PR should ideally be a part of all businesses from the start (sometimes even before). It helps to keep businesses honest (IMHO) in that “if it is out there, you have to live up to it”. And PR is not just about press and media relations or press releases. Sometimes you are excited about a move or a change you are making as a business that needs to be shared but not good enough to create a story or a release around it.
With the increasing importance of social media in our communications strategies, social media is quite often overlooked as a part of this strategy, particularly, LinkedIn.
LinkedIn is not just for the job seeker or the recruiter anymore. Businesses in the B2B space use it for outreach and lead generation. For us, as a communications agency, it is a resource for information. While Google may still be (for most) a resource to get information about a company, increasingly especially for media and for the startup ecosystem, it is LinkedIn. This is a resource to find out who works there, what the company is doing, who owns it and what they (the owners and the business) stand for.
So do you have a LinkedIn profile for you or the business you own/run?
Here are our tips on getting the most out of LinkedIn and what you need to post from a communications point of view.
Profile
Having a business profile separate from your personal one is crucial. While you should link one to the other, more often than not, the person researching you is looking at your company page to see its activities, perhaps the team (depending on the size of the business), and ultimately other resources etc. like the link to your website or social media or blogs for expertise and your personal page to see your role, what you do, what you are interested in, what you stand for.
LinkedIn has very easy to use guidelines on setting up a page with a lot of prompts etc. So it is idiot-proof – so anyone with very little knowledge can set up a simple page. On your personal page, link your position and company in your profile to your company page. That will make it easier for people to discover you and your company
Posts
On your company page, here are some ideas for posting (even for those for whom LinkedIn is not the primary social media platform for business).
- Share milestones / successes / introduction of new products or services
- New team members
- Client testimonials (especially if you are B2B)
- New projects and tag all the partners and team members that are part of the project
- Industry-relevant stories / research that might be of interest to your business ecosystem
On the personal front, do feel free to reshare to your personal page to ensure as a business owner you are linked to your business(es). But don’t just share, add your personal thoughts on the announcement or the post, tag someone that you think it would resonate with. People do business with people.
Frequency
How often you should post depends on your business. If B2B is your focus or you are fundraising etc, perhaps a weekly post otherwise once a month is good enough. Maybe create a “newsletter” version of key highlights over the month and share. Whatever the frequency you decide on, stay consistent.
Map out a strategy on posts and stay with it. It will help to manage your content, your time and resources. If you need help, you could always reach out to us.
