How Business Leaders Should Lead By Example on LinkedIn

If you’re a business leader, or aspire to become one, remember that your employees, partners, and prospects are all potentially watching your activity on LinkedIn. What you do here has the potential to stimulate mass engagement from your stakeholders and generate great visibility for you and your business.

In this article, we will look at ways you can greatly improve your presence on the platform and lead by example. We’ll discuss three key things business leaders should do on LinkedIn: inspire others through posting, optimize their profiles to be found by other businesspeople, and proactively network and build key connections here.

1. Business Leaders Should Lead By Example and Post on LinkedIn

You’ve probably seen that Cisco is investing in LinkedIn training for its 84,000 employees, to help them become “talent influencers” and raise the profile of their business and their career opportunities on the platform. If you’ve been in any doubt about the impact LinkedIn can have on a business, this should be a powerful reminder of how crucial it is seen as being by many other business leaders.

For businesses wanting to become more visible on LinkedIn, a couple of the key challenges are overcoming inertia and making it easier for employees to become active on the platform. As a business leader, you have the potential to influence the team around you and the wider pool of employees through the actions you take on LinkedIn.

If employees don’t know what they should be engaging with on the platform, it’s hard for them to become more active. If they aren’t inspired to know what to post about themselves, inertia sets in and the power of the combined voices of your employees is lost. By regularly sharing engaging and inspiring content, you can set the tone and activate your stakeholders on the platform.

Here are some ideas to get you started on your LinkedIn posting journey:

●     Share industry insights with your own unique twist: Everyone can share articles, reports, or news that keep connections informed about critical developments in your field. But your leadership position means you can share unique perspectives on what is happening, insights that are far more likely to spark engagement and debate. So don’t hold back from adding your own take on what’s happening.

●     Celebrate achievements and milestones: Who on your team deserves a special mention for something they’ve achieved or for the leadership they’ve shown? What awards is the business in the running for? What significant milestones have been reached, or client testimonials have been secured? Let your network know about these successes. People like to share in other people’s wins and achievements – and these kinds of posts are very easy for others in the business to engage with.

●     Introduce new team members or product launches: Use LinkedIn to showcase your company’s new hires and its latest product and service offerings. This helps humanize your business and showcases the progress the business is making. If you and your team have a network of contacts that’s concentrated in the markets you serve, this is doubly powerful.

●     Promote events and webinars: LinkedIn is a powerful platform for raising awareness of your company’s upcoming events and webinars – and for driving up registrations for these sessions. If all your team are inspired to support these promotions, the impact on the business can be significant.

Remember, though, that consistency is key. Aim to post at least once a week (and ideally more often than that) to keep your network engaged and to remain visible to your employees.

2. Business Leaders Should Keyword Optimize Their LinkedIn Profiles

A fully-optimized LinkedIn profile is crucial for business leaders. Having your profile optimized means you will more easily be found by potential business partners, new clients, journalists and other professionals. It also means you’ll more readily appear in candidate searches being undertaken by headhunters in your sector, so this is important both for your business and for you personally in furthering your career.

The key is to optimize your profile with targeted keywords so that you appear in the most relevant searches being undertaken on the platform:

●     Identify your target keywords: Brainstorm keywords that are most relevant to your industry, job title, and skills. For example, if you’re a CEO of a software development company, your target keywords should include not just “software development” and “CEO”, but also all their variants and all the sectors you serve. If you can deliver software development for the retail sector or the banking sector, then “retail” and “banking” need to appear on your profile. Otherwise, every search for “retail software development” you’ll fail to appear in the search results.

Expand this concept to encompass all the technologies your business has capabilities in, all the business processes your software development can be applied to. Only then will you start to saturate the platform, in terms of appearing in more and more of the searches that are relevant for improving the fortunes of your business.

●     Include keywords in your headline: Your LinkedIn headline is one of the most visible elements of your profile, it’s seen every time you post and comment – as well as appearing in search result pages. Plus, it carries additional weight in terms of your search result placement. So, incorporate your target keywords in your headline to clearly communicate your value proposition.

●     Optimize your summary and add a Featured section: Your summary section is often the first thing that people will see on your profile – and so this creates that all-important first impression. Use your summary to talk to both your employees and team, as well as to connect with potential clients and business partners. The goal is to weave your keywords naturally into your narrative to create a compelling and cohesive story that others will warm to.

Combine this with adding the Featured section to your profile. This allows you to showcase key content, landing pages and videos in a way that is highly visual and eye-catching. Think about what you would like a reader to do next – and then add elements to your Featured section accordingly. Perhaps you would like people to book in a call with your team, or sign up to your newsletter? Or maybe you’d like them to watch a video about partnering up with your company. Whatever the outcomes are you’d like to result from someone visiting your profile, the Featured section is the part of your LinkedIn profile that helps you to achieve these goals.

3. Business Leaders Should Proactively Network and Build Connections on LinkedIn

The good news is, by having already optimized your LinkedIn profile’s keywords – and by regularly posting on the platform – you’re going to attract incoming connection requests from other business leaders in your sector. So, your actions are already ensuring that your network grows in a focused way.

But it’s also possible for you to more proactively build meaningful connections here.

Now, let’s not forget that networking is all about building strong, lasting relationships. On LinkedIn, it’s essential to focus on quality, not quantity, when building your connections. With that in mind, be selective about the connection requests you accept. But also grow your network in a very intentional manner.

Perhaps you have a target list of 100 top companies you’d really like to win as new clients. Or a hit list of potential business partners you’d like to nurture. Or some priority news publications you’d like to start being quoted in.

By being intentional and searching and connecting with your top targets, you are shaping the conversations you will have in the future – and the kinds of people who will be exposed to your content here.

Just as with posting regularly and optimizing your profile, by taking the lead in growing your network you show others in your organization what a strong LinkedIn presence looks like – and you inspire them to try and emulate what you are doing.

Conclusion

In conclusion, when used well, LinkedIn can be an incredibly powerful tool for business leaders keen on expanding their professional network, increasing their business visibility, and fostering meaningful relationships. The key to unlocking the full potential of LinkedIn lies in consistent posting and engagement, strategic keyword optimization, and intentional networking. Doing these things not only enhances one’s personal online presence but also significantly impacts the company’s overall digital footprint.

Arguably more important than this is the fact that business leaders’ proactive engagement on LinkedIn serves as an inspiration to their teams, encouraging them to actively participate and contribute to the company’s digital presence. As they follow your lead, the collective impact across your team can significantly boost the company’s reach and impact. Will you make it a priority to up your LinkedIn game in the coming months?

We hope this has provided some good food for thought. If you are a company looking to make hires, or an executive looking to make a career move, you’re welcome to visit our website to see how we might be able to help.