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The best brands in the world have 60 per cent or more of their staff on LinkedIn.
UNIVERSITY STUDENTS ON LINKEDIN All students, before they complete their course at your university, should add the details of their education to their LinkedIn profile( even if they did not complete their qualification).
Heads of departments and career staff can provide specific instructions on how to do this, ensuring that students choose your university from the drop-down box and that they include a description of your university in the description box, a list of the subjects they have completed, and a text link to the university at the end( this will be a clickable link on an Android phone). You can see an example on my LinkedIn profile at https:// www. linkedin. com / in / sueellson.
This section also provides an opportunity to add or link to external documents, photos, sites, videos and presentations that can showcase the student’ s achievements or even their graduation certificate online.
It is also a good idea for students to add both their university email address and their personal email address to their LinkedIn account, and to make sure they do not remove their university email address after their studies so that they can still be‘ found’ by other LinkedIn members via this email address. For more, go to https:// university. linkedin. com / linkedin-for-students.
UNIVERSITY ACADEMICS AND STAFF ON LINKEDIN All academics and staff can be given guidelines on how they can showcase their employment at your university on their LinkedIn profile. For example, you can provide some choices for them to consider including a banner image to put behind their photograph, specific guidelines on how to complete their Experience section( including a description of the university, their tasks and achievements, and a website address) and making sure they choose your university from the drop-down box.
They may also like to add your university website address in their website links section at https:// www. linkedin. com / in / edit / contactinfo( a great backlink to the university website).
If they have a profile on your university website, they could link directly to this page, and ultimately your university could track how many visits are coming via LinkedIn. Naturally, all academics and staff should receive a written copy of your LinkedIn social media policy, which should also include what they need to do when they are no longer working at your university.
UNIVERSITY ALUMNI ON LINKEDIN When students select your university from the drop-down box in their Education section, it will automatically add them to the alumni list at your university. This is great news, but it doesn’ t guarantee you direct access to these alumni – it simply showcases them on your university profile.
However, the good news is that if you have an email list of all of your alumni( it is always best to ask for their personal email address rather than their work email address), you can pay for a sponsored InMail via LinkedIn to reach these people. You will need to electronically upload this list to LinkedIn. This can be a very effective way to reach people if they have not already responded to their email correspondence, but depending on your numbers of alumni, it could be very expensive!
The other option is to create a LinkedIn group for your alumni. This can also be helpful, but alas, a lot of people do not always see group messages( because they have unsubscribed from notifications) or they do not join the group in the first place as they are more interested in their own topics than what is happening at their alma mater.
The alumni tool can also be very good at identifying individuals who could be considered for an award, scholarship, speaking or fundraising opportunity at your university.
UNIVERSITY MARKETING AND BRANDING ON LINKEDIN
I do not recommend paying for sponsored updates, as these only appear in the LinkedIn newsfeed and the actual amount of time people spend looking at their newsfeed is not significant at this time. If you do go down this path, choose the‘ click through’ option rather than the‘ impressions’ option.
However, your university will want to have a terrific university profile and share relevant updates roughly once a week( so that people checking you out can see some good quality content). All comments should be responded to as quickly as possible.
Every update should aim to have at least five Likes, and this can be helped if you copy the link from the update and send a direct email message to selected individuals and invite them to‘ Like, Comment or Share’ the piece( also known as employee advocacy or employee marketing). If this is done soon after publication, it can increase the viral potential of the post.( Employees in your case could include students, academics, staff and alumni.)
Your vice-chancellor is also an important representative of your university, and it may also be appropriate to encourage them( or other heads of schools) to share relevant updates via their personal LinkedIn profile( it is also important that their LinkedIn profile be of excellent quality). Again, encourage early interaction to increase virality.
PUBLISHING ON LINKEDIN Individuals can publish articles on LinkedIn that remain on their LinkedIn profile( not lost in the newsfeed) until they are deleted, and these can be search engine optimised to appear in Google search results. You can see all of mine at https:// www. linkedin. com / today / author / sueellson and all of yours by changing‘ sueellson’ to the name of your LinkedIn profile.
Your university can encourage students, academics and staff to publish here and at the end of the article, provide a link back to the university and then share it as a post. Note that Google does not like duplicate content, so it needs to be at least 30 per cent different to anything else published online by the author.
OTHER STRATEGIES There are many other techniques you can use with LinkedIn, and multiple strategies are available for connecting, activity building, content creation and curating, research, relationship development, reputation management, alumni engagement, professional status building, information gathering, comment responses, lead generation and business development. ■
Sue Ellson is an independent LinkedIn specialist, trainer, consultant and author. For more information, email sueellson @ sueellson. com.
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