How To Boost Your Engagement on LinkedIn With An “Engagement Circle”

In our Beginner’s Guide To LinkedIn Marketing, we talked a lot about the importance of engagement as it relates to reach. Here, we’ll dive deep into how to boost your LinkedIn marketing reach by creating what we refer to as an engagement circle. 

Followers vs. Engagement on LinkedIn

You might be tempted to look at your follower count to determine how many people will see your posts on LinkedIn. In reality, the reach of your posts all depends on engagement. That’s why when you post on your Company Page on LinkedIn, the most important thing is to get engagement. 

Engagement on LinkedIn includes Likes, Shares, and Comments on your posts. The sooner after your posting the better. That will tell LinkedIn’s algorithm that the post is interesting. Then, they will begin showing it to more and more people.

As people engage with your posts by Liking, Sharing, and Commenting, their network will see your post. You might rely on your own followers to engage initially. But, it’s really the power of your followers’ network that will impact your reach. 

Your number of followers can only get you so far. This is why it’s much more important to judge your success on social media platforms by your engagement rate and not follower count. 

Here are a couple examples that show follower number vs. impressions. (Impressions are how many times the post showed up in someone’s feed.) 

How To Get Engagement on LinkedIn

Now that we’ve covered why engagement is so important, let’s talk about how to boost your engagement on LinkedIn. 

The best way we’ve found to kick off engagement on LinkedIn posts is to have a group of people you call on to engage with your posts in an authentic way. We call this an engagement circle. This is as simple as sending out a notification to these folks when a post is made on your LinkedIn Company Page so they can engage with it. 

Encourage your engagement circle to engage with each post by making Comments, Sharing, and Liking the post in authentic ways. Your post will then be visible to the connections of everyone who has engaged with the post. 

How To Create a LinkedIn Engagement Circle

It’s important you choose the people who make up your engagement circle wisely. They should be connected with industry professionals relevant to your target market. After all, it’s your engagement circle’s connections that will be the main audience for your posts.

If you are a marketing professional in-house at a company, pull in 5-10 co-workers to make up your engagement circle. If you are a solopreneur, rally a small group of 3-5 other professionals with similar goals and create an engagement circle together. In a corporate setting, share posts made by your employees. In a group of like-minded solopreneurs, be each others’ cheerleaders with engagement. Engagement circles should be a win-win for everyone involved.

The key with anything on LinkedIn is to make sure your posts and engagement are authentic. If the same person is posting the same comment on every post, or sharing every single thing you post with their network, that will start to come across as spammy and inauthentic to their network. Be sure to make it clear to everyone involved that they should only comment, react, or share if it feels authentic.

Check out our LinkedIn Resources here for more tips on LinkedIn marketing how-tos and strategy.