I recently found out that there are some social media agencies selling content services for LinkedIn that includes lots of external links for you to share with you network. This is bad advice and a waste of your money – here’s why! LinkedIn want to keep you on their platform and therefore don’t favour links to external websites and content. Yes your post will still reach a few members of your network HOWEVER the algorithm will limit the number of people it reaches. LinkedIn also prefers it when people engage and interact with your content and historically links to external websites haven’t received much engagement in terms of comments and interaction. Here’s a video I recorded for LinkedIn and posted. You can see the original post here.

The more you understand who your target customers and market is the better your content will be and the more people will engage with what you post. Don’t try and communicate with a broad or generic audience – the more specific you can be the better!

Make sure whoever you pay to help you with your social media knows what they are talking about and keeps up to date with what’s going on.

I’m not going to lie – things change all the time and it takes a lot of time to keep learning best practice for each platform and not all social platforms are the same either! Don’t waste your money on things that won’t serve you well or generate any results. Since posting this on Friday I’ve received so many messages from people that have been stung by these types of services and it’s just not good practice. The same goes for other LinkedIn ‘experts’ selling you services that connect you with 500-1000 new connections per month.

Don’t cheat the system and try and buy relationships.

Take the time and get to know people you add into your network as it will pay off in both the long and the short term. Also don’t discount people straight away if they aren’t your ideal customer or target market – you never know who they know or who they could introduce you to!