Brenda Burch Dumont's Blog

CHAPTER TWO – LINKEDIN

I am often asked how much time it takes to be fully ‘engaged’ in social media.  Well, the question isn’t ever as broadstroked as that, but how much time it takes to have a successful presence and engage with your audience on popular platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook is of high interest to those considering a social media plan.

To try and narrow the question so the answer is useful, I’ll address what time I think it takes to maintain an active and engaged presence on LinkedIn each week to continue to develop your talent hub to attract qualified and appropriate candidates for your recruiting requirements.

Before moving forward to answer the question let me try to explain ‘engaged’ This word is getting over worked currently.  Basically, ‘engaged’ refers to the regular back and forth communication between company/individual and fans/visitors/customers/etc. that is the hallmark of social media.  If your social media program is ‘engaged’ you are receiving questions, answering questions, commenting on comments, and generally gaining branding traction through tweets, updates, comments, videos, and common discussions.  It’s the different between dating (one sided communication) and being engaged (back and forth communication takes place – let’s hope!)

Back to being ‘engaged’ on LinkedIn.  Time must be initially spent to ensure:

• you have a complete and accurate profile,

• that your company’s profile is complete and the correct individuals are appearing as employees,
• that time has been spent to connect with the correct colleagues, vendors, subject experts, competitors, and consultants
• that you have joined the appropriate Groups for your industry and your discipline
• that you have a number of quality references for various aspects of your career

Once those basics are created (and that will take some time!) here is what I would recommend is accomplished at minimum each week with suggested time period requirements:

Once a day – check your home page on LinkedIn. (many people open the page in the morning and leave it on during the day to check periodically or when you can – remember, you’ll have to refresh the page each time)  If recruiting is your full-time responsibility and you have actually postings on the LinkedIn job board, you may want to check responses 2-3 times per day.  The home page will tell you about:

• who’s connecting to whom – the very convenient mouse-over lets you know who your competitors are connecting with or your subtly advise you of a new arrival in your area.
• who has visited your profile – always interesting information
• which new discussions have been started under which Group
• what new blog posts have been posted by your followers
• potential new followers (these ‘suggestions’ are determined by an intuitive search engine using keywords

You can see how easily you could spend all day following up on one topic or another.  My suggestion?  Depending on how many open orders you are working on, and the fact that LinkedIn is definitely a platform where the more you put in, the more you get out…………you should ‘engage’ in the following activities for about 1 hour per day:

• Research potential new individuals to follow.
• Check new group discussions.  Those discussions that are really discussions as opposed to strictly jobs posted under various groups represents the very best way to develop your talent hub, grow your candidate base and develop credibility for yourself and your company. Sorry for the overkill with the italics and the bolding but without a doubt, knowledgeably participating in a worthwhile group discussion not only gives you the answer to the discussion question, or the opinions of experts for free, while providing an excellent learning opportunity – but your participation can greatly enhance you and your company’s credibility, reputation and brand with all the fellow Group members.  These group discussions often go viral and soon your participation can be part of a topic being discussed by huge numbers of individuals on the world wide web.
• Produce worthwhile, educational status updates.  Everyone says that any tweet, status update (on Facebook), or update on LinkedIn that provides information or a learning opportunity to your followers is the ‘best’ in terms of acceptability and – here’s that word again – engagement.

Ok, an hour a day on LinkedIn, add another 5 a week for Twitter (from my last week’s blog ‘How much time does it really take to be ‘engaged’ in social media recruiting – Chapter One – Twitter?’

http://tinyurl.com/2decj4a

and we are now at 10 hours per week on average and counting.  Next week we’ll talk about the time spent on your Facebook Fan Page.  Don’t have one?  Gosh, you’d better consider one fast.

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Retail, social media by Brenda