How small businesses can increase impressions on LinkedIn posts
If you are posting away on your LinkedIn company page but not getting many impressions, you may be wondering what you are doing wrong. LinkedIn is often talked about as an underrated platform with its potential not being fully recognised or utilised. For small businesses, LinkedIn can be a gold mine for potential customers and new relationships – especially if you are in the B2B space. B2B buyers are on LinkedIn – you just need to get to them.
In reality it’s about checking in with LinkedIn’s algorithm and understanding that really, they want to keep you on the platform and keep people using the platform for its purpose – information sharing. There are a few ways for small businesses to increase impressions on posts and here we will discuss some strategies:
1 – Mine your content and publish image-only, no-link posts
This is top of the list of things to try to increase reach and impressions on LinkedIn. LinkedIn like text only posts because they keep you on the platform, without the distraction of a link to follow. The great thing about these posts is there are unlimited content options. As long as you can add value and interest to your followers, any piece of previously published content can be mined for social posts. You can extract tips or advice from blog posts, lead magnets, web pages and more. If you also want to share a link to a resource add it to the post comments and direct people to check out the comments for the link to learn more. This is a powerful way to share knowledge and relevant information to engage followers, without taking them off the platform itself. Of course you do want social media to drive some traffic to your website – so a balance is key to hit both strategies. Publish some posts with links, and some without – and don’t forget to analyse your data afterwards so you can see trends over time and how both approaches are working for your business.
2 – Use your employees to expand reach and exposure
If you aren’t already using employee-generated content on LinkedIn, now is the time to start – even if you only have a few employees. Employee-generated content outperforms branded content in terms of engagement, followers, and conversions. Encouraging your people to share your LinkedIn posts with their own networks will increase impressions and expose your company page to potential new followers. What you’re doing is familiarising your brand with more LinkedIn users – this falls into the first stage of the sales funnel/buying cycle – creating awareness, or improving reach if you are looking at it from a marketing point of view.
Asking employees to share branded content is the key to getting them to actually take action. Employees will avoid stepping on toes if they are not given permission to create company content and so leadership need to lead at the front, by showing them how it’s done. Even just sharing the post, with a small comment such as “A great blog from XXX for those small business owners out there” or “Our products really do hit the mark with our HR customers”, will help hugely to improve impression rate. It also helps your people to learn more about your business, get involved in your marketing, live your company values and feel like they can make a difference.
Try these two approaches for the next 30 days and then measure the results to see if it’s made a difference. Look at your posts and analyse the impressions, reach and engagement levels. Do more of what is working! People don’t go to LinkedIn to look for recipes, see photos of people’s kids, or be inspired by a foodie picture. They’re on LinkedIn wearing their professional hat – and that is the best time for B2B small businesses to engage them.
How can I help?
If you would like to improve your LinkedIn activity, get started or be coached on how to use it to your full advantage as a small business, do book a consultation with me to chat through the options!
