Is Your Company Destined To Succeed on LinkedIn? It's Up To Your Leadership

No less than Every Single Time - that's how often the topic appears when I talk with my customers about the success of their corporate communication on LinkedIn: How can we engage our employees ? It usually continues with some explanation of the understandable fear of a competitor stealing the most active employees, but… let’s leave it for another article.

Employee engagement is the best place to start for a number of reasons when the end goal is more customers and higher acquisition rates on LinkedIn. Engaged employees mean better reach of the corporate messages, better success of the content, faster growth of the page follower count.

And you have a number of tools to achieve it:

• The My Company Tab is the place where page admins can upload (“recommend”) content for employees in order to inspire them to create their own updadtes;
• More employee-generated content on the Company Page that may motivate others to start creating too;
• Regular messages on the internal communication channels that would underline the importance of employee activity on LinkedIn for the company;
• Some more tactics that you can easily brainstorm.

The point here is that no marketer knows the customer like the salesperson who is in constant contact with the buyers, no page can reach the audience that all active employees' profiles can, no PR person can write the story that an engaged employee can tell.

We know where the start line is, now it is time to share the bad news:

None of these will work the way you want without the key ingredient - the active participation of the corporate leadership.

Social media - even LinkedIn - is considered ‘personal space’ and for most people filling it with corporate content is a no go. So they’d need some good example in order to act the way you want. They’d need someone to follow in their own LinkedIn journey - which are ‘our messages’, ‘our topics’. I am a fan of the ‘lead by example’ approach and I’ve seen dozens of times how an active CEO can make some waves and inspire employees to start creating content. And if some of the board members and VPs are also in the all-star LinkedIn team, even better results can be achieved.

And since these people are usually super busy - board meetings, sales pitches, interviews, etc., here are a few things you can do to ignite the fire (we’ve tested them, so we know they work):

• Explain your LinkedIn strategy to the leadership team and even provide some educational courses. I have lead a number of those and one 1-1.5-hour training session is just enough to get you started (send me a DM if you want to learn more about the format);
• Prepare a couple of possible updates each week and suggest them to the CEO in order to publish at least one of them. Don’t forget to keep employees and corporate achievements as key topics, but still rely on the storytelling as a way to maintain the human touch.
• Continue with monthly ‘reminders’ for the most successful non-page updates from the corporate LinkedIn ecosystem and spread them within the internal channels with active calls for participation to all employees.

You should never forget that LinkedIn stands for ‘a long game’. It may take months of nurturing to reach the tipping point where employees won’t need nudging but the effect will definitely be visible. You just need the leadership to do their job and… lead.

Do you have an employee engagement story you’d like to share? I’d be happy to read it at [email protected]!