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Using organic social media strategies to market your business
Are you a founder of your company? Or are you an individual offerings services to other businesses? In both these cases, you need to become a LinkedIn influencer in your own right. An influencer is a person who can influence potential buyers of a product or service. Becoming an influencer for your brand will increase the brand's awareness and gain followers. Since these followers came to know about the brand from a connection, they will be more loyal than someone who has been marketed to. Also, LinkedIn recognises influencers and awards them an 'Influencer' badge, which gives extra benefits to the individual.
How to become a LinkedIn influencer
Since you want to be an influencer for your own brand, you must follow a different approach than paid influencers. You cannot talk about your product all the time nor can you expect to influence people by re-sharing your company page posts. Your main focus is to show thought leadership in your brand's field.
Let us take the example of the founder of an investment app. This app provides more control of an individual's investment with simple data visualisation. The founder can create the following types of posts:
Posts which give the founder's insights into consumer behaviour related to investments and the challenges they face. Posting about the principles on which the app is built on provides more value to the connections. They begin to understand how the app can benefit them and why this founder is qualified to create the app.
Third-party press articles or high-quality blogs that talk about various aspects of investments. These posts will showcase how the founder is keen to keep up with the market trends and looks at the business from a holistic perspective.
And every once in a while, the founder can post about the app. Mixing it up with the thought-leadership posts will influence the connections to check out the app.
Using LinkedIn to build your personal brand
Since LinkedIn is a professional platform, it is a great place to showcase your thought-leadership. LinkedIn recognises that their users come to the platform to gain knowledge in the professional space. Hence, long posts on LinkedIn perform better than on any other social media platform. Long posts allow you to write details that support your thoughts.
LinkedIn provides details statistics on your personal posts like views and who saw your post. Knowing how your post is performing in terms of reach, gives you the freedom to experiment with post types. For example, I found that my posts with images have lesser reach than those without images. By using related hashtags in your post, you can reach people outside your network as well.
Updating your profile headline to be about yourself can gain you followers and increase your product's awareness. People prefer to connect with individuals, rather than follow company pages. Since your job title and company are already part of your profile, your profile headline can highlight your skill in the company e.g. On a mission to simplify investment for busy professionals . This is very helpful when your company is in the B2B space. Your customers can search for the solution they want and find your profile. Seeing your posts will build up their confidence in your product.
Your first few customers will always come through your connections. This is why it becomes important for founders of the business to play an active part in the marketing of the product.
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