Here’s an excerpt from Polaris founder Ben Pinnington’s Amazon best selling book Making Waves: PR strategies to transform your maritime business giving advice on maximising the use of LinkedIn.
A major shortcoming of social media is quality of content. There is far too much irrelevant and poorly written and presented rubbish. The more people join social media, the louder that noise becomes. But you can pierce through the din with thoughtful, attractive, newsworthy, helpful quality.
Joseph Pulitzer, the American newspaper pioneer, stated his view of how to communicate, and it remains valid for all the people becoming publishers on social media today:
‘…put it before them
Briefly so that they will read it,
Clearly so that they will understand it,
Forcibly so that they will appreciate it,
Picturesquely so that they will remember it, and above all,
Accurately so that they may be wisely guided by its light.’[1]
Perhaps surprisingly, given the prominence of Twitter/X in the media and the number of journalists on that platform, LinkedIn has far more users at 1 billion as of 2024 with 40pc of active users logging in daily around 140million. Bought by Microsoft in 2015, apparently because of its enormous amount of data, its more serious ‘Facebook for business’ image makes its users highly relevant to maritime businesses, and many of the big players have huge followings. There is a conversation going on here that your business and senior executives need to be part of.
Here are some ‘hacks’ to refresh your LinkedIn profile
- First port of call is to get your profile in order. Decide if you’ll be using your profile to promote your career or your company or both.
- Research how people use their profiles well.
- Use the headline of your profile to promote yourself with an elevator pitch rather than using your job title.
- Use energy words to give your headline bite.
- Use an image on the background of your profile, behind your profile picture, to tell your story. Think of deploying a headline over a striking professional image.
- Make sure your profile picture is professional and smart – bin the holiday snap! LinkedIn is formal, so think suit-and-tie networking, compared to the more informal Twitter, where a smart open shirt and jacket will suffice.
- When approaching someone to connect, ensure you use a covering note that is sincere and short, explaining the benefit to them of connecting. No note could be seen as rude.
- Use the ‘about’ section to build your credibly. Think what you have achieved for your clients, your track record and what you do.
- Use the ‘featured’ section to showcase your work, including key thought-leadership pieces and notable highlights, and do not forget film. The more people can see and hear you talk, the easier it will be for them to grasp you, your character and style.
Hashtags for LinkedIn
CIPR training suggests using up to three hashtags per LinkedIn post. The key metric is the hashtag follower/content ratio, so use hashtags that have high numbers of followers, but comparatively few people tagging content with that hashtag.
For example, use #publicrelations versus #PR. The former has 3.7 million followers and less content tagged; the reverse is true for #PR, which has fewer followers 29,894, but more content, so #publicrelations is much more impactful. In maritime, #decarbonisation has just 1,600 followers, #maritime 63,000, #shipping 96,000 #MaritimeIndustry 32,000, while #technology has more than 26million.[3]
Keep in mind that people can also follow hashtags on LinkedIn, so popular hashtags like #throwbackthursday or #flashbackfriday can be fun ways for your brand to join a wider social media conversation. Official hashtags at the big maritime trade fairs are good for raising awareness and listening to what is going on, on both LinkedIn and Twitter.
Good websites offering insight into the world of hashtags include www.sendible.com/insights/twitter-hashtags and https://blog.hootsuite.com/how-to-use-hashtags
Types of post
Focus on the ‘post’ option on LinkedIn rather than the ‘article’ option, which has become a dud, to engage with your audience. LinkedIn is the only social media platform that likes you to post pdfs and PowerPoint slides. This is ‘content fuel’ and gets more views and engagement than normal posts on smartphones because a bigger image keeps eyeballs on your content longer, stops people swiping, and LinkedIn likes it because, unlike a hyperlink, it keeps users on the site, so it is actually good to share an old-fashioned ‘fax style’ pdf press release rather than a link.
LinkedIn also prefers film to be directly uploaded on to content feeds rather than YouTube links and will promote this kind of content more favourably, allowing films up to ten minutes long. Perfect for snappy presentations and thought leadership.
Paid-for content
CIPR trainer Andrew Bruce Smith warns that the era of organic content – gaining traction for free – is diminishing on social media. It is, therefore, wise to get savvy with paid-for content, or at least try some of the functionality via free trials.
For example, you can sign up for a free two-month trial of the Sales Navigator tool on LinkedIn. This enables you to target your content at professionals by job, industry and geography outside your immediate network. After the trial, you spread the cost over days, from one- to seven- to thirty-day periods, and adjust it accordingly.
This tool enables you to make more informed decisions on the type and kind of people you can market to and adapt your content-making messages, or offers a focus on, say, CEOs or financial directors or human resources directors in the maritime industry, drilling down by country. The possibilities are exciting and I advise mixing your organic content with targeted paid-for campaigns.
The LinkedIn insight tag
According to Andrew Bruce Smith, the LinkedIn Insight tag is the only way of getting detailed insights into the type of person visiting your website, including their job title, who they work for, location, company size, and so on. He says:
‘It is important to stress this information is provided in aggregate, ie it is most definitely not personally identifiable information. You won’t be able to identify individuals, but it still gives you an idea of the type of visitor you are attracting.’
The LinkedIn Insight tag is a useful tool to help measure the stakeholder engagement of your campaigns. It is essentially a small piece of JavaScript that you can install on every page of your website – similar to, say, Google Analytics’ tracking code.
Andrew says if you use Google Tag Manager, you can install the LinkedIn Insight tag in under a minute. To get the Insight tag, you first need to have created a LinkedIn Campaign Manager account. Although this is intended for use with paid-for campaigns, you do not need to spend any money to get the Insight tag code.
Once you have a Campaign Manager account, go to the ‘Account Assets’ drop down and click Insight tag. You then enter the website you intend to install the Insight tag on.
‘Once you have the Insight tag installed and LinkedIn has verified it, you are in business. LinkedIn will then begin detecting any and all visits from LinkedIn members to your site, and they can be visiting from any channel, not just LinkedIn. Once LinkedIn has detected at least 300 unique users, it will then begin sharing with you details of these visitors – job title, who they work for, location, company size, and so on.’
Quotes and details used with kind permission of Andrew Bruce Smith, CIPR trainer.