors

On your company page or personal page, LinkedIn helps you learn more about visitors who consulted your page. There's not just the number of visitors to observe, but also their sector, position, location, mutual connections, etc. You can then see if your content matches your target well.

Your company page also allows you to measure page consultation evolution over a 30-day period based on: your page views, unique visitors, and clicks on the personalized button or CTA, indicating that visitors entered your inbound marketing funnel.

Published Posts

On your company page, you have access to a graph representing page traffic taking into account the device used to consult your page. It allows you to track activity spikes that can come from posts published on personal LinkedIn profiles, but also from your website, newsletter, and other social networks.

On your personal page, you can analyze your published posts directly by clicking "View statistics" below each of your posts to see impressions, reactions, comments, and shares.

Engagement Statistics

Reactions

On LinkedIn, you have access to your numbers of: reactions, comments, and shares. This helps you know if posts please your audience and engage them. Otherwise, you can connect this with visitor data and thus see if the target reached was right or rework your post content.

Company Page Updates

On your company page, you can see the evolution of interaction statistics on your posts in graph form.

Thanks to this graph, you can track your posts' interaction evolution over a defined period and compare interaction rates with view rates. Based on the communication strategy implemented, this analysis allows measuring publication evolution and estimating your progress.

Company Page Interactions

The plus of your company page: published posts appear as a list with publication performance: impressions (views), clicks, CTR (clicks divided by impressions), reactions, comments, shares, and engagement rate. You can thus easily measure your content's relevance and effectiveness.

LinkedIn Follower Statistics

Followers

You can check the number of followers on your company page and LinkedIn page. You also have access to new followers gained over the last thirty days on your company page and get a graphic representation of follower number evolution.

The most important thing in this section is seeing the number of new followers increase. If it's growing, it means the actions taken attract people and your content interests them.

Demographics

It allows you to learn more about people who follow you by: location, function, industry sector, and hierarchical level. Here, the data helps know if obtained followers are truly part of your target.

If your target isn't part of your followers, this leads you to rethink your strategy. It's important to understand this data to fully leverage your LinkedIn follower list's potential.

Pro tip: On your LinkedIn company page, you can know your positioning compared to other companies based on your followers and publications, to gauge competition and know if you should redouble efforts.

LinkedIn Company Page vs Personal Profile

Two Different Marketing Tools

LinkedIn Company Page

It allows learning more about your company, brand, services, and products. Unlike a personal profile, the company page speaks on behalf of an entity, not as a person. It's therefore passive compared to a personal profile.

You can only gain followers on your company page to create a community and share your expertise, always with the objective of selling. This page's passivity forces you to provide quality content dedicated to your target. This content must necessarily meet a need if you want it to gain effectiveness.

LinkedIn Profile

The personal profile, on the other hand, is yours—you speak in your own name. A personal account offers you many more possibilities than a company page because you can create a direct link with your network.

Unlike the company page, you can send messages directly to prospects and directly connect with other professionals in your sector. The personal account is now used for prospecting (mainly B2B), better known as social selling.

Company Page and Personal Profile: Complementary

You should know that personal pages' organic reach is more important. That is, LinkedIn offers them greater visibility than a corporate page. So, to increase your impact, you must get your employees on board and invite them to share your content. But in this case, why create a company page?

Let's take the case where you're a company CEO. You share your expertise, talk about your company via publications because you don't have a LinkedIn company page. Several people in your network are interested in what you do and want to know more about your company.

They visit your profile and see a visible gray box corresponding to your company in your professional experiences. These people were potential incoming leads who needed, at that moment, to know more about your activity.

Result: they're frustrated because they didn't get their need met: "learning more about you." Plus, you lose several opportunities and credibility with them.

Conversely, the absence of certain features on the company page is compensated by your personal profile and those of your teams. You must make both work together to generate opportunities for your business.