LinkedIn Strategy For Organisations

Especially over the last 12 months, I’ve been working with more teams and not just the executives as a collective because a trend that I’m seeing is that leaders realise the importance and value of turning their employees into brand ambassadors and elevate the company brand through personal brands. And I love it!

Now whilst a lot of work is focused on internal actions like being visible to relevant stakeholders, developing a career progression strategy aligned with their personal brand and being more influential with or without the title, the most recent engagements have been focused also on their external branding, in particular their LinkedIn profiles.  

And guess what?

A common concern came up which isn’t a one off - it is a worry pretty much every company addresses with me: that their staff's LinkedIn profiles were attracting recruiters and their talents are getting poached left, right and center.

First things first- It's a very common challenge that many businesses face but doesn’t have to be when done right. Most writers are focused on the individual and highlighting their particular strengths and that's excellent when the goal is changing careers, setting up or aiming to grow a (mainly service-based) business. However, when it is to achieve a company wide objective, what we need to realise is everyone’s contribution to this objective, the role they’re playing to get their and their particular audience. It’s not an isolated exercise where everyone just shares their individual career highlights. It comes down to having a clear and uniting strategy as a company.

There are to keep it simple - 3 distinct levels to your organisation's LinkedIn strategy:

Level 1: External-Facing Force -

Your sales and business development champs.

They're the ones who connect your products and services with the customer. Think business-to-business as well as individual sales professionals whose role is to get new customers on board and would be the one who're attending client meetings, pitches and delivering presentations.

Their main audience are - you guessed it - decision makers in company’s your organisation is targeting and they want to see everything but statements like ‘exceeded sales targets in 2023 by xx%’ and therelike. Noone wants to be part of another trophy or become a statistic so we need to focus on the experience those people would have, what makes your sales and BD force different to work with and also - what makes this particular person unique? This is where hobbies can come in but also personal stories and achievements like climbing Mt Everest or selling lemonade from the age of 8 years etc. This is where you can be intentional with the story you choose that supports the individual’s position in the organisation 

Level 2: People Leaders, Managers and the Executive Powerhouse -

Whilst the main audience for your external facing team is future clients and customers, the role that people leaders and managers play on LinkedIn is to not only be a brand ambassador for the products or services the company offers but also to attract and recruit the best talents.

Especially the younger generations of talents are looking to work for leaders who they can learn from who they look up to and who they aspire to be and be associated with. In terms of content - it should be a mix between educational content for the products/services but also a ‘behind the scenes’ - how meetings are conducted at the organisation, how values are lived as a team, how individuals are getting rewarded and recognised for their contribution etc. People at this level are also responsible to create and nurture industry partnerships and adding credibility to the organisation as decision-makers still check who’s ultimately responsible. 

In the end, we simply want to translate the role we play in our day-to-day online because as a leader and manager, your role is to get the best out of people and by focusing on the individuals, may it be through internal recognitions, promotions, pay rises and there likes, we want to do the same online. Having said that- there is a function on LinkedIn which I don’t recommend - not only because I absolutely hate it but also because I’ve never seen anyone nailing it or getting much traction.

It’s the ‘recognise co-worker’ sticker which is so generic and couldn’t be further away from a personalised recognition. It may be just me and you’ve had a different experience. In this case, send me a DM and let me know what and why it worked because I always love to be proven wrong.

Level 3: The CEO-

A CEO’s profile is incredibly important and has multiple functions: From adding credibility to potential customers and clients to attracting the best talents to contributing insights to the wider industry as well as sharing the company’s vision (which in return attracts potential customers, clients and talents) rather than just sharing current projects and updates, being the one who introduces new projects which also helps to build goodwill with an audience when you take them on the journey, explain the rationale behind the decisions and the impact it will have or not have.

It’s basically risk mitigation and crisis management before it happens and I work with a lot of emerging and advanced tech leaders especially in the AI, crypto and NFT space who are or will be facing push back for one or many reasons.

This brings me to the last point - content and communications strategy.

Optimsing your LinkedIn profile is one thing but driving traffic to it through content to increase your reach is another. However, reach isn’t everything. But relevance is and this is where cut through content comes in.

If your posts starts with ‘really excited to be here at conference xx’ - or ‘great opportunity to join the team’ - stop right there. These bland posts haven’t worked since the early 2000’s so don’t waste your time and energy on them.

Add some flair and flavour by explaining the backstory, sharing a behind the scenes photo of the team, celebrating your teams or clients’ success and/or summarise learnings from attending a conference. This is what people are interested in - not the information but the wisdom aka: how can you do the thinking for others and make it relevant to them which brings me full circle- we need to know who we’re ideally wanting to get in front of and ‘talk to’ (also virtually) because your profile and then your content is an easy decision and execution from there.

Some of the CEO’s who are doing a fab job are Vishen Lakhiani (founder and CEO of Mindvalley), Alex and leila Hormozi (both founders and CEO/ COO of acquisition.com) going all in building their brand, Gary Vee of course has been doing for a long time and won’t stop anytime soon either

So here you have it - if your LinkedIn profile doesn’t work for you when the objective is to leverage the team as brand ambassadors to build and grow the company and does the heavy lifting for your role, the reasons are either a) being too focused on individual’s achievements b) lack an alignment with the strategy or c) not creating engaging and captivating content.

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