Rocket Readings: B2B Social Media: How to Boost Engagement on LinkedIn

B2B Social Media: How to Boost Engagement on LinkedIn:

Smart marketers have been recognizing the benefits of LinkedIn for B2B social media strategies for some time now.

According to Mashable, LinkedIn is growing even faster than it was in 2010. We all know that LinkedIn is a fantastic resource for recruiting, but the benefits don’t stop there. Last year on OpenView Labs, we shared 7 benefits including:

Creating and managing your personal brand
Generating feedback
Building thought leadership

In this post I will share some key tips to building your brand’s presence on LinkedIn and boosting engagement with your followers.

Here at OpenView Partners, we have been really focused on improving our overall presence on social medias sites, including LinkedIn. Since Q4 last year, we have specifically focused on growing the size of the group, boosting engagement, and driving traffic back to our sites. Since this time last year, we have grown the group from 300 members to over 1400. To top it off, we have increased our referral traffic from by nearly 300%.

Here are some of the tactics we have implemented in order to grow the group and boost engagement:

Encourage participation across the entire firm. From the start we invited everyone in the firm to the LinkedIn group and we explained the value of the group. We pushed everyone to post comments and start discussions so that it was not just one or two individuals from the marketing team posting the content. If you can follow this same model, I highly encourage you to get at least 5 people on board to help out so that there is a good variety in content and participants.
Spread the news on other effective channels. Do you have a well followed blog? What about a successful newsletter? Think about using your other channels outside of social media to promote your LinkedIn group. Every once and a while we will include a short blurb such as this “Are you connected with us on LinkedIn? Did you know that OpenView Venture Partners is on LinkedIn? Join our group today to connect with your fellow warriors in expansion stage software companies.” Simple and to-the-point. From these messages, we have seen our membership grow by 10-20 followers. (Hint: use this tactic to grow your Facebook page too).
Monitor and manage the group. Once your group gains some traction, you may notice other people “spamming” your page. This may include promoting their products or webinars outright or writing overly promotional comments about their companies. Ensure that one person is assigned to reviewing the discussions and content to ensure that it fits within your overall goal for the group. More people will be willing to participate and post comments to discussions that offer valuable, engaging information rather than just an advertisement for something else. There are two things you can do when you see promotional content: 1) Flag it as a “promotion” and it will get moved out of the discussion tab 2) Delete the post. Over time if you notice that certain members are only posting promotional content, don’t hesitate on banning them from the group. It may make everyone else more comfortable!
Ask questions when posting discussions. As you complete blog posts or other pieces of content, it is a good idea to post the content to your group. And as you read blogs and other content that fits in with your audience, post the content to your group. When you drop the link into the discussion thread, add a short question or comment to your post so you automatically encourage participation.