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LinkedIn remains a powerful marketing tool for companies. More importantly, the platform is one of the best routes to building a professional and Personal Brand to showcase your talent, thinking and skill sets.

Over the years, the growth of the ‘business’ social network has sadly created a dilution in the professional side and in turn, accelerated the banal side, often found on broader social channels.

Though I’m not the first to write about this and without wishing to sound like an old grump, there seems to be a steady onslaught of people unaware that what they are posting is rapidly impacting how others see them.

Absolutely, though when was the last time you shared pictures of your breakfast with a prospect or your top client?

With LinkedIn being used as a major due diligence tool by business, coupled with the continual bombardment of social messaging, the importance of content as well as ‘context’ is now paramount.

This broad church has many eyes and ears. Old prospects lurking in the wings, waiting to engage in your services and part with hard earned cash — only to see you posting a video on how a 3D printer can recreate a dolls house… All that hard work and prospecting, falling flat due to a miss timed post.

Why, when your personality comes through in well-crafted posts.

Click bait, or the luring of people to click on your post which has no relevance, is a big issue and more likely to hinder customers than help them.

The continual need for acceptance in today’s social [media] aware society means that we are often lulled into thinking that quantity is quality.

Wrong.

With LinkedIn, less is more. Like any content, you engage based on its appeal, structure and message. Put yourself in your client’s shoes. Would you want to read what you’ve posted?

Are you measuring posts and content? When was the last time you generated a UTM code, linked to Google Analytics?

If not, why not? When does posting on LinkedIn become spamming on LinkedIn? Without measurement, you cannot tell.

Some questions to ask yourself:

Have you distributed LinkedIn posts across other networks? If so when and what was most potent? What time of day creates most engagement? Which clicks lead to conversions or inquiries? What success metrics do you attribute to a post?

Analysing and refining will show what works and equally, what doesn’t.

Overall, people will occasionally tolerate more personal posts, but with 40% of users checking LinkedIn daily, when these irrelevant post become continual, think about what you may be damaging.

This post first appeared in Medium on Jan 30 2017