Social media - how can I get my team using LinkedIn?

You can ask but you can’t dictate. A social media presence is considered personal, even on LinkedIn, although arguably many businesses see effective use of the platform as crucial to success. 

Whilst employment contracts that restrict what you can and can’t say about your organisation online are common, you can’t enforce LinkedIn interaction in a contract.

But even if you could contractually oblige people to engage on LinkedIn, if they’re not up for it, it won’t be great. What employer wants a reluctant, communicator whose arm has been twisted as a brand ambassador on social media?!

A certain degree of encouragement and some useful tools, might be all that’s needed. 

Identify that LinkedIn is right for you

It’s not right for every organisation, but let’s assume you’ve already done the work that’s identified LinkedIn as a useful platform (drop me a line if you haven’t!) 

If your company is on LinkedIn, that usually means you have a business page and then members of your team can link to that page as their place of work.

Once your page is up and running, your team can then engage with and share your posts. 

People often have more connections than pages

It’s quite usual for leaders who are active on LinkedIn to hold all the connections, with the actual organisation page receiving much lower engagement. Build networks around your organisation page, rather than just your people. The organisation is the primary platform, if you come to rely on individual people as your main mouthpiece you’ll lose your audience if they leave your organisation. 

BUT because LinkedIn is still a place about individual relationships, it’s hard to get an organisation page to become an active interesting place without engagement from your team. You need the people in the organisation to share your company content. 

A good old chicken and egg situation.

LinkedIn is hard without leadership presence

Although you can’t force people on to LinkedIn, if you have a strategic objective to use the platform well, you’re probably going to need someone from your leadership team to have a profile. It’s hard to start a brilliant company page, without any top dogs involved.

The first stumbling block might be the profile page itself. It can be hard to write your own profile. If someone else can draft a professional profile for people as they join the platform, it can help to get them past that first hurdle.

Leverage people that are naturally social

If you’ve got people who are naturally social on other platforms but don’t use LinkedIn, they could be useful recruits. Think about your best people, those who are already natural brand ambassadors for the business and find those that have active profiles on other platforms.

It could just be a small step with a few useful tips to get them engaged on LinkedIn. 

Create simple guidance & tools for LinkedIn

Guidance can take the form of a toolkit that explains the organisation’s strategy on LinkedIn and provides a bit of advice on how to share and engage with content. Most active engagement from an employee is outside of your control so supporting them to do it well is in everyone’s interest.

Some people will happily share content, others will want to curate their own, so it’s good to create guidance for both situations.

Build awareness of restrictions

In some sectors (such as finance) legislative regulations mean people need to really understand what they can and can’t say. So this is important to factor in if you know people are actively curating business content from a personal account.

If you’re in a sector that’s regulated you will already have a clause in your employment contracts that restricts what you can and can’t say publicly to promote certain products. 

More subtle than this is style of communication. You can’t control tone of voice in personal accounts but you can encourage a level of professionalism.

Don’t be a dictator

A big part of enabling your company to grow on LinkedIn is to relinquish control and let it go! It’s a bit like saying, “I can’t trust Simon to work from home because I know he’ll do no work”. If he does no work at home, he’s not the type to put in a proper shift in the office either! If you can’t trust an employee to talk about you sensibly on LinkedIn, what do you think they say about you when they go down the pub? Your people are always your mouthpiece, whether you like it or not.

If you want to chat about how to get your team using LinkedIn, get in touch – I’d love to talk.