What Marketers Get Wrong About LinkedIn

If you’re starting your content marketing strategy and have identified LinkedIn as your main platform, it can be tempting to skip the groundwork and just start posting. But the ✨incredible✨ workplace memes that you’ve carefully curated will have to wait because, first, you need to make sure that you’re doing your social media right.

You only get one chance to make a first impression—and that applies to LinkedIn, too. If you go about marketing the wrong way, you’ll end up turning people off from your brand and losing momentum. Study up on these common mistakes marketers make on LinkedIn and avoid becoming another corporate social media horror story.

Lack of Personalized Connection Invites and Follow-ups

If you’re using your personal social media page alongside your company page to grow your business, don’t spam people. Craft a personal message for each person you ask to connect with. If you looked into their business and think your software can simplify their workday, write two or three sentences that are meant just for them.

If someone doesn’t respond right away, follow up. We’re all human, and people forget to reply on LinkedIn all the time. Give them a week or two, then send a polite but gentle reminder of your goal for connecting and how you can help them.

Inconsistent Posting

If you only post on LinkedIn once a month, you’re not going to get anywhere. You need to post content regularly. Posting five times in one day isn’t the goal either, but you should be posting at least once a week. People don’t make buying decisions based on one piece of content, so bumping yourself and your business to the top of their feed can sway their decision.

Additionally, you need to post when your target audience is online. With 2 million other posts to compete with every day, your content can easily get lost. With software that uses AI to post on your behalf when your audience is on, you can make sure your content gets in front of the right people.

Trying to Appeal to Everyone

It’s easy to get caught up in a numbers game and try to secure as many followers as you can, as quickly as you can. But this won’t help your brand in the long run, and you’ll end up spending money marketing to the wrong audience.

Instead, hone in on your ideal audience, AKA the decision-makers or people who will actually choose to buy your product. Take the time to create buyer personas so that you create content that helps you get the most out of your LinkedIn marketing dollars.

Your Content Doesn’t Solve Problems

Ultimately, your service or product should solve problems for consumers (B2C) or businesses (B2B). Your content should provide insight into how your service or product helps people. If you’re only making funny memes (which can be helpful to get people’s attention from time to time) or trying to use clickbait to get people interested, no one on LinkedIn will look at it.

Users of LinkedIn are professionals who want to learn something—your content needs to be informative. Explainer videos and product demos do well on LinkedIn because they teach your audience something new and show them how your product or service solves their problems at the same time.

You Only Self-promote

If you’re only posting about how great your company is and promoting your content, it can make LinkedIn users see your posts as spam and they won’t engage. They might even unfollow your company profile. Remember, you’re here to help people learn, and showing how your company solves their problems is the value added.

So, stick to the 80-20 rule: 80% of your posts and content should be for your audience’s benefit. This could be a helpful article or instructive video from a third-party source. The other 20% can be about your brand or services. This content ratio helps people trust you, so they are more receptive to your content that feels more salesy.

Not Using Employee Personal Pages

If you aren’t asking your employees to post company content on their personal LinkedIn pages, you’re missing out on an opportunity. As a marketing tactic, employee advocacy boosts engagement and deepens brand trust. Potential customers are more likely to trust a product or business shared online by a friend or family member rather than a company.

You can use software that makes this easy for your employees. Features like one-click email sharing lets employees share pre-approved social content to their personal pages with a single click.

Tracking the Wrong Metrics

You can track tons of different metrics on LinkedIn, including visitors, post impressions, and followers. But these basic metrics don’t tell you exactly what you need to do to create actionable goals to boost your followers. If you just follow post impressions, you might burn people out with posts that make people laugh but don’t teach anything about your product.

Instead, use software that offers robust analytics about the impact of your posts. Easy-to-understand analytics show you exactly why certain content works best for you, so you can try out different types of posts that appeal to the right audience.

Market on LinkedIn the Right Way With Clearview Social

Building your LinkedIn audience can be easy as pie with Clearview Social’s employee advocacy software. We take the guesswork out of your social media strategy so that you can focus on creating helpful content that attracts people to your company.

When you choose Clearview Social, you get helpful features like:

  • One-click email sharing so employees can share pre-approved content to their personal social media pages straight out of their inbox
  • Article queue builders to help you plan out a string of articles related to your business
  • PeakTime AI that posts content for you at the time your audience is online
  • Robust analytics to show you which content works best for your brand

 

To see why our clients say Clearview Social “literally couldn’t make social media any easier,” click to book a demo ⬇️⬇️⬇️