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This is a short post. Because the answer to the question, “How did your library double engagement on LinkedIn?” is easy.

We started posting more often.

Let’s back up a bit. Why would a library even consider being on LinkedIn? It’s just one more social network that you gotta worry about, right? Who has the time? It’s not as sexy or provocative as Twitter and it’s not as timely as Snapchat. It doesn’t have Facebook’s gigantic audience. You could even argue that LinkedIn is hard to figure out in terms of user experience.

Those were all my concerns every time my social media specialist and I sat down to talk about LinkedIn. It just didn’t seem like a place where our cardholders were hanging out. Turns out we were wrong. We just had to put some cheese in the mousetrap.

Before this revelation, we posted to LinkedIn about twice a week, if we remembered. Our standards for success were pretty reasonable. In our documented strategy, we state that we will use LinkedIn to build a professional network to help increase the use and awareness of our business and career resources. Our benchmark for success is 1400 weekly impressions.

My social media specialist went on a well deserved vacation this past summer and I took charge of LinkedIn while he was gone. And I decided to experiment by posting on the site every weekday. I picked things I thought would resonate with the LinkedIn audience–professionals looking to network, find new jobs, and build connections that will help them advance in their careers.

One day I posted a promotion for an upcoming seminar on small business grants, with a beautiful, correctly sized graphic I created for free on Canva.  On another day, I chose to promote a self-help book from our new arrivals feed.  We were already posting a “Worker Wednesday” profile each week, highlighting one of our branch staff on our other social media platforms and I posted that on LinkedIn. I also promoted a niche business magazine from our eBranch and a vintage photo of librarians at one of our branches.

The result is that engagement doubled over the course of two weeks and we decided, right then and there, to adjust our strategy and post more often on LinkedIn. Our little experiment showed there was clearly an audience for those messages.

Be sure you have a social media strategy before you undertake any serious posting on any social media platform. But remember that you can always change your strategy if you discover something new about a platform that has performed consistently for you for some time. Flexibility is good!

And if your library is on LinkedIn and is having success, please let me know. I’d love to talk to you about it!

Subscribe to this blog and you’ll receive an email every time I post. To do that, click on “Follow” button on the bottom left-hand corner of the page. Connect with me on Twitter and Snapchat–it’s where I talk about library marketing! I’m @Webmastergirl. I’m also on LinkedIn, Slideshare,  Instagram and Pinterest. Views in this post are my own and do not represent those of my employer.