Using employee advocacy to improve your LinkedIn growth strategy in 2023
As a business owner, using LinkedIn for your company can help you to grow in 2023. By implementing a plan and encouraging employee advocacy through a LinkedIn growth strategy, you can propel your social media presence this year.
What is a LinkedIn growth strategy?
A LinkedIn growth strategy is a plan you put in place to grow your audience, generate engagement, and gain new business leads. LinkedIn is a fantastic free social media tool, especially for B2B businesses.
The platform has evolved in recent years and now can become a great way to build authority and credible relationships. But without proper guidance or strategy, it could be huge time waster. It’s no longer a platform to simply showcase individuals CVs.
What should be in a LinkedIn growth strategy?
You need to create a plan that includes –
- Defining your marketing goals – whether that be gaining leads, getting public speaking opportunities, or fundraising?
- Defining your target audience – what are their biggest pain points and how can you solve their problems?
- Creating content that appeals to your target audience – what types of content will you share? Text only, videos, images, carousels, and polls are all common LinkedIn content types.
- Building your audience – are you connecting with the right people and actively searching for your target audience?
- Engaging with your audience – how you will build a relationship with your connections? Once connected, you can now ‘ring the bell’ on people’s profiles to be notified every time they post. This makes engaging with their content easier. Relationships are built in the comments section and DMs in LinkedIn.
- Which hashtags are relevant to your marketing goals – find popular industry hashtags and use 3-5 in each post to be found by more people. For a full guide on using hashtags for social media, read this blog post.
- How you will evaluate your content performance – you need a way to track whether your goals are being met. You should review your social media data every month to keep on top of your LinkedIn growth strategy. Here’s a guide on how to analyse your social media metrics.
Outline all the above points from a company perspective and start breaking down tasks into your team members. The best LinkedIn growth strategies include not just the business owner, but all staff to create employee advocacy.
What is employee advocacy?
If you’re a business owner, it’s beneficial for you to get your employees and team on board with LinkedIn, too. Don’t think of them building their own personal brands as a threat – see it as an opportunity for building the awareness of your company through their connection base.
Leveraging your employee’s LinkedIn profiles by getting them to share their own content and promote the company’s content is an employee advocacy strategy. Think of your team as an extension of your sales team. In my eyes everyone is there to help promote the company.
Employee advocacy is important because it can build a great brand reputation and form strong relationships, helping to –
- Inspire your workforce
- Create brand ambassadors
- Share emotional stories
- Build a trusted community
- Showcase brand personality and company culture
- Improve your comms
- Advocate change
- Grow your business
- Bring in qualified leads
How to encourage employee advocacy on LinkedIn
Your employees and team members are your biggest company asset. The people in your team all have unique expertise and knowledge within your industry. You’ve hired them because they’re great people and are brilliant at their job.
People buy from people. If you represent a great company culture and your employees show knowledge of your industry on LinkedIn, it will help your business go from strength to strength.
But it can be a challenge to get your employees on board. Maybe they’re not confident in using their social media, or they don’t see it as an important task.
To encourage employee advocacy, you need to educate your employees on the company goals and how using a LinkedIn growth strategy can help get you there. It’s also important to make sure employees have enough time in their schedule to make it a priority – don’t expect people to do it in their own time.
Do this right and your business will be associated with credible experts in their field. Clients may approach your employees directly to start working together. It gives your business a well-rounded approach to LinkedIn – and could help to lighten your workload as a business owner, manager or salesperson.
If you advocate for positive change within your company and highlight the benefits to the company – and the staff members – you can add employee advocacy to your social media marketing strategy.
Learn how to create your personal LinkedIn growth strategy
If you need help creating a personalised LinkedIn growth strategy to encourage employee advocacy within your team, The Thinking Cap can help.
Do you need help with content ideas and how to formulate a social media content calendar? Our content creation workshops would be perfect for you.
Are you just getting started on LinkedIn yourself? Do you want to learn how to maximise your own LinkedIn profile before educating employees? The interactive LINGO course gets you ready to smash LinkedIn within a week or our bespoke LinkedIn training can nail your strategy.
Start encouraging an employee advocacy mindset now to fly through 2023.
I hope you enjoyed reading this blog post.
If you’d like further help, let’s jump on a call and have a chat.
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