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LinkedIn Posts for the Banker

LinkedIn for the Banker

Looking to generate more business leads for your Treasury Management services? Many of our clients are looking for ways to add more businesses to their sales pipelines and one of the easiest ways is to use LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a business-focused, professional social networking app and many of your prospects are using it. Today, we’ll visit some tips on using LinkedIn posts for the Banker.

Say Something Relevant

First, what do you want to say? Posting something relevant to your prospective business customers is important and coming up with something interesting can be challenging. However, when the idea strikes, we recommend putting the idea through a content filter. A “content filter” guides your posts to be relevant to the people you want to talk to.

For instance, at Malzahn Strategic, our content filter is: Deliver Value, Educate, Inform, Entertain, and Give the Reader a Reason to Take Action.

If you don’t have a content filter set up for your organization, we recommend you speak with your marketing team to develop these guidelines and then share them among those who post to social media.

Once you have your topic and have run it through your content filter, write the post in Word so you can verify spelling and check for grammatical issues. If you are stuck with a sentence and can’t quite make it sound right, using an AI based re-writer might be useful. ChatGPT and Copy.AI are two re-writers we have regularly used when we get “stuck”.

Once written, make sure your post is less than 3,000 characters. This is LinkedIn’s limit on posts.

Some organizations may require employees run their posts through a review process before posting. If you need to do that, get your post approved.

Post Your Post

Once you are ready to post your information, consider adding a photo or infographic to emphasize or confirm your content. You can easily create an infographic in PowerPoint or have your marketing person help you out in formatting a photo for LinkedIn. There are specific sizes for LinkedIn photos/infographics: 1200 x 627 72dpi or 1080 x 1080 72dpi are the two we recommend. Anything else and LinkedIn tends to crop with undesirable results.

If you wish to add a video to your post, we recommend a resolution of 1920 x 1920 (square). You should also have a preview image created to match your video 1920 x 1920 72dpi. If you don’t use a preview image, LinkedIn will pick the most awkward part of your video to use for a preview. We also recommend no fade-ins or fade-outs for your video. Get to the point and don’t waste valuable seconds on a fade.

Now, post your post.

Posting Tips

Here are some things we’ve learned over the years to improve your posts:

  • Post should have, but don’t need, an accompanying video, photo, or infographic.
  • The first 3 lines are visible on the LinkedIn feed, so make those three lines your point. Get to the point at the top, then elaborate on it later.
  • Write concise posts using your organizations’ content filter.
  • No Selling in posts – it just annoys prospects. You can do that when you talk to a prospect.
  • Work with your marketing or graphic design staff to make your photos, videos, or infographics informative and compelling. Professionalism is important on LinkedIn.
  • If your post is important and you want more folks to see it, consider boosting the post for a fee. We’ve seen where $500 spent on a boost can give the post good visibility.
  • Looking for free stock photos? Unsplash is a place to start. Your marketing folks might also have a corporate stock photo subscription (Adobe Stock, Shutterstock, etc.) you can take advantage of.
  • Pick three hashtags for each post and place them at the bottom of your post. One hashtag is your business primary hashtag and goes on every post, the second one refers to the main topic of your post and the third for the secondary topic of your post (if you have one).
  • Posting to relevant LinkedIn groups can be a way to get more views if your post is relevant to the group.

Some Daily and Monthly Maintenance

Here are some tips on maintaining your LinkedIn presence.

  • Daily comment on comments. If you get comments on your posts, reply to the comment to keep the conversation going.
  • Daily ask others to follow your organization’s LinkedIn page. If your organization doesn’t have a LinkedIn page, push to get one created.
  • Daily comment on other posts. Again, use your “content filter” to make sure you are making the right comment.
  • Monthly review stats on your posts to see what is working. After a few months, you’ll start to see a pattern of content that works, and content that doesn’t work.

More Resources on Lead Generation

Book: Revenue Growth Engine by Darrell Amy. He has a free audio version available for listening any time.

Book: Outbounding by William “Skip” Miller.

If you made it this far, please follow Malzahn Strategic on Linkedin! We aren’t spammy and post relevant information for the banking industry. Remember our content filter above? We stick to it.

LinkedIn is a powerful tool for getting prospects into your Treasury Management pipeline. If your institution is struggling with getting your Treasury Management department up and running or need help with selling Treasury Management services to business customers, we’re here to help.

 

Core Values for a Credit Union

Core Values for a Credit Union

If you’re looking to refine or document your credit union’s core values, it may be hard for you to come up with a good set of core values. Core values for a credit union seem easy at first, but as you work through the process, digging them up and documenting them can be difficult.

Your organization’s core values are already present in your employees. As a leader in your organization, you are expected to help define core values and ensure that they are carried out. Since they are already there, you don’t need to brainstorm new core values; you just need to assess the ones that are already active within your organization.

To create your core values, we can’t give you a lesson here, but we can share with you some ideas from other credit unions.

Core Values for a Credit Union

Financial Stability

Trustworthy

Friendly

Stability

Excellence

Trusted Bankers

Confidential

Customer Service

Passionate

Values Driven

Easy Going

Flexible

Helpful

Responsive

Service Oriented

Thoughtful

Collaborative

Efficient

Focused

Positive

Proactive

Considerate

Friendly

Generous

Consistent

Dependable

Honest

Integrity

Trustworthy

Innovative

Knowledgeable

Pragmatic

Wise

If you are really struggling to find your core values or have documented over five of them (stop at five), we recommend you read an article in the Harvard Business Review called Make Your Values Mean Something by Patrick M. Lencioni. This article will help you to identify your core values, and to distinguish them from aspirational values, permission-to-play values, and accidental values.

Still need help documenting your core values? We can help with that.

Books by Marcia Malzahn