How do you use LinkedIn update?

Grant Leboff: Danny, on LinkedIn there are an awful lot of really good tools, some of which people know about, some of which they don’t. I just want to talk about how some of those are used. One of them is ‘updates’. How would you recommend that a business should use updates in a proper and productive way?

Danny Bermant: To use updates in a productive way, means using them in a targeted way, and if you really want to get the most out of it, you need to think about combining those with LinkedIn ads. So if you are a law firm, it’s looking to speak to new business start-ups, business owners. You can create what’s called a sponsored ad on LinkedIn so that a business that is, let’s just say based in central London, employing 1 to 10 people, specialising in, let’s say health care, and what we do on LinkedIn is get the exact profile of person we want to talk to, and those updates will appear in their home screen.

So, again, it’s really looking at not just putting out updates it’s actually about making sure you target them. And when you start off your LinkedIn company page, you’ll typically have a small number of followers. People won’t necessarily find your company page that easily because typically people on LinkedIn look at each other’s profiles. They don’t always look at the company that that person is linked to. So it’s using those to reach out to people. In terms of your LinkedIn profile there is something new out on LinkedIn which is called ‘posts’ and that’s where you can actually publish blog articles on your profile. That’s extremely powerful because all your connections will get notified.

There’s a sort of flag system on your LinkedIn profile that tells you when members of your network have published articles. And that’s really a powerful way to expand your audience’s understanding of how your business functions. So it’s really making use of that as a way of widening the knowledge of your audience. People might go to your website and occasionally visit your blog, but people go on to LinkedIn every day, so if you publish your blog on there, you are going to get, in many ways, a lot more exposure.

Grant Leboff: And in terms of ads, one of the things that I was found interesting about advertising online at all, is that the most powerful thing today is context. It’s getting things contextually correct. How, on LinkedIn, would someone make sure that their ads are a bit more contextually correct when they are seen? Are there any techniques that you could advise people to do when they’re looking at LinkedIn advertising?

Danny Bermant: In terms of ‘contextually correct’, I presume you’re talking about relevance to what’s going on? So, for example, if it’s the budget – and you’re an accountancy firm – putting out updates that speak to your audience. I think, in order to get updates that are contextually correct, you need to think about researching your audience and what their ‘pain points’ are. A lot of businesses that go on to social media are very me, me, me, orientated. They spend a lot of time talking about themselves. I’ve got bad news for businesses, which is – they’re not interested in you. They are only interested in themselves.

In terms of being contextual, you need to be speaking about things that concern them and things that really matter to them. That might mean just carrying out some research, by sending out a survey or survey monkey asking your audience to list the 10 issues that really matter to them the most. It could be, doing a little bit of anecdotal telephone research, or your sales rips meeting with clients and finding out what are the issues that matter to them. But I think that needs to be addressed in your updates, if you do that, you will see a much higher degree of shares, likes, comments, and overall engagement.

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