How much information is right to share on LinkedIn?
At Transition Solutions, we have been helping companies and individuals with workforce changes for 30 years.
With 810 million members, LinkedIn is a powerful resource in your job search efforts. LinkedIn represents your professional brand and sharing information is important to connect with your network and potential opportunities. In addition, LinkedIn is driven by algorithms that tend to increase exposure for those who use the platform regularly to post original content that is engaging. Therefore, knowing how much to share can sometimes be challenging.
CEO Today, recently shared insights summarized below from David Martin, CEO and founder of Be Known Communications on why and how to best share personal content on LinkedIn.
Why would you want to share personal content on LinkedIn?
1 – People buy from people. At its most primitive, LinkedIn is simply a platform for speaking to an audience, engaging with them, and ideally selling to them through the building of a brand profile and trust. The more human you can make yourself the better because if people feel like they know you, they are more likely to feel like they can trust you, which in turn means they are more likely to be open to your messaging and want to do business with you. Let’s face it, unless you are just an egotistical maniac, you are not just posting content so that people look at you, you are doing it to further your business.
2 – Social selling is a softer sell. ‘Social selling’ is the term given to using social media to subtly sell a product or service. Unlike the more traditional approaches to direct marketing and sales, where it is all about in your face ‘sell, sell, sell’, social selling relies much more on hitting multiple touchpoints through non-sales content. If you have wanted to scream at your screen due to the endless stream of cold calls and hard-sell messages you receive in your LinkedIn messages inbox, then you will appreciate that it is an approach that very rarely works. Personal content removes the feeling that your audience is just there to be sold to.
3 – It drives engagement. Thankfully, the days when you got shouted down for posting anything personal on LinkedIn are long gone. The fact that personal posts generally get better engagement than most others shows that as far as most of us are concerned, personal posts do indeed have a place on LinkedIn. This is important because LinkedIn’s algorithms favour posts from people who have engaged connections and whose audience interacts with their content. Good engagement on personal posts, therefore, helps increase the reach of your other work focused posts.
We agree that some personal sharing is good. Martin goes on to share key considerations on HOW best to do it.
- Keep personal posts to a minimum. Personal posts should only make up about one-sixth of your regular content. You still want to be taken seriously and to be thought of as an expert in your field, so pushing knowledge and insight should be your priority.
- Don’t isolate connections. Whereas on social platforms where most of your ‘connections’ are your friends and you are therefore generally talking to like-minded people with similar worldviews, your audience on LinkedIn is going to be more diverse, with a mix of political and cultural differences. It is therefore important to steer away from posts that express extreme political views or that others may find culturally insensitive. Social values are playing an increasingly important role in how people decide who they want to work with and for. The purpose of posting is to make people want to do business with you, so avoid content that makes them feel like you are too different to them or not aligned with their values.
- More than dogs and kids. Personal posts should be more than just pictures of pets and children. In fact, lots of people aren’t comfortable with posting information about their family and home life. That shouldn’t mean avoiding personal posts completely though. Personal posts can be about hobbies, interests, likes and dislikes and they can also be linked back to a work theme if that makes you more comfortable.
Overall, Martin concludes that posting personal content in the right way will help you build your LinkedIn profile and generate potential business leads.
LinkedIn also offers the following advice to get the most out of your posts.
Looking for MORE help developing or improving your LinkedIn profile? Check out our blog on The Top 10 Steps to Stand Out on LinkedIn.
At Transition Solutions, we have been helping companies and individuals with workforce changes for thirty years. Our strong reputation for consistently delivering exceptional service at value sets us apart.
If you would like more information on our services please check out our website at https://www.transitionsolutions.com/ or you can contact us directly at 888-424-0003 or email us at info@transitionsolutions.com.
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