LinkedIn is one of the best ways to market yourself or your business online professionally. Since LinkedIn is a professional networking site, designed to help people make business connections, share their experiences and resumes, and find jobs, it’s the perfect place to tap into a focused and resourceful audience.
Like most social media sites, LinkedIn has recently joined the ranks of Snapchat, Facebook, Whatsapp, and Instagram in terms of the social media strategy of offering stories. LinkedIn Stories is a feature that enables members and organizations to share images and short videos of their everyday professional moments.
Sharing Stories is an easy way to share your experiences and insights and to build meaningful relationships with your professional community. LinkedIn shares Stories that you post for 24 hours.
LinkedIn is most certainly a social network - any website that facilitates users to connect, communicate and share similar goals or interests is a social network, so it makes sense that a Stories feature would be available. Broader engagement data shows that Stories is increasingly how the next generation of social media users are communicating, in preference to the traditional News Feed, and as such, leaning into the evolving trend seems like a logical way to go to maximize engagement and interaction.
Here are some ways you can capitalize on LinkedIn’s Stories feature to stay ahead of the game in marketing:
Create a More Personalized Experience
If you’re one of the first few brands using LinkedIn Stories, then chances are you’ll be gaining a considerable amount of extra airtime with your audience on LinkedIn.
With that in mind, you can use this new platform to share all your important brand updates — even if you have a feed post about them too. This can feel more personal to your audience and let them know you’re always keeping them up to date in an instant.
Share Live Events
Stories present a great opportunity to share snippets of events you or your company is hosting in real-time, which gives people live updates in a “snackable” form. You can share both images and 20-second videos to your Story.
You can also use Stories to create extra hype around a big event you have planned, sharing images and short videos leading up to the event as “sneak peaks” of what’s in store.
Establish Yourself or Your Brand as a Thought Leader
LinkedIn is full of people who want to share and engage with new thoughts and ideas in different professional fields. You can use your Stories to showcase your knowledge and insight on the latest happenings in your field and establish yourself or your brand as Thought Leader.
Stories are a great way to capture audience attention in a fun and engaging way, and because the posts only last 24 hours, you can create daily content and updates to stay fresh and up to date.
Use Stories’ Insights to Gauge Your Audience Reach
For the 24 hours that LinkedIn shares your Story, you can view Insights for each of your posts. Insights let you see the number of viewers who viewed the post and a list of the viewers’ names. You may also see your viewers’ name, known job title, and current company, depending on their privacy settings.
This presents a great way to see if your profile is getting meaningful engagement from the right target audience. If you post multiple Stories on different days, soon you’ll be able to tell from your Insights what type of posts on your Stories your audience likes the most, based on which posts get the most viewership. Further, based on the jobs of the viewers, you can tell what background or field your Stories appeal to the most.
Whether you’re sharing insights, job opportunities, or a new product from your brand, you should definitely capitalize on this new channel to reach more of your audience and set yourself ahead of the competition.
LinkedIn Stories is currently in Beta mode and being tested in Australia, Brazil, France, the Netherlands and the UAE. Be ready for when it comes to the Caribbean!
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