LinkedIn has over 575 million users worldwide with 100 million users actively engaging on the platform every day. In Australia, LinkedIn has over nine million users with approximately 50 per cent active every month. This makes LinkedIn a powerful platform for small-business owners across Australia to reach their target markets locally and/or internationally.
Despite this, many small-business owners are struggling to integrate their LinkedIn presence with their marketing activities to create a reliable avenue for acquiring new business. The reason?
As with any social media platform, engagement on the platform is key and it can be difficult to maintain the daily habits required to generate interest from our target market. So, it’s important we find the most effective ways to use the platform in order to achieve our desired outcomes.
Uploading video content is a key strategy on LinkedIn to gain reach and is a fantastic way to build your personal brand amongst your target audience. As with Facebook and other social media platforms, content that takes users off the platform is low priority content, the platform doesn’t like it, so sharing links to your website or blog post isn’t the best strategy.
Creating content that keeps users on the platform whilst keeping them engaged with your content is key – if you want to share a link with them then add this in the copy or the comments section along with your video. Video content needs to be thumb-stopping – make it eye-catching, relevant and shareable by using headline text and subtitles in your video to help users quickly identify what your post is about.
Now, if you’re thinking “I don’t have time to create and edit a video every day for LinkedIn” the good news is, you don’t need to! Create your content in batches, brainstorm 10-20 of your most frequently asked questions (perhaps you even have a list of these already) and film short 30-90 second videos that provide a top-line answer to these problems. Then set aside half a day to film it all in one go. This way you can get the lighting, sound and visuals right and create a whole heap of high-quality content in one go.
When you’re filming the video start by asking the question or relating it to a real-life story, for example “How do I make time to share a new video every day on LinkedIn? Really excited to share this hack with you all today!…” Or, “Yesterday one of my clients was telling me how they’ve been finding it really hard to carve out time to create a video everyday, and so I shared this little hack we use at The Change Makers to build up our content bank…”
When editing, use a tool-like splice or headliner (a simple google search will bring up loads of useful free and paid editing tools) to create social-media ready videos to share over the next month. And, of course, you can also share these videos on other social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram or Youtube to make your content work harder for your business (and not the other way around!).
Lauren Kress, CEO and Founder, The Change Makers
