Brand Amplification thru Employee Posts on LinkedIn
LinkedIn is arguably the most successful social media platform for business, growing at a phenomenal rate and now boasts over 610M members worldwide (with 160M US workers). In the past it was a job search tool/engine – over the last several years, businesses/brands are using LinkedIn to grow relationships, promote themselves, raise awareness, keep people informed, post jobs, make announcements, etc.. And with good reason – some interesting statistics (from LinkedIn):
Over 50% of Americans with a college degree use LinkedIn
45% are in upper management
Over 30M businesses have LinkedIn Profiles
50% of web traffic originating from social media came from LinkedIn
It’s no wonder that over 94% of B2B marketers on social media use LinkedIn to publish content. There are 2M posts of articles, videos, etc. made each day, generating millions of views/shares/likes, and thousands of comments every hour. And content shared by employees see a 2x higher engagement rate vs. being shared by a company.
Businesses that post articles often encourage employees to share those articles with their networks, increasing the exposure of the article to a broader audience. Many businesses also encourage employees to publish their own content that supports the overall narrative, and brand, of your business. They often identify a handful of subject matter experts who will commit to posting content several times a month, whether it be original content or content curated from third-parties.
When an employee posts an article, their profile picture is visible at the top of the post, along with their title. Readers, when seeing an article of interest, often click through to the personal profile or LinkedIn Page to learn about the sender. The content published is attached to and becomes a part of the employee’s LinkedIn profile, positioning them as an expert and thought leader. As these posts have the potential to be distributed to a wide audience, the entire project should be treated as an advertising campaign, with particular attention paid to the quality and substance of the content, and the overall look, messaging, and branding.
The senders’ profile picture is also displayed at the top of their profile. People are immediately drawn to images on a page, particularly those of other people, so the profile picture will be the first thing a viewer notices on the page. Studies have shown that viewers decide in as little as 80ms whether a person is truthful, trustworthy, and competent. That’s why it’s critical for you and your company to maintain complete and optimized profiles of your employees, including professional looking headshots, ideally ones that are consistent with your brand. By doing so, you’re reinforcing the messaging/branding of professionalism, quality, and attention to detail that is important for any business. It also conveys that the employee who is posting is a professional, takes their job seriously, and recognizes that they and their post is representative of the company.
This is why many companies who have employees posting articles ensure that those employees’ LinkedIn profile is professionally written and include a professionally done headshot, the latter that is consistent with the look of headshots posted on the company’s website. The overall look should be reflective of your brand, and be designed to send the right message to prospective viewers. Providing those employees with a professionally done headshot for their LinkedIn profile is also used as perk by many employers (see my blog article: https://www.barrybraunsteinphotography.com/blog/2019/9/9/businesses-can-provide-professional-headshots-to-employees-as-a-perk-its-a-win-win)
If your company and its employees have optimized their profiles, you could gain an advantage when prospective customers are searching for companies, products and services like yours.
To learn more about creating great headshots for your team and your brand, download my ebook “The Marketers Guide to High Quality Team Images”:
