How to avoid posting on LinkedIn

I generally avoid telling any of my clients that they have to do anything and, since someone says “I know I should be more active on LinkedIn” to me about once a week, agency leaders’ presence on social media is the topic of this week’s article.

You don’t have to be active on LinkedIn.

However, LinkedIn has several roles that do have to be done in some form. So, if you’re the sort of agency owner who hates social media and is looking for permission to avoid it completely, you can…as long as you do other things that tick these boxes.

1. Articulate your (segmentation, targeting and) positioning: you’ll need a website that you are confident explains exactly what your agency does and who it does that thing for. You need to replace a succinct “about me” with an even-more-succinct homepage and you’ll need to replace your weekly/twice-weekly/daily LinkedIn post with different content that articulates your point of view, like a blog post. Which leads us to…
2. Distribute your point of view: if you don’t want to use the feed to speak to LinkedIn’s captive audience, you’ll need to speak to your prospective customers elsewhere. Most commonly, this will be some combination of paid advertising, PR and public speaking. Other platforms, publishers and conferences have their own captive audiences you can speak to, who may or may not be the same audience that’s on LinkedIn, because some clients don’t log in all that often, so you’ll probably want to be doing some of this even if you are on LinkedIn. If you have a big presence (e.g. a large LinkedIn following), you’re more likely to be able to get to do this stuff for free…but you can just pay for it. Which leads us to…
3. Be top of mind: posting on LinkedIn every day/every other day/every week reminds people you exist and, let’s not kid ourselves, our clients don’t think about us all that much. Most agency comms are just supposed to make sure you’re in the right place at the right time, so if you’re not in the feed to prompt people, you just need to be in front of them on other channels. Cold outreach performs this same role (I’m fond of saying that the feed is just another email inbox); again, paid advertising does the job. Company LinkedIn pages do not do the job so, if you want your company to use that channel, it’s either your own profile or paid ads. Which leads us to…
4. Lead marketing by example: posting on LinkedIn is one of your company values (rather than the ones you think are your company values). If you post on LinkedIn, or speak on stage, or write blog posts, or whatever you want your marketing to be, then your smarter people will emulate you. I’ve written before about how this showed up in my career; first at Branded3 and then at Rise at Seven. If you don’t post then your people won’t post; if you do post, you can mobilise more (but not all) of your team to do the same. If you don’t want to post on LinkedIn, you can either a) do the other things that you do want to do and encourage your team to do the same or b) fund a larger marketing department who will do that for you. Which leads us to…
5. Build your black book: at some point, you’ll probably want to hire some people (as well as getting more clients and potentially also finding reliable freelancers). You can gain a following of potential new recruits who feel like they know you, agree with you and can stand to be around you…or you can do this by other means, like asking colleagues and clients for referrals and introductions; getting to networking events and/or having a coffee with people you feel have the right experience; or paying recruiters. (By now in the article you should be getting a sense that there’s a bunch of stuff you might want to be doing besides LinkedIn even if you do post!)You’ll want to make sure your team knows who you might be looking for so that they can keep the relevant contacts warm because, again, there’s a lot of “right place, right time” in recruitment: someone is looking for a role, or they’re not. Which leads us to…
6. Keep in touch with your team: this, in my opinion, is the one that flies under the radar for most leaders. Social media lets you talk to your staff every day. You can keep them posted on what’s going on in the business and consistently remind them where it’s headed and what it values, which is definitely one of the most important roles you play as a leader. If you don’t want to use your LinkedIn account in this way, you can: a) have a physical office location, with everyone in it, most of the time. If you have remote employees (or more than one office), ask yourself how often you communicate with them. It should be at least weekly;b) run at least one All Hands every week. Rise at Seven had All Rise last thing every Friday, where we’d reinforce values; update the team; and generally make sure the staff knew who we were. I wrote about that meeting here;c) write a weekly email to the whole team that celebrates the behaviours you want to see more of (values) and keeps the team in the loopd) walk the halls: visit the offices; grab a coffee with your remote workers; travel.Whichever you choose to do (LinkedIn; options a) through d); or something else), know that it’s important that your team feel like they know you. You’re going to be in some trenches in the next few years and you want your colleagues there with you when it hits the fan. Which leads us to…
7. Stay in the loop yourself: I have, honestly, tried to make this a balanced article and that’s hopefully demonstrated by this last point: LinkedIn is a trash place to get your news from because it’s full of people who are spinning it to sound like they’re the ones with the answers (basically like the Daily Mail or any other media)...but you’ll know more about what’s going on if you’re in the feed, looking for people’s thoughts to engage with. Instead of LinkedIn, you could read industry news in another format, like a good publication (I read Prolific North); someone’s newsletter (I love Tina Fegent’s weekly newsletter, although that is on LinkedIn); or, I don’t know, YouTube or something. But it’s your job to decide where the agency is going and you can only do that if you know where the industry is going, so pay attention. You need to be open to new ideas coming your way, which leads us to…
8. Be contactable: clients send briefs via LinkedIn; new hires message agency owners on LinkedIn; people who might be helpful to you in all sorts of other ways reach out to you on LinkedIn. Some of these things happen via your website’s contact form but many of them do not. Instead of using LinkedIn, you can publish your personal email address; you can hand out business cards at networking events; you can be prolific in communities like WhatsApp groups and Agency Hackers and so on. But if the leader doesn’t let new opportunities arrive in one of their inboxes, those new opportunities go to someone else. (Complete aside, but I’ve always found it incredibly odd that some agency leaders require someone trying to connect with them to enter their email address for the connection to go through. Why are you on this platform?)

I don’t think this list is exhaustive: there are other benefits to being active on the social network (there are, in fact, other social networks, but it’s rare that I get asked about those, so that’s probably best saved for another article).

I help agencies to plan their marketing, which may or may not include the leaders’ personal LinkedIn accounts: I’ve learned that if they don’t want to do it, it’s not going to work, so we choose alternatives.

I also help leaders who do want to use LinkedIn to decide what they want to say (again, when it’s part of a wider marketing plan…you’ve seen in this post that LinkedIn is never the one answer) and hold them accountable for actually doing it.

If that sounds like you, why not message me on LinkedIn...