Maximize Your Impact with LinkedIn Formatting

Facebook. Instagram. TikTok. LinkedIn. There are so many social media platforms that it’s hard to keep up with what works and what doesn’t to gain followers and get views. When it comes to higher ed marketing, how you post on different platforms can make a big difference in your engagement with possible future students. LinkedIn is a platform that can have a major impact on graduate enrollment.

Why? Well, more than half of all Americans with a college degree have a LinkedIn profile. In fact, according to HubSpot, LinkedIn is the number one social network for lead generation. Added to the fact that posts on LinkedIn with hyperlinks to other websites increase engagement by over 200%, LinkedIn can be a game changer for graduate programs across the country.

This means, when VisionPoint Marketing and its partners post on social media, it’s important to get it right.

But when multiple people are in charge of your brand’s social media posts, it can be hard to keep up with what everyone knows about how to make these posts. Creating a document of “best practices” is a great way to keep everyone in the loop. Two quick LinkedIn tips that should be added to your best practices document are:

• Tagging your institution or employees in posts and comments.
• Hyperlinking to your institution’s website.

The consistency between posts by multiple social media managers will help your readers get deeper into your brand, and it will help keep your posts and brand crisp and clean. Both of these are relatively easy to implement uniformly and go a long way to building trust among your readers.

Linking to another LinkedIn page

Use the @ symbol and type the person or company’s name. This can be used in posts as well as in comments for a nice clean link to someone else’s LinkedIn page. For example:

• Have you heard about @visionpointmarketing’s new offerings?
  • When you type @ and then begin typing VisionPoint’s name, VisionPoint Marketing will come up and you just click it and continue typing.
  • This will hyperlink to the company or person’s LinkedIn page.

Adding a hyperlink to an outside webpage

Note: There is some debate about whether or not LinkedIn algorithms are affected by adding links to a main post. Some people and companies avoid this by adding “See link in comments” and then posting the link in the first comment.

To add a link to your LinkedIn post, just copy the URL from the address bar and paste it in your post. This will create a preview box of the webpage you are pointing to, allowing readers to know where they are headed. For example:

• VisionPoint Marketing has several job openings. If you are interested in joining a family of highly-motivated employees dedicated to higher ed marketing, visit https://www.visionpointmarketing.com to find out more.

That link in the post will then allow LinkedIn to create a preview of the VisionPoint website for readers to see before clicking.

When posting a hyperlink to a comment, you will most likely not see the preview box, so just a nice, clean direct link is needed, like the one above.

Note: There has been some success with creating preview boxes if the writer uses the LinkedIn App on their phone, but this does not work every time. It’s better to make sure your hyperlink is “live” so people can click on it.

If your URL is long or ugly, consider shortening it using TinyURL or Bitly to make the URL more manageable. Your company should come up with a policy for when URLs should be shortened and add it to your best practices document.

Work with us

Interested in what more than 20 years in the higher ed market can bring to your college or university? Visit https://www.visionpointmarketing.com to learn more.