Business, personal or both? Getting the best from your LinkedIn accounts

What sort of LI accounts do you have?

Do you just have a personal account which you use for both engaging and business posts?

Or do you have the best of both worlds with separate personal and business accounts?

Do you need both type of accounts and what’s the best way to use them so they work in harmony?

Here we examine the two accounts and the best tactics to use to get the most from them.

The posting dilemma

When you start out on LinkedIn it makes sense to concentrate on your personal account.

It’s SOCIAL media, remember, and your personal account is the ideal medium to introduce who you are, what you do and what you stand for.

Having said that, don’t use your personal account as if it’s a business account and churn out sales post after sales post from the off.

Don’t make the mistake of turning up your nose at the more ‘personal’ type of post, these are your icebreakers and calling cards, if you will.

Think about posting on your personal account in the same way as you would approach an actual networking event.

If you turn up in person, you don’t go up to a complete stranger and give them a lecture on your business, do you?

If you do, you’ll quickly find yourself on the edge of the room and everyone will try to avoid you!

Why? Because that’s not how you introduce yourself to people!

It’s no different on social media, people are looking for a conversation, not a lecture!

They want to know something about who you are and get to know the real person behind the account.

‘People buy people’ has been almost done to death and turned into a cliché, but only because there’s a lot of truth behind it.

People want to get to know a potential client or customer before they work with them, your posts are therefore aiming to help you establish trust and give people confidence in both you and your product.

The time equation

One of the common themes you see on posts is that of time.

Time, in the sense that building a presence and connections on LinkedIn is a slow process, it takes time to get results when you open a personal account and start with no connections!

Then, of course, there’s the time you spend on the platform itself.

Remember, this is on top of the day-to-day business, plus of course family and personal commitments, and nobody has ever managed to extend a day beyond 24 hours!

If you work on both business and personal accounts from the off, you could dilute your efforts so much that you end up neglecting both of them.

Far better to start with your personal account, grow your network and following on that and leave the business account until you have become established personally.

When time is a limiting factor, it’s best to keep all your eggs in the one basket to begin with, do a good job growing the personal account instead of a half-hearted attempt to grow both at the same time.

In-house, or outsource?

If time is short, this is the question you need to be asking yourself.

Does it make sense to adopt a DIY approach or would you be better served by outsourcing your account management to a specialist SM account management agency?

Yes, there will be cost implications if you go down the outsourcing route.

You’ll need to weigh up the pros and cons of account management, which will get quicker results but at a cost, as opposed to going it alone which can be difficult when you are thinly spread and concentrating on the actual running of your business.

Developing your company account

Your company account will never get the reach or the level of engagement that a well run personal account gets, if you accept this from the outset you’ll save yourself a lot of frustration and pain!

Most business posts get lower engagement than personal ones, which isn’t surprising in view of the subject matter.

Business posts, after all, are focused on your target market far more than a personal account post is.

You’re telling your audience about the products and services you offer, maybe with case studies to show how your product or service overcame a problem and made it better.

There are only a certain number of ways you can comment on a sales post, so engagement will be lower as a result.

But engagement is only part of the story, what really matters are the number of views the post gets.

Many people on the platform are lurkers who may well read a post but don’t like or comment on it. We call then The Linky Lurkers.

However, never underestimate the power of the lurker. Often it is the lurker who will approach you out of the blue after reading your posts for some time before deciding they are interested enough to contact you and take things further.

Inviting connections to follow your business page

You can help your business account to gain followers by inviting people in your network to follow it.

On your company page click on the ‘Admin tools’ icon and click on ‘Invite connections’ which will bring up a list of connections who you can invite to follow it.

This can be broken down by industry sector so you can select which connections are most likely to be interested and thus are more likely to accept the request.

The best of both worlds, running your accounts in harmony

When you post on your business account, share it with your network via your personal account.

By doing so, you are getting two bites of the cherry since the post will be seen by both followers of your company page and also your personal account connections.

Just make sure that it is easy for your connections to make a clear distinction between the two, so keep purely business related posts for the company account and your more engaging posts should only be posted on the personal account.

Conclusion: Start personal and grow from there!

Keeping all your eggs in one basket isn’t always good advice but if you concentrate on building your personal presence before developing your company page you will have a far better network that can then take advantage of your specialist knowledge once you start posting on it.

If you can’t spare the time to run your own social media marketing why not have a chat about how we can help you get the most from it?