Becoming #1 most socially engaged on LinkedIn – here’s how we did it

Last week, Digital Gurus was crowned the #1 most socially engaged staffing firm on LinkedIn (EMEA region). LinkedIn analysed 60,000 businesses, 627,000 consultants and 450 million members and measured their social reach, employee engagement & interactions, employer brand & content marketing power. To win the medium enterprise category is huge for us and I am obviously chuffed to bits.

So, how did we achieve this? Well, here’s what I think were the four most important factors:

Build trust with your sales team

If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my 8 years in marketing, it’s that earning the trust of your sales team is the single most important part of your job. Why? Well, other than having generally great working relationships - they’re also critical to the production and delivery of great content.

Earning the trust of your sales team is the single most important part of your job.

Most recruiters have huge social networks of their own and as a recruitment marketer, if you don’t have these guys supporting your campaigns, you are immediately losing a huge, relevant audience. What’s worse, you are also bypassing valuable insight about the markets you operate in.

The truth is you will never convince every recruiter in your business that your sexy new marketing idea is going to yield results, but find a few people in the business that really get on board with what you do (your marketing cheerleaders, if you will) and use the work you do with them as an example to everyone else. Slowly but surely, I guarantee you’ll have more people on side and be able to produce and deliver great content much more successfully.

People to people

Whether you’re a kooky, down-with-the-kids East London agency, or a super corporate financial services staffing firm, don’t forget that every online interaction happens between two humans (or multiple humans in some cases). We are not robots – we are emotional & complex beings.

Produce your content for humans: encourage discussions, be provocative, relish in emotional reactions and don’t forget to listen. Think of your activity on social media platforms as a telephone conversation, not a loudspeaker.

Think of your activity on social media platforms as a telephone conversation, not a loudspeaker.

Disrupt

My experience before starting my role at Digital Gurus was very much focused on visual platforms, such as YouTube, Snapchat and Instagram. Of course, this is a professional network and I had to be careful to maintain that theme, but after scrolling through my LinkedIn newsfeed, I saw a massive opportunity for content disruption.

We aren’t the first agency to use video, and we won’t be the last, but I firmly believe this has been one of the most important additions to Digital Gurus’ content strategy this year.

We aren’t the first agency to use video, and we won’t be the last, but I firmly believe this has been one of the most important additions to Digital Gurus’ content strategy this year

We don’t have high production values or epic storyboards, but so far this year we’ve produced nearly 80 videos and across all our social networks, we’ve had nearly 20,000 views. That’s 20,000 more times than most that our recruiters have been able to put across their personality, passion and expertise to prospective candidates/clients. It’s very difficult to achieve this from other content types.

Be consistently consistent

This is about building trust and credibility with your audience. A few things to think about here:

Tone of voice. If your social media voice is tongue-in-cheek but your company website is corporate and plain, you're sending mixed signals.

Strong visual identity. Look at your social media posts – is there anything other than your logo that makes it obvious that this piece of content has come from your brand? If the answer is no, take a good look at your fonts, colours, copy style and choice of imagery.

Continuous content themes. Your content strategy shouldn’t be too rigid, but it’s a good idea to have some ongoing post themes. For example, upload a blog every Wednesday at the same time - an audience that knows when to expect your content will be more likely to see it.

Like many things, when it comes to content strategy, the learning never ends. For myself and for Digital Gurus, the real challenge starts now – how are we going to keep our #1 spot? I hope I’ll be able to let you know in October 2017...