Building Communities & Audiences on Linkedin in 2023

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!