Did you know that 90 million senior-level influencers and 63 million decision-makers use LinkedIn? Here are four effective social media tips you can implement immediately to amplify your brand exposure and increase your thought-leadership presence on LinkedIn.

Set goals to track ROI

To generate business results, be clear with what specific result needs to be accomplished. The first and most crucial step is to define what a “win” is on LinkedIn. Here are some things to consider before starting to build out your LinkedIn presence. Do you want to:

• Increase website traffic?
• Increase the number of likes, comments or shares on your feed?
• Build brand awareness?
• Generate leads and sales?

Plan and prepare

Once you define what your goal is for being on LinkedIn, map out how you’re going to get there by answering these questions:

• What specifically does your audience want to know from you?
• How often will you deliver that content?

Create a content calendar based on your audience’s needs and wants. Leverage LinkedIn analytics to uncover popular content that your network enjoys. Tweak your posting plan each month to ensure that what you’re sharing is relevant to your audience’s interests and industry trends.

What to share

Now that you know what success looks like on LinkedIn for your firm and why you want to be active on it, let’s talk about the types of content your audience will want to engage with. Here are some ideas for topics you can share when you don’t have much time to construct a plan from scratch:

• Content from trusted sources
• Your entrepreneurial journey
• Charitable impact
• Events you are attending or sponsoring
• Business or entrepreneurship tips
• Highlights of your team
• Industry news

Other methods of sourcing content include gathering stories and testimonials from your team.

Ask them to collect one positive Google review each and contribute to your business’ brand awareness in the online world. Share one original blog post each month, providing value by posting original content.

Craft quality captions. Use three hashtags that include your #businessname, #topic and #localtopic. Use your wealth of wisdom to extract three expert topics, and incorporate these into your social media posts.

Be authentic and true to your brand while sharing information of value. A new study conducted by Hearsay Systems revealed that clients prefer lifestyle content from financial advisors on social media. “Lifestyle content is suggested the least by corporate marketing teams (23%), but has the highest engagement rates from advisors’ followers (48%). As a result, this limits advisors’ ability to present their personal authentic self, which their followers like to see,” according to the study.

Engage and stay top of mind

How do you keep your audience engaged? By having great content that is shared consistently. Aim to post three to five times a week, and like and comment on your network’s content daily.

Add a layer of engagement with video. Studies show that social media posts with video have 48% more views. Create your own live videos with time-sensitive industry and company news, or reshare videos by people you admire. Craft strong copy to accompany the video, and close with a measurable call to action to take advantage of this inbound marketing opportunity.

LinkedIn is not just a sales tool; it is also a recruiting tool and a digital portfolio that extends your website content to a larger audience. Company news and team highlights are easily shared in just one click. To save time and use LinkedIn efficiently, set goals, make a content plan, share information that adds value and incorporate video to tell your business story to your clients, contacts and colleagues.

Tara Clark is the founder and CEO of Vancouver-based social media agency Social T.