Meet the person named Australia’s best influencer
Stuart Kennedy looks at the characteristics of the most successful participants in this year's LinkedIn Agency Influencer program.
Media agency employees can make powerful contributions to their agency brands by publishing unique content as a long form post on LinkedIn, the business-oriented social media platform.
LinkedIn has developed an Agency Influencer program especially for media agencies in Australia. It helps employees develop content that not only shows off their agency’s brand but also grabs the thought leadership baton and leads to deeper engagement with clients.
“There is a huge appetite and need for media agencies to have a bigger presence on our platform,” says Lara Brownlow, Head of Agencies at LinkedIn ANZ.
“The aim of Agency Influencer is to enable people to get their ideas and opinions out there to take part in the conversations that are happening in an ever-changing industry.”
Run as a competition, the Agency Influencer program is unique to Australia and helps individuals working in Australian media agencies find their voice on the LinkedIn platform and become thought leaders outside the traditional trade press stage. It was launched via an Australia-wide roadshow through April and May 2016 and wrapped up on November 18.
A total of 300 people registered to be part of the program from across 70 different agencies in Australia.
The first prize was a trip to New York and a visit to the LinkedIn office in the historic Empire State Building that dominates mid-town Manhattan.
With change hitting traditional media, social media and programmatic advertising at an ever more rapid rate, there’s plenty of grist for the mill.
Taking the high ground on thought leadership through LinkedIn can really help close a pitch, with statistics showing 62 per cent of readers are in the upper ranks of their industries: managers, VPs, CEOs. The social media platform recently surpassed 160,000 long form posts a week and its more than 10 million posts to date – according to internal data – make it one of the world’s fastest growing platforms for professional publishing.
“There’s just so much to discuss and debate, and LinkedIn allows agency employees to have that voice and share their thoughts with the wider market,” says Brownlow, adding that the quality and quantity of content – more than 200 published pieces – was outstanding. “The standard of content we have seen from this promotion has blown us away.”
The Agency Influencer program featured a leader board, updated every month, showing which participating people had been the most influential on LinkedIn.
A corresponding education program has seen different learning modules posted every month from LinkedIn’s learning portal Lynda.com. The modules covered topics ranging from the best tactics in developing successful content marketing to profile optimisation and leadership tips , such as LinkedIn global editor Dan Ross revealing in an online video how he writes persuasive posts.
Examples of published work include a piece on the Pokémon phenomenon by Foundation’s head of strategy Rachael Lonergan. This was the most read article in the entire program, with an impressive 30,000 readers.
“Lonergan is among those who make smart use of LinkedIn as a publishing platform,” says Brownlow. “She’s getting thousands and thousands of engagements on her posts and writing great thought leadership on behalf of her agency. She’s helping reach new audiences and driving consideration of her agency.”
But in the end the killer content creator was Greg Graham, Business Development and Marketing Officer at Group M, who put together a whole content pillar around how to write great presentations.
MediaCom had the most number of posts of all the agencies, followed by Group M and McCorkell and Associates.
Graham, who also coaches within the agency, said the competition allowed him to develop as time went on.
“The LinkedIn Agency Influencer Program has been awesome,” he says. “I have found my voice with original posts on Presentations and it’s been incredibly rewarding with the positive feedback. Plus my engagement with the platform and the interaction for GroupM has gone through the roof.”
So, how do you write the perfect LinkedIn post?
The winner of the Agency Influencer program competition was picked on their performance in LinkedIn metrics.
Says Brownlow: “There’s an algorithm that works on the content that agencies have been writing. We wanted picking a winner to be entirely data driven. We looked at how many posts were written, how many people were reached and how many people read the posts and engaged with them.”
The competition also measured an individual’s general activity levels on LinkedIn, such as network-building through connections and content sharing, and unearthed some clever ways to make an impact.
“You could be sharing all sorts of content, not just your own,” says Brownlow.
Everything you could possibly do on the platform, such as likes and endorsements, added weight towards the overall score… as long as it was related to your professional world.
The end score was weighted heavily towards how much original, thought leadership content an individual posted on LinkedIn.
After all these factors were stirred into the metric mix, an algorithm made the pick of which Agency Influencer was the winner.
Great winner – good for you Sparrow!
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Nice one bruv
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He gets better looking every year.
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