Why and How to Use LinkedIn for Business Growth in 2024

If your business is not yet on LinkedIn, opportunities for growth, visibility, and connection-making may be slipping through your fingers. LinkedIn is home to over 1 billion members and 67 million companies, but more than just a global playground for professionals, it is a vibrant tool to drive your business forward.

This article extracts insights on mastering LinkedIn growth from an “Uploading…” episode with Logan Lyles, a master of content and evangelism at teamwork.com. It covers why your business needs to establish a strong presence on LinkedIn, the steps you need to take to expand and enrich your social network, how employee advocacy can transform your brand's social reach, and what type of LinkedIn content will hit the mark this 2024.

Why Your Business Should Be on LinkedIn

Your business, no matter the size or industry it operates in, can benefit immensely from a well-structured LinkedIn presence. Here’s why:

1. LinkedIn rewards social interactions

Unlike other social media platforms where posting is the main pathway to visibility, on LinkedIn, the rewards are more distributed. Logan notes that merely commenting on a LinkedIn post can bring you into people's feeds and increase your visibility. 

Your name and profile can spread organically to wider circles of people even without you having to create a singular piece of content yourself. It's a brilliant way that LinkedIn provides an avenue for engagement and enhanced exposure that other platforms can't quite match.

2. LinkedIn helps establish thought leadership

As it sifts and serves expert voices in various industries, LinkedIn is second to none when it comes to nurturing thought leaders. Any informative articles you write, insightful conversations you spark, or industry changes you highlight on this platform can amass visibility and credibility for your business. 

A single eloquent post or a well-argued comment can mark you as an authority in your field, especially if the content resonates with professionals in that niche. Your footprint on LinkedIn is not only about how much business acumen you possess but also how effectively you engage others with your knowledge and insights. It is this exchange of intellectual capital that makes LinkedIn a unique platform for your business to establish and augment its thought leadership. 

3. LinkedIn powers lead generation

Every single LinkedIn interaction can be a way for you to generate leads. Consider this platform as a virtual hub where salespeople, solo entrepreneurs, and representatives of all types of businesses can gain traction—not just through overt selling but by engaging richly with the community.

Logan Lyles emphasizes that maximizing LinkedIn doesn’t merely mean utilizing tools like Sales Navigator or LinkedIn Ads or incessantly sending InMail messages. More often than not, your active participation—sharing opinions, initiating discussions—can create authentic connections that eventually convert into leads. If you're offering valuable services or trying to grow your audience, expressing genuine interest in what others are doing can become an opening act for lucrative conversations.

4. LinkedIn is filled with relevant audience

Another major reason your business needs to be on LinkedIn is the quality and relevance of its user base. As Logan notes, locating your target audience is a fundamental marketing principle. And if you're in the B2B or professional services sector, there's no question about it: Your audience is more likely engaging on LinkedIn.

The platform has a higher proportion of business decision-makers than any other network—around 65 million, in fact. These are the individuals who can say "yes" to your proposals, who hold the budgets and call the shots. Having direct access to them increases chances exponentially that you'll hit upon those transformative business relationships.

5. LinkedIn enables professional network building

Lastly, LinkedIn enables you to keep tabs on current and potential clients, industry colleagues, old schoolmates who may now hold prominent positions—anyone who could play a part in business possibilities.

LinkedIn is engineered for connection-making: It encourages you to build new connections out of friends of friends and even suggests who to connect with based on your professional background and interests. Leveraging these features can gradually amass a broad, diverse network of individuals who could become partners or clients or who could refer you to other potential opportunities.

How to Grow Your LinkedIn Network in 3 Steps

With digital profiles becoming the new storefronts, presence becomes more than just being there. Creating LinkedIn company pages is already a huge step in the right direction, but you shouldn't stop there. Growing your LinkedIn network effectively calls for a strategic approach. According to Logan Lyles, who has built a prolific online presence with his LinkedIn profile, there are three pivotal steps to follow.

Step 1: Follow people who are influential in your space on LinkedIn

Just as you select which TV channels to watch, your choice of what LinkedIn pages and profiles to follow has a substantial impact on the type of content you come across. When you follow influential people on LinkedIn, their updates and posts become part of your daily feed and present opportunities for engagement.

Their content can also provide insights into their thinking and approaches, which could then inform your own LinkedIn marketing and content strategy. Over time, regularly engaging with the posts of these influential people can help you get noticed by a wider social network within your industry.

Step 2: Connect with them and comment on their LinkedIn posts

Don't just passively consume LinkedIn content; actively participate by commenting with meaningful insights, questions, or praise. The goal here isn’t to simply increase your comment count but rather to contribute meaningfully to the conversation at hand. Discuss the points you found most interesting in their posts or share an experience that mirrors theirs.

Remember Logan's point about how LinkedIn rewards social interactions? Your comments can subtly signal your expertise and thus position your LinkedIn profile as one worth watching. Be consistent without spamming. Aim for regular engagement over a period of time for solid results.

Step 3: Upcycle your comments to create your own LinkedIn posts

You’ve started following influencers in your niche and regularly engaging through comments. Now it's time to leverage those efforts further by turning your comments into content of their own that you can post on LinkedIn groups or your own LinkedIn profile or business page.

Start looking into your thoughtful, detailed comments and identify ones you can expand upon in stand-alone posts. In this way, your comment on someone else's post could be just the springboard for an engaging article of your own—driving further visibility and interaction on your account.

How Can Your Employees Help Boost Your LinkedIn Profile

​​As a business on LinkedIn, if you're eager to expand your reach farther and faster, it's time to tap into the power of employee advocacy. This means encouraging employees to share brand-approved content about your company with their own social networks.

The numbers speak for themselves: a study shows that an employee’s voice has a 561% greater reach than official corporate channels. Your employees can transform into your company's micro-influencers, penetrating social networks otherwise unreachable by traditional marketing means.

How then can your business harness this potential and successfully set up an employee advocacy program on LinkedIn? Here are four steps to follow:

Step 1: Cultivate a culture that supports employee advocacy

Employee advocacy on LinkedIn shouldn't be mechanistic—it works best when genuinely fostered in an organization that values its employees and develops an inherent culture of sharing. If your brand fosters engagement internally, your team members will more likely want to trumpet their experiences externally. 

This starts with transparency, communication, personal growth opportunities, and recognition. When people feel connected to their company's mission and appreciated for what they achieve, conveying pride in their workplace will come naturally online.

Step 2: Provide shareable content and easy-to-follow instructions

Not everyone in your team would have experience or confidence navigating LinkedIn. As an organization, make it simpler for them by providing ready-to-share content relevant to your vertical and objectives. 

This could take the form of company news, success stories, values-focused posts, thought leadership pieces—anything that will represent both themselves and your brand well on LinkedIn without appearing overly promotional.

Additionally, offer resources like brief LinkedIn training sessions, as Logan does, or guidelines so employees understand best practices for sharing content. Discuss what is acceptable to post about from a corporate perspective. Let them know it's not just permissible but encouraged that they bring their unique voice into these content marketing pieces.

Step 3: Appreciate and incentivize active participants

It's important to acknowledge the effort your employees put into using their own LinkedIn accounts as an organic extension of your company's marketing efforts. Recognize those who actively participate in your advocacy program—weekly or monthly shout-outs or public appreciation during team meetings can go a long way toward boosting morale.

Beyond simple recognition, consider integrating incentives such as gamified leaderboards for the most active advocates, prizes for the most engagement garnered on LinkedIn posts, or even bonuses tied to program participation.

Remember, the goal isn’t just about having numerous employee LinkedIn posts but promoting genuine enthusiasm among your team which reflects externally. So make sure any incentives align with this principle rather than encouraging a flurry of superficial activity.

Step 4: Measure the impact of your employee advocacy program

Finally, ensure you have mechanisms in place to gauge the effects of your employee advocacy program. Track metrics such as reach, engagement rates, and traffic generated to your website from LinkedIn posts by your employees.

You can use LinkedIn analytics to gather data about post-performance. If needed, you can also look into third-party employee advocacy tools that offer even deeper analysis.

Don’t forget to also gauge qualitative success—Has there been increased client recognition? Positive customer feedback? Improved company reputation? 

Use the insights you gathered to refine your strategy, optimize content production and distribution, or re-orientate misrepresented brand impressions in employees' LinkedIn conversations if necessary. 

What Types of LinkedIn Posts Should You Create in 2024 

Visibility on LinkedIn in 2024 is as much about the substance of what you share as it is about adopting evolving content forms that audiences resonate with. While polished, long-form thought leadership articles will remain important, different types of more dynamic and engaging posts can accelerate your growth on this platform. 

Logan’s predictions center around relying on video content—specifically short-form videos, interviews, and reaction pieces—for LinkedIn marketing in 2024. Video content will ensure you capture attention effectively amid LinkedIn timelines teeming with written exchanges.

1. Short-Form Videos

2024 sees the rightful coronation of short-form video content. With platforms like TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts shaping consumers' content consumption habits, LinkedIn users have similarly gravitated towards quick, impactful videos.

The push for brevity in a professionally geared environment like LinkedIn means framing concise yet compelling narratives limited only by creativity. With these bite-sized content pieces, you can comment on industry trends, give quick product updates, or offer advice or tips related to your niche.

2. Interviews

Logan also recommends the use of interviews for LinkedIn marketing content creation. Interviews have a timeless appeal as they offer behind-the-scenes insights that thought-out LinkedIn posts can't quite capture. 

LinkedIn audiences appreciate the authenticity and expertise that come with one-on-one interviews. Whether it’s sharing snippets from a podcast or a Q&A with an industry expert, interviews can provide a wealth of knowledge and perspectives. 

Be sure to tag the individuals involved for increased visibility and engagement across networks on LinkedIn. Also, remember that you can use Castmagic to automatically draft engaging captions that capture the essence of your interviews.

3. Reaction Videos

The final recommendation from Logan is reaction videos, burgeoning in popularity across multiple platforms and now finding their place on LinkedIn. These videos typically consist of you reacting to market trends, new regulations, competitor declarations—essentially anything industry-related that your audience would find interesting.

Reaction videos not only give your perspective on a topic but also invite dialogues around the subjects at hand. Moreover, they can emphasize how current and involved you are with happenings in your field, which only adds to your credibility and trustworthiness on LinkedIn.

Key Takeaways: Your LinkedIn Company Page, Your Growth Asset

Successful LinkedIn marketing hinges on proactive, strategic engagement. This article advanced the dialogue around this in four dimensions.

• Rather than treating LinkedIn as a billboard, your businesses should lean into it as a vibrant social community rewarding meaningful interactions—from thought leadership attempts to innocuous comments under posts. 
• Growing your LinkedIn network calls for closely following influential figures and creating dialogues with them, which could later be upcycled into lucrative content pieces.
• Your business stands at an opportunity junction where your employees can act as potent brand evangelists within their individual networks. By tapping into employees as micro-influencers, businesses on LinkedIn can multiply touchpoints with potential leads or partners outside traditional promotional efforts.
• While text-based posts continue to hold their ground on LinkedIn, looking ahead lays bare a stronger emphasis on video content. Documenting interviews or reacting to industry updates via videos will connect your business closer to audiences quicker compared to what any series of written posts would achieve. 

Start Doing Business on LinkedIn, The Right Way

The game and the rules may change, yet mastering LinkedIn growth in 2024 boils down to genuine, strategic engagement that provides value. More than merely using the platform for job postings or sharing corporate narratives now and then, businesses must exploit the various avenues that reward real social interactions.

Investing in building individual thought leadership and fostering employee advocacy effectively while embracing evolving content types such as LinkedIn videos helps you create relatable impressions amidst millions of users. Even with its billion-member stature, navigating LinkedIn marketing and networking can be less about fitting into overwhelming numbers and more about taking a few strategic steps in meaningful corners.

For more insights into content marketing success and to connect with thought leaders like Logan Lyles, listen to 'Uploading...'. Your next business breakthrough could be just one episode away.