Best practices for digital communication - linkedIn : how to use it

Initially used primarily by senior executives, LinkedIn now has a wide range of user profiles including businesses, experienced influencers, decision-makers, opinion leaders, Master’s graduates and even students.

An interesting social network that could therefore complement your digital communication strategy and enable you to develop an audience by highlighting your institutional image.

Why use LinkedIn ?

With 2 million posts per day, LinkedIn is a social network on which you can also showcase your image. In addition to presenting yourself, you can also create content about your latest activities or your sector, to pique the interest of your contacts or followers.

With LinkedIn, you can :

- Gain the trust of users.

- Have direct contact with them.

- Target and establish a new audience.

- Communicate about your entity.

- Follow the news.

- Monitor the competition and best practices.

- Improve your search engine rankings.

- Increase your visibility.

- Establish new partnerships.

- Benefit from all the advantages of a free tool.

- Generate leads towards your website.

Creating and managing your LinkedIn account

Profile optimisation is key to creating an effective LinkedIn account. This will enable you to attract as many people to your account as possible and get them interacting with you and your messages.

Follow the steps below to create and optimise your LinkedIn account :

- Start by clicking on the icon in the top right of your home page.

- Choose the last option: Create a Company page +.

- Enter your company name.

- Choose a URL and check the box.

- Create your Company page.

- Click "Start" on the home page.

- Add your logo and cover photo.

- Add a description of your activities.

- Set your page administrators.

- Attract more followers (cultivate your personal profile, join groups and involve your collaborators).

- Add relevant content to your page on a regular basis.

- Promote your content with LinkedIn Ads.

- Analyse your results.

Bear in mind that LinkedIn prioritises organic content, hosted directly on the social network. Here, there are three types of organic content that you can post: articles, text and photo posts and videos with well-informed captions. You should also note that you can post from different places: from your Company page, in groups, via direct messages, by email or even by commenting on other content.

Therefore, to generate conversions, you should focus on relevant and quality content that is suited to the users you want to target. To vary your posts and pique the interest of your target audience, learn to communicate about other subjects by sharing your latest news or events, for example, or posting tutorial videos or even articles. Talk about yourself, share what you are doing and showcase your expertise. Advise people seeking information on a subject in which you are an expert and share flash info on news from your business sector. Don’t hesitate to address your community to gain greater visibility. Ask questions and invite people to react, comment on or share your post. And lastly, use hashtags.

Sponsorship

LinkedIn also gives you the option to promote relevant posts to increase your visibility and highlight your attributes and expertise to potential leads you want to target. Its advanced targeting options enable you to deploy a very effective promotion strategy based on the activity sector, position held or even the years of service of each social media user. The promotion tool on LinkedIn, as on all the other social networks, is an experience that can be constantly refreshed and improved. So be attentive to what’s working and what isn’t so you can continue fine-tuning your image and strategy. To promote one of your posts, go to your Company page and click Boost at the top of your content.

Monitoring performance

To measure your performance, LinkedIn provides you with numerous statistics such as reach, engagement, number of visits, interaction and even demographic data. Performance analysis is a key tool for developing your LinkedIn community, as it gives you a clear overview of the actions you have taken and allows you to take a necessary step back to understand and improve certain points. Note that the Statistics tab available on the platform allows you to measure the performance of your actions and their ROI, broken down into three categories: Visitors, Updates and Followers.

Practical advice

- Enter as much information into your profile as possible and describe your activities in order to highlight your expertise and field of activity as extensively as possible.

- Encourage all your staff and partners to share the content posted on your account.

- Regularly invite your target audience to follow you.

- Join groups close to your activities to exchange and increase your visibility.

- Share relevant content.

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