JoAnne Funch — February 3, 2020 For those of us who have stuck with LinkedIn as a go-to social media platform, we benefited from the resurgence of the platform throughout 2019.
I expect that LinkedIn will continue to build momentum in 2020. Industry predictions continue to spotlight LinkedIn for business and not just as a career site they so often have been known for, but for brand awareness. A key to business success is having a strong network and LinkedIn dominates as the platform where professionals go specifically to do business.
Focus on Your Professional Brand
When you Google your name, most people’s LinkedIn profile shows up at the top of the search results, so start off the new year with an updated LinkedIn profile that makes that all important first impression. Think of your profile as a resource and note a resume.
Visibility Creates Opportunity
Engagement is the key to results. Your goal should be to post content that people actually engage with. Comments being the best followed by likes and shares. The LinkedIn algorithm favors comments and rewards comments by showing your posts to more people. Video content is dominating followed by text only posts, then text posts and images. The least favored content is any article with a link off the site. LinkedIn wants to keep you on their site as long as possible as do other social platforms, so avoid linking away.
Video Dominates
Social Media Today reported, “LinkedIn users are 20x more likely to share a video on the platform than any other type of post. Combine that with the fact that LinkedIn members spend almost 3x more time watching video ads compared to time spent with static Sponsored Content, and it’s fairly safe to assume that LinkedIn is going to make video a key focus heading into 2020.
Expect LinkedIn to improve its video discovery tools, and put more emphasis on uploaded video content as a means to share your brand story, build thought leadership and connect with your audience.”
Types of Videos
Native video is 5x more likely than other types of content to start a conversation among your connections and network.
In marketing you want to take the prospect on a journey staring who how they will get to know you, then like you and after earning trust, try and buy. Your content should be segmented for each of the steps in the journey. Here I break down the journey using video, but consider other forms of content taking the same path.
- Building Brand Awareness – You would want to use this type of video to start the customer journey. This should be designed to let people know more about what your brand is about and keep it short! If you have a product, take the same approach with a product video. The goal here is to create an upbeat, positive impression of your company & people.
- Like or consideration of your brand – These type of video’s might include: Company story videos that show the human side of your business such as employees and even executives speaking about or working in the business. More casual and fun seem to get noticed. If you are a company of one, think about how you can pull back the curtain to how you operate your business.
- Try your product or service – this type of video may demonstrate a product or talk about a service and how it gets results. Here is not where you dump an entire line out on the table, but give a taste of what someone could expect. Your goal here is to demonstrate you have the solution to their problem.
- Social proof – This gives prospects confidence based on what others have to say. This could be in the form of a testimonial video.
Tips for Optimizing Videos
- Get to the point in the first sentence and limit the video to under a minute
- Add captions to every video because most people are using LinkedIn at work and have the sound turned off. I recommend a resource called www.rev.com
- Upload the typical Mp4 file format – here are the specific details for posting video
Employees and CEO’s Will Be Greatest Advocates
According to an article published in the Hootsuite Blog, “social media is already changing how employees work. By 2020, we’ll see the greatest impact on two areas: employer branding and the rise of executives who understand—and know how to use social media to listen to customers, communicate their vision, and rally employees.
Key to this transformation will be the ability of CEOs and other leaders to use social to communicate directly with employees. And by 2020, CEOs with tepid professional adoption of social media will become more rare.”
LinkedIn will dominate as the platform where CEOs and employees will be sharing thought leadership, brand awareness and job opportunities.
This article is originally published on LinkedInforBusiness.net.
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