How To Involve Your Team In LinkedIn

If you’re excited about the possibilities on LinkedIn but need a little help making sure it all gets done, don’t fret. LinkedIn doesn’t have to be a solo sport. There are plenty of ways to involve your team in your LinkedIn sales, marketing, and outreach strategy. 

Done correctly, you can easily divide and conquer tasks related to your company's presence on the platform—in fact, I recommend it. Still, there are some tasks better reserved just for you. Let’s take a look at several factors to consider when deciding which tasks to share and which tasks to own. 

Consider sharing these LinkedIn tasks with your team. 

• Managing your company page: Your company page is a place where you not only can involve your team but you should. I recommend giving company page access to at least two people on your team so that as roles shift and your team changes, you never lose access to your page. LinkedIn allows you to choose from roles with varying levels of access to your company page. Consider how to divide tasks related to your page—such as updating your imagery for relevant seasons or campaigns, keeping your contact info and description up-to-date, and posting content—and assign roles accordingly. 

• Company page engagement: In addition to page management, engagement on behalf of your company is also a great task to delegate to your team. This includes responding to comments and liking or otherwise engaging with other posts that align with your company's LinkedIn strategy. For team members in this role, choose the narrowest role option that makes sense for each person, and see to it that your super admin is someone who will be engaged and available if you ever need to make role changes down the road.  

• Posting and scheduling approved content: If you’re not using a third-party scheduling software or you don’t want to use one, you might consider leveraging your team to help you manage your own LinkedIn content. As long as you have direct oversight and input on the content you’re putting out in the world, your team can help you with the grunt work of posting it at the right time. 

• Conducting lead and client research: Just as your sales team or assistants might help you with background research on a client or identifying possible targets, LinkedIn tasks related to these goals are also okay to delegate to your team. Be sure that if your team members are conducting research from your own profile, you have clear guidelines in place about what they can and cannot do while accessing your account. For example, if your team members are accessing your notifications, be sure they have a way of capturing them so you don’t miss something important. 

• Message follow-up in limited circumstances: In (very) limited circumstances, it may be appropriate to allow someone on your team to check your personal messages and InMail and respond on your behalf. I generally advise against this, but it may make sense in specific situations where you know you will be out or unreachable for an extended period of time—for example during a leave of absence, long vacation, or maternity/paternity leave. If you do have team members manage your inbox, still make use of your away message and err on the side of honesty, and have them introduce themselves, rather than leading the person on the other end of the message to believe that he or she is interacting with you. 

Consider not sharing these LinkedIn tasks with your team. 

• 100% of your outbound messages: While delegating your inbox to your team is allowable in a narrow set of circumstances, never delegate all of your outreach to a teammate. Not only can this practice create information gaps that undermine your effectiveness, but it also lacks honesty and transparency. People expect to be interacting with you when they reach out, so anything else can undermine trust. 

• Personal engagement: Company engagement is in general much easier to delegate than your personal engagement on LinkedIn. While having a team member post approved content can be helpful, I recommend reserving engagement from your profile as a task you fully own. No one knows your relationships better than you do. 

• Complete profile narrative: Be wary of team members or consultants writing your entire profile without your hands-on involvement. When I work with clients through The Profile Transformer™,  we have an interview and multiple rounds of approval before launching so I know everything I craft for a client’s profile represents him or her well. An inaccurate or inauthentic profile can quickly damage your reputation. 
  
  

Best practices to adopt. 

• Regular communication: Delegating tasks to your team is not a “set it and forget” solution. The best LinkedIn team setup still involves regular communication. If your team is managing aspects of your personal LinkedIn presence, staying in the loop is even more important. You should continue to be aware of and involved in everything that’s happening on LinkedIn on your behalf. 

• Company page guidelines: It’s worth taking the time upfront to set expectations and guidelines with your team about what, when, and how often to post from or update your company page. For example, you might consider creating a general post format to follow, a weekly or monthly content calendar, and even a brand voice handbook for your team. These steps will all help to create consistency and ensure that your company page sounds and looks like your brand, rather than a disparate group of people. 

• Honesty & integrity: Before delegating a LinkedIn task to your team, always consider how to maintain your honesty and integrity in the process. Trust takes time to build, but it can be eroded quickly, so avoid the temptation to use a half-baked team LinkedIn strategy without considering the implications. 

Involving your team in LinkedIn in the right ways can improve your presence and accessibility on the platform. I have trained dozens of leader-associate pairs on how to implement systems around LinkedIn delegation that support, rather than inhibit, their goals. Be thoughtful about when to delegate and when to reserve tasks for your own personal LinkedIn time. 

If you’re looking to improve your use of LinkedIn and see a greater impact, consider signing up for my 3 Proven Principles to Accessing Your Target on LinkedIn...(and land more clients!). In only 20 minutes, I’ll help you access the right people and gain clarity about who should be in your LinkedIn network. You can get access to the training at this link.