Do you struggle on knowing how to fully utilize LinkedIn for you institution? Brian Connelly, an Account Executive for LinkedIn Marketing Solutions, presented during one of our New & Next Spotlight sessions at Converge 2015. His informative session helped answered many top higher education questions and also shined light on tools, resources and strategies we all need to be taking more advantage of.
Establish your presence on LinkedIn
- Make regular posts to keep your content top-of-mind and top-of-feed!
- Post interactive content, asking open-ended question to encourage engagement
- Include rich media with posts – posts with photos and videos are 5x more engaging
- Use targeted status updates to reach specific audiences
- Encourage students and alumni to share experience and pride by posting recommendations
Need some inspiration for content to post? Here are some great content ideas to consider:
- Content featuring rankings or lists
- Play on nostalgia, events and experiences
- Participate and post about cultural events
- Highlight alumni or faculty successes
Familiarize yourself with tools and resources
LinkedIn Alumni Tool
This tool can help accelerate user’s careers through making campus connections. By staying connected with your alma mater, user’s can stay up to date on classmates’ career endeavors, campus news and potential job opportunities. Current students can connect with alumni in their network to research degree outcomes and field potential job opportunities before graduating.
On the institution side, university’s can highlight notable alumni and feature recommendations they’ve received from current students and alumni. School’s can also integrate the Alumni Tool on their website to showcase this information to potential prospects.
LinkedIn Add to Profile Button
“With the Add to Profile button, program participants can reach out to their connections with a suggestion to add their professional accomplishment or degree to their LinkedIn profile” – LinkedIn.com. This tool is free and easy to implement for users and help increase the overall natural exposure of both the school and its degree programs.
Organic and Sponsored Post Analytics
LinkedIn’s Analytics tool helps school’s understand the performance of organic and sponsored posts by reporting on metrics such as impressions served, clicks, likes, followers acquired, shares, visitor demographics and more. By analyzing this data, institution’s are able to dictate what type of content performs best allowing you to better strategize for future posts.
Another tool work checking out: LinkedIn Economic Graph. LinkedIn is digitally mapping the global economy with the vision to create economic opportunity for every member in the global workforce.
Build strong University, Company, Showcase page presence
The difference and how to utilize the different types of LinkedIn pages is definitely a hot topic in Higher Education. Every institution should have both a company page and a university page in order to leverage the different features and reach a larger audience. However, according to Brian Connelly, its likely that these two types of pages will be merged soon – stay tuned!
University Pages
Schools should utilize University Pages to market themselves and also build a community. Inform users of what makes your institution special by highlighting alumni, showcasing recommendations and connecting with alumni, students, prospects, parents, employers, faculty and donors.
Company Pages
School’s should use Company Pages to brand themselves as a company and employer by providing news updates, employment opportunities and other institutional information.
Showcase Pages
Does your institution struggle with needing to posts for different departments or school’s within your institution? Create separate showcase pages for each area so you can reach a more targeted audience with your content.
Focus on content creation and become a publisher
LinkedIn’s publishing platform has expanded allowing all members, in addition to influencers, publish long-form posts. Becoming a publisher on LinkedIn gives you the opportunity build influence through thought leadership by sharing your insights, knowledge and experiences.
While companies and school’s aren’t able to publish long-form posts from their Company or University pages just yet, encouraging current students, alumni, top influences and thought leaders in your network to share their experience and outcomes from you institution, can be even more powerful.
Additional LinkedIn Marketing Solutions
Sponsored Updates
Share your updates with a larger network while still be targeted enough to reach your ideal persona. Target users based on their job industry, education level, field of study, skills, LinkedIn groups they participate in and more.
Sponsored InMail
LinkedIn’s Sponsored InMail marketing solution allows you to get the right message to the right people at the right time. Sending highly targeted messages to your ideal audience to drive recruitment or alumni donations. LinkedIn InMail is only sent to members when they are on LinkedIn leading to an average open rate of about 40% – significantly higher than standard email campaigns.
Insight Tag
“The LinkedIn Insight Tag is a piece of lightweight JavaScript code that you can add to your website to enable in-depth campaign reporting and unlock valuable insights about your website visitors.” – LinkedIn.com. This tag allows you to better discover the demographics of your website visitors such as their job industry, seniority, company, skills and more. This tag can also help measure your LinkedIn marketing efforts by reporting visitors and their engagement.
For more LinkedIn higher education resources, visit LinkedIn.com/edu.
Download the presentation slides here.
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