Month: December 2022

We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again: building an engaged community is the holy grail of recruitment marketing. 

If you want to meet inspired professionals on their forum, the chances are you’re doing a lot of work on Linkedin. To set you up for success, we’ve put together the best advice for growing your audience and building a community in 2023. 

Plan for the Long-Term

As any writer will tell you, you should always start with a plan. Before you set up your strategy for the year ahead, it’s worth researching what your network is talking about and how they perceive you or your company. 

From there, you can create a roadmap and figure out where you want to end up. Do you want people to be more engaged with your content? Do you want a better ROI for your business? Do you want to up your follower count? 

Make a plan that outlines your goals and consistently work towards them. 

When it comes down to your content it’s important that you communicate your company’s mission. That gives people a reason to listen to you and tune into what you have to say. Your mission should be the reason that you’re doing what you’re doing, whether it’s to solve a problem or make people’s lives easier. 

Keep to that message. Consistency builds trust, so give it time and allow your audience to grow naturally. Engaging relevant people with genuine content will give you far better ROI than just shouting your ideas at everyone through boosted ads. 

Optimise Your Pages 

Having great content is useless if nobody can find you. Optimise your page to be searchable by using keywords in blurbs, and complete all the fields on your page. 

Utilise showcase pages to talk about projects or sectors that you have within the business. This will help you build niche-targeted communities who are laser-focused on your message. 

Keep your branding consistent across your page, and consider providing your employees with a branded format to use on their personal accounts. This gives you a cohesive brand feel and boosts the community feel online. 

Create Great Content 

People want to buy from people. Utilising your personal narrative in your marketing will help people resonate with your brand, making you approachable and personable. 

Use simple words that are easy to digest when you’re writing. People on Linkedin are looking to connect with people, not read academic jargon, so make sure that your voice, including hints of your dialect, is present in your writing. 

Create content across a variety of media. Use visual and video content to grab people’s attention, and utilise polls to boost interactions with your audience. Don’t be scared of long text posts. They can provide more value to your audience by giving depth to your topics, thereby providing valuable insights.  

While your personal story is important, not everything should be about you. Try to follow the 4-1-1 rule, which gives your audience four pieces of news or relevant topics from your field, then one personal update and one piece of content from or about someone else in the community. You can put a personal spin on each of these, but you shouldn’t be the focus all the time. 

Understand the Psychology of Your Audience 

It’s easy for social media to convince you to measure success through engagement metrics. It’s important to remember that interactions on Linkedin aren’t always about your content but your message. Someone could find your point really interesting, but not want to align themselves with your message as it’s off-brand for them. Keep posting on-message content and see what happens. 

Always offer value to the reader. People want to be informed or entertained, so think about what matters most to them and offer it in your content. Are you sharing content that helps people feel connected? Are you offering solutions to common problems in your sector? Are you building a network of like-minded people? Build content that speaks to people’s needs. 

Don’t be scared to share your personal or company values in your posts. Advocating for social responsibility, diversity and inclusion will make people feel included and seen. People respond to what matters to them, so telling them what you care about is likely to make them feel included when it’s a shared value or experience. 

Performance Tips

1. Experiment with different content and see what works for you and your audience
2. Post 1-2 times per day. If that’s not achievable, post consistently 
3. Ask questions and invite feedback to get people engaged 
4. Use links in your posts, these get around 45% more engagement 
5. Focus on user experience while creating content as it boosts conversion rates
6. Communities are about people, so Linkedin promotes people’s posts over company posts. Where possible, share your content from personal pages.

Create a Community Feel

If you see people commenting on your posts, reward them for interacting with you and make them feel like valued members of your community. Find champions within your community and raise them up. 

Utilise your team members and encourage employee engagement. This will help spread the reach of your content and get your immediate network invested in sharing your message. 

Healthy communities are an ecosystem. The content you create will bring people in who will then have conversations about what matters to them. That will form qualitative research, which will inform the content you create in the future, which will bring more people in. This is what we call consumer generated content.

It doesn’t have to be professional, but building genuine relationships is essential to a healthy community. 

If you’d like to know more about building your personal brand and audience on Linkedin, reach out to see how we can help!

If you read our previous blog ‘Revolutionise Your Social Marketing Strategy With Video’, you’ll already know the best practices for making and posting videos on Linkedin. 

You might be wondering ‘But how do I make them?’ 

Don’t worry, we’re here to help! 

We’ve put together technical tips and a step-by-step checklist that will help you independently nail your video content. 

Step 1 – Script Your Video

While it’s tempting to include a branded introduction for your videos, ask yourself if your audience will want that. If you only include necessary content people are more likely to stay engaged during your videos. Try to include graphics or logos to promote your brand instead of creating an intro that isn’t providing value to your audience. 

Write a script for everything you want to include in your video and rehearse it before you start recording. Make your content concise and helpful to keep people’s attention. 

Don’t use phrases like ‘that’s how you land your next job’ until the end of your videos. Doing this will tell people that you’ve already given them what they came for, so they’ll start looking for something else to watch. Avoiding those phrases will allow you to  promote your own services or further content while you have a viewer’s attention. 

Wrap up your videos with a simple and clear call to action, and articulate what the benefits of following it are. Invitations like ‘get in touch to find your next opportunity’ let viewers know exactly what you’re offering. 

Step 2 – Record Your Content

So you’ve planned out your content, you’ve got a script and you know how you’re going to grab attention. What’s next? 

When you’re recording your videos there are some things you can do that will enhance your video’s performance. 

Make sure your videos are still engaging with the sound off, as that’s how they initially play on LinkedIn. Your content needs to be visually appealing, so make sure that your speaker has dynamic body language, leans towards the camera and uses gestures to create an engaging video. 

Change up your backgrounds too, even if it’s just filming from varied angles to keep it interesting. It’s also worth considering investing in visual assets that you can have in the background of your videos, such as your brand’s logo, some plants or an interesting piece of decor. 

Set up your recording studio somewhere that has good natural lighting and isn’t too noisy so that you can get clear video and audio. Even making small adjustments like facing a window can make a lot of difference to your content. 

Most of all, remember to have fun with it!

Step 3 – Edit Your Clips

Once you’ve recorded your masterpiece, there are some things that you can fine-tune during editing to make sure that your videos really stand out. 

When you’re editing your audio it’s important to consider how engaging it is. Can you clearly hear the speaker, and is their voice dynamic and engaging? If it’s sounding a little flat it can be helpful to include background music to provide an immersive experience. Be careful not to overwhelm viewers with too much stimulation though – if you’ve hosted a lively conversation with lots of different voices it could be overwhelming to have music playing as well, so consider how best to support the content that you have. 

Consider the pacing of the video, and whether you can cut out any unnecessary pauses, stammers or repetitions. Keeping your content streamlined is essential to keeping your viewers engaged. 

While you’re editing it’s time to insert any visuals such as slides, graphics or logos to your video. Consider adding gifs that encourage people to like or share your video, as well as helpful section headers and subtitles that further communicate your message. It’s also important to ensure that you’ve properly adjusted your colour levels to reflect the tone of your content or brand, and apply this to all of your videos to create consistency. 

Step 4 – Nail Video Copy

Before you upload your videos, think carefully about how you can engage your audience before they even see your video. 

Crafting a great title is almost as important as having a good video. When writing your title, it’s important to reflect what you’re actually offering in your content. Don’t use clickbait as people will leave if they don’t get what they came for, and you’ll have wasted an opportunity to engage with potential clients and community members.  

Referencing your audience in your title can also be a good idea. People are more likely to watch something they immediately know will be relevant to them, so try using titles like this: 

• “5 Ways Videos Will Transform Your Recruitment Company’s Marketing Strategy”
• “Why Podcasts are the Future of Recruitment Marketing”
• “How Recruiters Can Nail Personal Branding”

Another consideration is using closed captions. Failing to use them will exclude those with accessibility needs and limit your engagement. Not only that, videos automatically play with sound off on LinkedIn, so having subtitles can give people an idea of what you’re talking about before they turn the sound on, making you more likely to get people interested in what you’re saying. 

Like titles, headlines are also essential to drawing people into your videos, so think carefully about what you’re going to write to go alongside your video. Make sure you’re giving people a reason to consume your content in the first sentence of your post, so that they’re interested before they’ve even clicked ‘…see more’. 

Do keyword research and tag your videos with relevant terms that will help them find the right audience on LinkedIn. You can include these in both your post and captions to boost their reach. Around 90% of people will read captions at least some of the time, so don’t miss out on this resource. 

Step 5 – Share Your Masterpiece

Now that you’ve grasped the basics, you’re all set to go out and create high-performing video content!