Research Comms Podcast: How to use Linkedin to communicate your organisation’s research (and grow your own network at the same time)
‘LinkedIn is not a place to get quick wins. It requires a medium to long term approach, where you're building up real relationships over time, so you need to be patient.’ Laura Hannan, on cultivating your network.
Laura Hannan is a Linkedin expert, trainer and practitioner. She is also the owner of Pitch121, an agency that manages personal Linkedin profiles for business executives.
In this episode of Research Comms, Laura shares the wisdom that she’s gleaned from 15 years of experience on Linkedin and gives her top tips on how communicators can make the most out of the platform to grow their network and drive engagement with their organisation’s research.
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In recent years Linkedin has become a thriving platform the communication of research and innovation, higher education, and academia.
That means there are huge opportunities for research communicators to use the platform to build an audience for their organisation’s news and digital content and, at the same time, to develop their own networks to help career growth once they’ve moved on.
But unless you take the right approach you could end up wasting precious time on the platform without seeing any results.
I do recommend listening to the whole interview with Laura to benefit from all of her insights but if you’re short on time, below are some of the main takeaways.
Have you listened to these other episodes of the Research Comms podcast?
Linkedin is all about the long game
LinkedIn is not a place to get quick wins. It requires a medium to long term approach, where you're building up real relationships over time, so you need to be patient.
It will take effort and constant attention to gradually build a network of followers for your institution. But the beauty of the platform is that everything that you do that helps your organization, is helping you personally as well.
Little and often is best
When it comes to spending time on Linkedin, it’s much better to dip into it frequently for short bursts of time than doing a big chunk every now and then.
If you decide that you can devote four hours a week engage with people and grow your network on LinkedIn, don't spend those four hours on a Friday and wait until the next Friday until you do your next four hours.
It's better to do fifteen minutes at the beginning and end of every day, because every action that you take will have a reaction that needs to be timely. You need to take the opportunity to respond on the same day because that opportunity won’t be there a week later, by which time someone will probably have completely forgotten that they liked your post, and being able to follow up on that becomes very difficult.
Use your profile to show who you are
Your profile page is essentially a personal landing page, it’s your digital self. Everything that you do on LinkedIn is about bringing people back to this landing page.
Most people will only spend a few seconds there and in that time they’ll make a judgment call about whether they want to engage with you. To capture their attention you want to remove all the veneers and barriers, so that people feel like they know you a bit.
That means in your picture you should be looking directly at the camera and giving an expression that gives a bit of a sense of who you are.
And your ‘About’ section doesn’t have to read like a CV or resume. You should write in the same way that you talk, so that people get a sense of your humour and your personality. It doesn’t have to be very formal.
You should be looking to be as memorable as possible. So have a look at your profile and ask yourself, ‘Where can I stand out? Where can I be unique?’ That is a good place to start.
Company/Organization page vs. Personal page
The company page and your profile page have different features and functionality. Only with your personal page can you reach out to somebody and send them a connection request and have a direct one-to-one conversation. A brand or institution’s page can't have that kind of interaction with people at the moment, so that limits what you can do with your company page.
Also, LinkedIn as a platform is really geared towards personal relationships. On your personal page your posts will only be seen by a fraction of your followers, about 10%. On a company page it’s even less - only about 3% of an institution’s followers will see its posts.
So, think about focusing on your personal page first. Initially it will only be your network that will see any content that you put out. But then, indirectly, they will get to see what’s happening on your organization’s page too.
MAKING CONNECTIONS
Be proactive with connecting and get conversations going in your inbox
It’s easy to end up being a little bit reactive on LinkedIn but if you take that approach you won’t necessarily get connected to the people that you want to be connected with, or have the kind of conversations that will help you get the most out of the platform.
That doesn’t mean you have to be aggressively approaching dozens of people a day. If somebody puts out a post and you see a comment on it that resonates, why not connect with that person to say, “Hey, I really liked what you had to say in that post. I’d like to stay in touch.”
You don't need to be connecting with them simply because you want something. If they are putting out valuable insights or information then that’s somebody that you probably want to have in your network.
Then when you get the conversation going, it needs to be a little bit like ping pong, where you do a short message then they do another one back. If your messages start getting very lengthy and they've just done two words, the balance goes off and the conversation will come to a close because you've just made it too difficult to reply.
Comments over reshares
It is generally better to comment on a post than to reshare it.
The stats say that an employee or team member commenting on a post from a company page is eight times more effective than doing a reshare. So, if you're sharing some research from your institution then it’s better to get that research onto a post of your own and put your own perspective and opinion on it. Work out why your network would be interested in it and tailor your post around that.
POSTING CONTENT
Intriguing openings
You want the first two lines of your posts to be as intriguing as possible, so that people click to ‘see more’ and read the rest. When people do that, the algorithm registers it as a sign of engagement and will make it visible for more people. So you need to really focus on how you can intrigue and compel people to read the rest of the post.
Polls
Linkedin polls have become a bit Marmite-y. Some people love them and some people hate them. But the truth is that polls do well in people’s feeds and the algorithm just loves them. You'll basically get five times the reach if you put out a poll compared with a regular post.
And if you're clever about what you put in a poll you can actually get some valuable data, as people will self-select around their likes, dislikes and challenges. So you can then follow up with people in a different way, depending on how they voted.
Articles
As far as the algorithm goes, for some reason articles don’t perform in people's feeds particularly well. That doesn't mean that you shouldn't do articles. People are taking time to read that and so an article is your opportunity to frame somebody’s thinking. On LinkedIn, you can add in different media, you can put in quotes to highlight certain areas, apparently articles that have I think it's five to seven images and it's performed better
But the great thing about putting an article on LinkedIn is you can put it onto your website and get it indexed and then repeat it on LinkedIn. You might want to change up the sort of beginning of it to make it a bit more about the social. If you change the the headline, then it gives you a secondary long tail search that you could come up, using basically the same content. You only need one content piece to make dozens of snippets and posts and you can put it in so many different formats.
Links in posts
There has been a bit of a rumour going around that you should never put an external link into your posts because LinkedIn wants people to stay on their platform so you get penalised by the algorithm for adding an external link. But it’s actually much better to include the link in your post than trying to hide it in the comments.
For one thing, putting the link in the comments means it will disappear if people reshare the post, leaving your post incomplete.
It also doesn’t look great to the Linkedin algorithm if you’re the first person commenting on your own post.
Research Comms is presented by Peter Barker, director of Orinoco Communications, a digital communications and content creation agency that specialises in helping to communicate research. Find out how we’ve helped research organisations like yours by taking a look at past projects…
LINKS
Laura’s business Pitch 121
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