If we were cobblers, our kids wouldn’t have any shoes. When we get busy it can be hard to practice what we preach, and that’s why last Spring we decided to devise a plan to give a little TLC to our much-neglected LinkedIn presence. 

It all started with the Social Summer Series! We planned out the series far in advance so we could get the short, actionable posts written, designed, and scheduled early. With our blog posts for the summer taken care of, it freed us up to undertake two summer-long projects alongside our regular work (we’ll post about the other one later). 

Here’s the gist. Essentially we decided to step up our efforts on LinkedIn with a three-pronged approach: 

• Curate more content to create an active presence (scheduling at least two curated posts a week and stopping in to share content directly in the platform at least once a week but usually more often)

• Reuse old blog posts on our personal LinkedIn profiles to push traffic to our business page, and our blog

• Remind Rebecca she has a LinkedIn page (yes, our social medium often neglects her own profiles), and share our company posts to her page more often — while we both engage on the platform more regularly from our personal profiles

Not only did this serve to improve our LinkedIn presence, but the old posts we shared were meant to push people to our blog at a time when we were posting less often than we normally do. (We cannot stress how important it is to make your content work for you in as many ways as possible, and to plan it wisely! Not only does it help your content marketing efforts, but it prevents burnout.)

Frankly, this experiment of ours was pretty simple. All it required was a little planning, a few Asana reminders, and a new dedicated Slack channel where we team up to curate content to share with followers. The results were immediate.

How it started

I took a quick baseline snapshot of our page analytics back in May. Things were looking pretty dim. Our post impressions were up, but everything else was on a downward spiral. Soon after, I started scheduling several curated posts a week — in addition to our original content — tasked Rebecca with sharing just two of our posts to her own feed. Meanwhile, I got busy leaving comments, liking posts, and even sharing other people’s posts.

How it’s going 

And in just one month, we saw our analytics go through the roof. Unique visitors went up by 142%; we gained four new followers (an increase of 300%); post impressions shot up by 476%. Still, our custom button clicks were down by 66%. 

So we doubled-down — I hopped in Asana and set up several weeks’ worth of reminders to send Rebecca on a sharing binge! I also started crafting more messages with calls to action, in the hopes that those custom button clicks would shoot up as well. 

Things did not go as planned in July… 

By mid-month, our stats were way down, even though we continued to create content and share it regularly. I had three working theories about why this might be:

1. It’s July and people are away on vacation

2. Perhaps we had slacked off on actually engaging with people on the platform, and sharing their LinkedIn posts to our page

3. The initial impact of Rebecca getting active on LinkedIn had worn off

I can’t do anything about the first possibility — or even the third, really — so I doubled down on sharing content I found on LinkedIn to see if increased engagement could help save our spiraling stats. 

I started to comment on and share trending posts. Not only did I share posts from contacts to our page, but I tagged them when it was appropriate — a tactic that works like gangbusters for our clients. We even posted one of our older blog posts as a LinkedIn article from the page. It made few waves, but Rebecca’s post about Reddit marketing on her personal page got lots of love. (Note to selves: People are hungry for Reddit-related content!)

While my efforts gave our impressions enough of a boost to get the stats back in the black, unique visitors and new followers still languished in the red — though, technically, they did improve with my renewed efforts.

Interestingly, we actually had a new client that started working with us right around the same time we started our experiment. After over a month of letting Rebecca manage their LinkedIn page, their stats looked great! Even the one stat that was down percentage-wise still represented healthy engagement and growth — we just came out of the gate so strong that New Followers were bound to decline a bit after the first month. 

In hindsight, it may have been a mistake to put me in charge of our page. Rebecca is our social media specialist and she has a far more systematic approach than I do — which just underscores the need for a professional with a systematic approach. 

But as August rolled around, it seemed my first theory may have been right — our stats turned around again as people came back from vacation. But then I went on vacation…

I left on August 19 — and the chart speaks for itself. You can see that our impression activity goes up and down, based largely on when and what we post. On August 12 we posted a call for small businesses to fill out our Small Biz Spotlight questionnaire and then shared it to LinkedIn groups for local small businesses. The impact on our impressions is obvious. But ultimately, it wasn’t enough to keep our impressions out of the red when coupled with the lack of activity that comes from going on vacation. 

What we learned from our LinkedIn experiment 

Marketing a small business on social media isn’t easy — even on LinkedIn, where people are, theoretically, there to network. But our experiment not only reinforced some ideas we already had, but it taught us some new things as well.

1. Don’t spend too much time monitoring vanity metrics. Yes, we want eyes on our content, but what we really want to do is make sure we’re growing our following and getting people to actually visit our page and learn more about us. A ”custom button click” is the Holy Grail of engagement and it’s hard to come by.

2. Consistency is key. We all know that posting regularly is imperative but there’s nothing like a vacation in the woods without cell service to remind you how quickly you fall out of favor.

3. Engagement really is important. I scheduled content to post during my vacation but when I wasn’t there to engage in real-time, our stats took a hit. (It’s no coincidence that engagement is the most time-consuming — and most important — part of social media management.)

4. Experimenting and improving is the key to growth. If what you’re doing isn’t working, it’s time to change it up. As we move forward, we’ll have to experiment with ways to drive people to that custom button. We don’t expect it to be easy but every time we master one of these problems with our own social experimentation, we bring that lesson to our client work. 

P.S. After we “ended our experiment” we kept plugging away, and saw our number of unique visitors and new followers continued to grow, even as impressions declined! So we want to double down on that first lesson we learned — keep your eye on the metrics that really matter.