Linkedin > The 15 Mistakes You’re Making Right Now

Jade Rattan 7 years ago

With over 350 million users, it’s no wonder businesses across the globe are noticing the effect LinkedIn can have, and jumping in head first. It’s fast becoming one of the biggest professional social networks around, but why are so many businesses doing it all wrong?

LinkedIn can be a great tool within your wider marketing strategy, if done correctly! There are so many ways to advertise, and get noticed, but there are also a lot of stumbling blocks along the way, and mistakes that can easily be made.

In this post we’ll be talking about the top 15 mistakes businesses make, and a solution to each.

A successful campaign is broken down into three main sections:

• Establishing Your Brand Presence
• Connecting With Your Audience
• Creating Engaging Content

Establish

Being one of the largest professional social networks, not having a brand presence on Linkedin can be very damaging to your business, and brand. You could also be missing out on potential opportunities as no one knows that you’re there.

1.  Not Having A Complete Company Page

Incomplete company profiles have on average around 40% less interaction. It doesn’t take long to get your profile up to date, so make sure you do it. Not having a complete profile shows you to be unprofessional and more importantly not a leader within your field. Why should someone trust to work with you if you can’t take the time to complete your basic information?

Solution: Ensure that your profile is as up to date as it can be. Take inspiration for your competitors and see how they market themselves. If you’re not sure on what you need to include, there’s a checklist here, for you to use.

2. Not Knowing Your Target Audience

Targeting the wrong audience can often be worse than having no presence at all, as if you’re not targeting the right audience, you won’t be seeing the results! As a business you should know exactly who is buying your product. Not only to help market yourself in the correct way, but by seeing what other opportunities are out there for you by what your audience are doing and buying.

Solution: Get to know your audience. It’s as simple as that. Carry out some research into who is buying from you. You can start by getting to know your current customers; you can also look at who are working with your competitors. This will help you begin to build up your personas.

What do they like, dislike, what other products and services to they use? Who do they follow? What are they really interested in? Try and build up in depth personas. In the long run, this will help you in many other ways than just marketing. It’ll enable you to define the way you sell and approach people; it’ll show you where your customers actually are and the different ways to cater your business to them.

3. Hiding Your Page

When a page isn’t optimized correctly it can be seen as ‘hidden’. This means that your audience can’t find you. If your page isn’t optimised for the correct audience, links on your page aren’t working, or there’s no detail on your page, this can result is people loosing trust within your business.

Solution: Ensure that you’re linking to all relevant pages, i.e. social platforms and company website(s). Add company specialities and values to give your page a bit of personality and let your audience get to know your brand. Adding detail will give your page more credibility, and build trust within your brand. Your company page will rank high in Google so it will be seen, so make sure it’s good!

Connect

Connecting with your customers is a great way to build your brand. It helps spread awareness for your business, and shows thought leadership in your field. Existing and potential customers are more likely to take notice of you, and trust in your brand once you have our own community.

4. Not Using Groups Or Not Using The Right Ones

Groups are a great way to connect with your customers, potential leads, and begin to influence. Not being a part of this means you cannot further your business through making new connections and more importantly, network with others interested in what you do.

Solution: Make sure you join groups with other professionals within your industry to share ideas, and build relationships. Groups also enable you to look at where you customers are, and join groups that they are part of. Here, you can share your thoughts as ‘the expert’ or ‘professional’ and help build up your personal and business brand. It allows you to connect with individuals you may never have come across, on a common ground. You can also create your own groups, and filter within them. This will allow you to better target your potential customers with ease.

5. Not Making Use Of Sponsored Updates

Not using sponsored updates means that you’re not reaching out to as many people as you could be, and missing out on potential leads. Sponsored updates are only available to company pages, and they allow you to reach out to more people. They appear on the newsfeed of the targeted audience, and enable you to share your content directly with them, by using a mix of precise targeting, and native advertising.

Solution: In simple terms – use them! They help your content get in front of the right, and different people that aren’t in your ‘usual circle’. It allows you to share your content with people other than just your following as it looks at who you want to see your content, and targets them. They’re easy to use, and the ad looks natural on the newsfeed as its content they will be interested in, and will expect to see anyway. You can learn more about how sponsored updates work, and how to use them here.

6. Or Ads!

Arguably ads aren’t as successful or eye catching as sponsored updates can be, but are defiantly worth looking into, and using within your wider marketing plan. Ads are displayed at the right hand side of the page, and similar to sponsored updates will be targeted to the niche you want. Ads are a small but can be successful way of marketing your brand. Not making use of them means you’re not making potential connections aware that you exist!

Solution: When creating the ad, make sure it’s clear, simple and shows what it is that you’re offering. Make sure that it links to the right place, and does what it says. LinkedIn ads are great for a wide spread campaign, but not recommended for a small campaign with a limited budget.

7. Not Making Use Of Showcase Page

Showcase pages are great for highlighting your content to the right people. They’re an extension of your company page, and are there to ‘show’ or spotlight your brand, business, etc. You can create multiple pages for the different areas within your business. By not using these you’re not allowing yourself to build up your brand, and network in a different, more specialised way.

Solution: Try to make use of showcase pages. They allow you to target users of Creative Cloud & Marketing Cloud, and let you target different audiences within the different areas of your business. Allowing you to interact with potential customers based on their different product interest, which will ultimately open you up to new opportunities, and expand your network. You can share company updates and sponsored updates just as you can with your company page, however these are aimed at building relationships and are more social. To find out more about how to get started, there’s a great beginner’s guide here.

8. Not Making Use Of Your Own ‘Brand Army’

Your employees represent your brand and are ultimately what make up your business. Not having them on LinkedIn can be detrimental for themselves and your brand as they could be writing, sharing, and networking. It can lower the visibility of your brand, as if your own employees don’t like and share your updates, then how will other see them?

Solution: Studies show that 9 out of the top 10 brands with the most LinkedIn followers have at least 60% of their employees online, so try to encourage your employees to create a profile, grow their networks, share the businesses content, and interact with people as much as possible. LinkedIn allows any one individual to share their knowledge and innovation to the wider industry through the content they, and your business produce, to people they network with. Your employees are your businesses own brand ambassadors, who should be celebrated and praised for the work they do, so make sure they share it!

9. Not Adding ‘Easy Links’

Not adding all the relevant links is such a simple yet easy thing to forget. When someone lands on your page and they cannot access the thing that they want, for example your website, some people will try and search to find you, however others will loose interest very quickly as it seems as though you have been ‘slack’ and not interested in properly completing your profile.

Solution: Ensure you add all external links to your business/brand on your company page. This includes:

• All marketing channels, ie. - email, newsletter, blog, etc
• Follow buttons to your site
• All relevant social channels

Try and make it as easy and simple to find you. Research indicates that 50% of people are more likely to buy and work with you if they can interact with you on LinkedIn, so don’t stand in their way.

Engage

Now that you’ve mastered establishing your brand, and making sure the right people are seeing it, you need to make sure that your content is as high-quality and engaging as possible. Creating engaging content is a problem faced by so many businesses. The world of content is forever changing, and what worked a year or even 6 months ago might not be so successful now. Ideally you want to make your content go viral, Adam covered this a few months ago in his post here.

10. Not Sharing Your Content Correctly

A lot of businesses will write an article, share it once, and then never share it again. By sharing the content once, only a limited number of people will be able to see it. By not sharing your content on a more regular basis you’re missing out as you’re not spreading awareness of you as a brand as much as you could be, and ultimately engaging with that potential customer.

Solution: Create a plan for sharing your content. Try to work out which posts are time sensitive, and which ones will be relevant for a few weeks or even months. This will help you determine what content to share and when. With LinkedIn, content really is key, it’s not just enough to create the amazing content, you need to make sure people will see it, too.

11. Not Using The Right Media

Many businesses can be ‘stuck in their ways’ when it comes to content, and only use one specific type of media. Times have changed, and content is king! Ensuring that your content is right for your audience is now more important then ever.

Solution: You first need to try and establish the right media platform(s) for your content. See what your competitors are doing, and check out your customer personas to try and discover what media they’re interested in already. Researching into your audience will give you the best chance of finding the right media for you.

The below chart shows you what different types of media can achieve; once you know what you’re trying to achieve with your content, it can be a lot simpler to try and implement it using different types of media.

(What you want to do > the right media to do it)

12. Not Making Diverse Content

Often businesses will stick with one method that worked for them at one time, and not try any others, which can loose you potential leads, and not show you as a thought leader. Sticking to one kind of content can be seen as a little dull, and uninteresting. Why would someone want to work with you if you’re not creative and imaginative with your own content, let alone to help them as a client?

Solution: Try and look at what others are doing, and what is working for them. Take another look at your customer personas and see what kind of content each of them like to read, and try to ensure that you are covering a little something for everyone in each area of your business. The ultimate aim with creating amazing diverse content is to be creative, and always remember that content is not ‘one size fits all’ and it must be diverse to engage with your whole audience.

13. Making Your Statuses Too Long

The rule ‘quality over quantity’ really fits in well with this common problem. Sometimes it’s not about the amount of detail you write, but the context that you say it in. A lot of businesses have written detailed lengthy statuses which on average do not work. People want information fast, and in the age where we can find out anything that we ever wanted to know in a matter of seconds, long and detailed information that could be broken down a lot smaller parts is not the way to go.

Solution: Ensure that your status is short, sweet and to the point. 60% of users have said that they are interested in industry insights – there are people out there who want to read your status, so make sure it appeals to them! Studies show that when you share a status you are 10 times more likely to get noticed, so make sure you’re getting noticed for the right reasons.

14. Not Asking Questions

Asking questions is one of the biggest ways to directly interact with your network. It shows that you’re interested in what your followers think, and are interested to learn about them. By not doing this you’re creating a barrier, which people can view you to be uninterested, and inactive on LinkedIn.

Solution: It’s as simple as you think - Ask questions, and make sure you reply to the answers! Asking and responding to your followers is great interaction for your brand. By doing this you are directly engaging with your network and potential customers. It will show you as a thought leader, can boost your brand, and help build trust within your business. Never forget that LinkedIn is a social network – interaction is crucial to success.

15. Not Making Use Of Analytics

This is where you can monitor and track engagement, which is potentially one of the best tools that you should be using. By not making use of this tool you won’t be able to see what has worked, and what hasn’t. It’s true that there are other ways to do this yourself and many other tools you can try, but this will analyse a whole range of data as well as data specific to LinkedIn, and show you what has worked well, and what hasn’t.

Solution: Ensure you are making the most out of analytics. It allows you to see:

• What posts are driving engagement
• Your demographic
• Key influencers
• What social channels work for your content

As well as much more..

This is the final result from all the hard work you have put in to try and increase engagement. From here, you’ll be able to find out exactly what has worked and why, which you can then implement to create your new marketing plan.