Five Reasons to Put Your Employees on LinkedIn

“A company’s LinkedIn real estate lies in its employees”. This is the message that LinkedIn keeps hammering home to us whenever we speak to them.

Ramping up our clients’ employee presence is therefore something we’ve been encouraging, and the statistics speak for themselves. In fact, the figures suggest that employee pages can increase the reach of a company ten-fold compared to using the brand page alone.

So, what are the key benefits of encouraging employees to lead the way on LinkedIn, the world’s most important business platform?

1. It Puts a Face on the Brand

People trust people, people buy from people, and naturally it makes sense that they’d be happier to reach out to a person rather than a company. It also helps if the face happens to belong to somebody they’ve seen at a trade event or read about in the press – ultimately offering a warmer, more personable touch to any communication.

2. It Helps Brands Leverage Employee Connections

Your employees have already done the hard work for you. By working at adding customers, potential customers and other influencers in the industry, they’ve effectively crafted a contact list of exactly the kind of people you’re trying to target. If your sales team of 20 each has 1,000 connections, sharing one Company Page post increases the reach of your brand messaging by an additional 20,000 potential customers. Compare this to the readership of your average industry trade magazine and you start to see the impact LinkedIn can have.

What’s more, LinkedIn tells us that 100 employee shares can result in 32 new connections, 48 Company Page views and 16 Company Page followers. In an age where ad spend is king to enable reach, this (free) method is invaluable.

3. Building Thought Leadership

LinkedIn’s blog platform, Pulse, allows anyone with a profile the ability to post out longer-form content. This offers a great way to position your employee as a knowledgeable authority on the cusp of industry updates – just the kind of person they’d like to work with and buy from.

An added bonus is that a Pulse post sits on the individual’s LinkedIn page, which means that anyone visiting their profile is likely to see it.

4. The Ability to Use InMail

InMail is the only kind of ad you can run from a personal profile, and one that has yielded excellent results for our clients. In this post-GDPR age, it’s more difficult than ever for brands to put themselves in the inbox of decision-making individuals.

InMail offers a way to do this and, with open rates significantly higher than the average e-shot (our agency record is 78%) along with much stronger click-through rates, the stats for InMail speak for themselves.

5. Personal Profiles are Sales Generators

A high level of activity on LinkedIn is directly related to the ability to convert, with those actively using social media outselling those that don’t by 78%. With as many as six to eight touch points required before buyers commit to a purchase, it’s essential to keep reminding decision makers of the brand’s offering, and an employee post or message offers an authentic way to achieve this.

Gone are the days of ringing reception and asking to speak to the person that deals with X or Y, and gone are the days of purchasing databases of dubious quality (thank you, GDPR). While driving around for face-to-face pitches will still have its place for many businesses, LinkedIn forms an important part of the sales armoury. Ignore it at your peril.

Feel free to carry on the conversation by connecting with me on LinkedIn.

The author: Alex Mansell is Social Media Account Director at WPR Agency, specialising in using LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook for B2B brands.