Tag: social media tips

General

Getting more from LinkedIn for B2B marketing and comms teams

If you work in B2B marketing and communications, sharing company and client news on LinkedIn is pretty much a given, but there are benefits to branching out and posting your own content.

In the September edition of the B2B Comms Breakdown online event, Ayo Abbas and I discussed how it can help you and your company.

We also talked about how to get started if you are unsure about posting non-company content.

Here’s a summary of the discussion; scroll to the bottom to watch the full video, including audience questions.

How can LinkedIn help marcomms professionals?

Stacey

• Posting as yourself boosts your overall visibility, which is good for you and your company.

• Personal LinkedIn accounts get more attention than company accounts, which can help broaden your network.

• It’s an opportunity to write about and explore a more diverse range of ideas and topics that interest you personally.

• More visibility and talking about different things potentially opens the door to other opportunities, such as speaking engagements.

• You can also try different styles of content for personal development but also as a chance to prove them for company use.

Ayo

• As marketers, you network with a lot of directors, and you see a lot of an organisation and that insight on how we see the world is worth sharing.

• Putting your view out externally helps position yourself internally as it gives you more gravitas.

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It's A B2B Comms Thing

Is social media a waste of time for B2B business?

Anyone involved in comms and marketing will be spending a chunk of time on social media but, with mysterious algorithms to contend with, it can be a frustrating and unpredictable strategy.

Ayo Abbas, Emma Drake and I discussed whether social media is a waste of time for B2B businesses in a LinkedIn live stream

So is it worth the time spent? This is what Ayo Abbas, Emma Drake and I discussed on a LinkedIn Live stream recently, and these are some highlights from that conversation.

If you want to watch the video of the full discussion, including audience questions, scroll to the bottom of the post.

Is social media all it’s cracked up to be?

Emma: I think people don’t often get a lot from it because they’re perhaps not using it well or effectively.

And the algorithm makes no sense, it’s not one thing you can solve. It is continually changing and morphing, and that is a huge challenge.

So anyone who tells you that they understand the algorithm on a social media platform is lying.

I had a post on LinkedIn that had multiple likes and shares, but it got under 300 impressions. I’ve had a post that had two likes and got over 2000. Go figure.

Social media can be really useful, but you need to have a plan.

Me: Yes, you are at the whim of the algorithm. Some platforms are ‘pay to play’, and they’re promoting content that has been paid for.

So you have to go in with your eyes open and realise there’s no silver bullet with social media.

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B2B media

Want people to stop scrolling and click on your B2B content?

Promoting your content on social media can be a great way of increasing engagement with your B2B content but there is an art to writing posts that get people to stop scrolling and click through to your content.

A row of people in suits all looking at their smart phones - picture is a close up of their hands.
Photo by camilo jimenez on Unsplash

Think of LinkedIn or Twitter as like a huge crowd with everyone shouting to be heard. You need to craft a few sentences that stand out and grab attention.

It’s not simply a case telling people you’ve written something and they will click through and read.

Doing this just lets down all the hard work you put into your creating your B2B content.

Look at it this way. If you were selling a book door to door, you wouldn’t simply say: “I have a book, do you want to buy it?”

You’d talk about what was in the book and why it was interesting or useful.

And yet it isn’t unusual to see a social media post that says something like: ‘Our latest report on the office market is out’.

Now context, the business brand or person writing the post might help.

But it may not.

And if you are relying solely on who you are to ‘sell’ your content to potential readers, then you are missing out.

Hint: People may not know who you are or have read anything you’ve written before.

You want to make people stop and pay attention and to do that you need to capture their interest or intrigue about your content, so people want to click through and read it.

Here are some ideas for how you can do that:

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Uncategorised

5 tips for writing LinkedIn content

Graffiti style social media icons - heart, thumbs up and smiley face. Painted in black and white on a silver background
Photo by George Pagan III on Unsplash

Are you on LinkedIn? I’ve been properly using it as a social media platform for work for nearly a year now and I love it.

It’s great for learning new stuff, making new connections…and getting business leads.

And it’s fun.

If you’ve haven’t yet unleashed the power of it as a business networking platform then what are you waiting for?

A few things I’ve learned along the way about LinkedIn content that might help you:

1. LinkedIn likes native posts, that is stuff you’ve written or created yourself rather than shared from within the platform or from other sites.

2. More engagement on your posts means more visibility, so write content that invites people to interact or comment.

3. Don’t just tell people what you’ve been doing or your successes. Imagine going on a date with someone who only talked about themselves, dull eh?

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Uncategorised

How to make ‘interesting’ content more engaging

A male hand holding a lightbulb
Photo by Diego PH on Unsplash

The word ‘interesting’ is overused when posting on platforms like LinkedIn.

Or rather it isn’t used effectively.

You’ve seen the posts:

“Really interesting panel on X last night” [Insert slightly blurry picture of a panel taken from a distance]

Or

“Really interesting article.” [Insert link to an article].

It’s quick. It’s easy. We’ve all done it. I’ve done it.

But what purpose is it serving other than to fill a gap in your feed?

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