5 Ways to Increase Employee Engagement on LinkedIn
As a B2B brand, it’s harder to get engagement on social media than it is for your B2C counterparts. Professional services and parts manufacturers, for instance, can’t compete with a cute seal-shaped water bottle or a stack of scrumptious cookies in a media landscape where users have limited time and attention spans.
The good news, however, is that there’s a specific audience over which you have considerable control who’s always willing to engage your content—as long as you have a strategy: your employees.
LinkedIn Engagement You Can Count On
Few people will have deeper loyalty to your brand than the people behind the scenes. It’s important to create content intended for your clients and partners, but for the purposes of driving engagement, you may also consider strategies intended for your employees, too.
As an award-winning marketing agency with nearly two decades of experience in partnering with B2B businesses, we’ve compiled our insights on how to leverage team members in your social media engagement strategy. Here are our top five tips:
1. Encourage adding the company to profiles
People use LinkedIn in a variety of ways. One common tactic that users employ to validate a business, discover a point of contact, build a relationship, etc., is to search the brand’s team. On a company page, you can click the People tab to view its employees. You can even see a breakdown by where they live, where they studied and what they do at the company.
How is this useful to you as a brand seeking content engagement? Well, even though LinkedIn does not prioritize your employer’s content in your feed in any way, it does prioritize highly engaging content within your network. So, once you start to build more engagement within your brand’s team in-group, it’s more likely your content will show up to your employees organically. That’s why it’s important to encourage everyone to add the brand as a current employer in advance.
2. Make it easier to like, comment and repost
Whether or not you think there’s much to like about LinkedIn, there’s undoubtedly a lot to like on LinkedIn. According to marketing guru Neil Patel, there are about two million posts on LinkedIn daily—and that doesn’t even include all of the messages sent, ads launched, etc.
Even if your team members want to engage with the content more, it can be hard to cut through the noise. You have to make it easier to engage. One way to accomplish this is within the content itself; put the most compelling message or shareable statistic in the first few lines of the post. Or, make it directly or indirectly clear what sort of action you want users to take (i.e., “Share which X you’d like to Y” for comments, or, “Celebrate this achievement with us!” for a celebrate reaction.) Another way to accomplish this is to include select posts on which you want engagement most in your company newsletter or digital meeting.
3. Tag team members in content
Give credit (and visibility) where it is due. Be sure to tag team members in posts where it is appropriate. Publishing a blog post? Mention the author and tag them. Sharing a recent team meeting? Tag the right people in the photo.
Not only does a company benefit from the increase in engagement, but also your employees benefit from having work-relevant content to populate their own profiles. This is the sort of virality that all companies crave—and is usually reserved for B2C brands. From a values standpoint, it’s important to ensure transparency, too. It’s a good practice to give credit to authors when you share written content and let people know when they’re being shown or mentioned online.
4. Use the “notify employees” feature
Your team can’t engage with content they don’t see. LinkedIn’s “notify employees” feature is the solution to this very valid issue with post visibility. Click on the three dots in the upper right corner of a post and select "notify employees" from the dropdown menu. This sends a notification to everyone who lists your company as a current employer.
This is undoubtedly the best way to encourage employee engagement—and why it’s critical that team members include your company on their profile, as outlined in tip #1. Since it’s not (yet) possible to target specific people or departments, you’ll only be able to notify everyone, so we recommend setting guidelines for when to boost which content. Generally speaking, we suggest only using “notify employees” for major announcements or content about the team.
5. Represent teams and roles in content
Users are more likely to engage with content when they can see themselves in the imagery or messaging. Relatability is key. So, when you want your team to engage with your content, you need to ensure they can connect to it.
In your social content calendar, be sure to consider how the content will appeal to your team members—all of them. No one wants to engage with an entity that feels exclusionary. Include your office to represent the facilities team, your virtual events to reflect your off-site support, your product warehouse to show your logisticians, etc.
An Engaging B2B Marketing Agency
With each of these tips, you’ll need to track their success and correct course when necessary. If your posts about admins never receive engagement, then the data says you don’t need to focus on that team. If your employees have reasons for not adding the company to their profile, then don’t push it. LinkedIn engagement, as with any marketing strategy, should flex to meet the needs and opportunities of each brand.
Growing social engagement can seem like a simple task, but it requires tons of planning and management. It takes a lot of time, as well, which is something most B2B brands have in short supply.
Contact our content experts and social media mavens to partner with our agency to grow your LinkedIn engagement.
Cody H. Owens,
Content Director
We have a lot more to say about social media management and strategy. If you're still hungry for insights, check out these other posts on the EMB blog.
