How to Balance Great LinkedIn Content & Compliance

LinkedIn is now essential to staying in front of sellers, investors, bankers, and the entire ecosystem.

Investors will follow you on LinkedIn.

Bankers will send deals because your posts remind them to reconnect.

Sellers will see your content and judge what type of firm you are.

It’s the era of semi-private equity.

BUT how do you balance great content and compliance?

51 Labs, a marketing firm for the M&A market, hosted a panel with HKW and ACA Compliance to discuss this balancing act. (VIDEO AT BOTTOM)

1) LinkedIn will never be this good again.

The platform has a content deficiency, meaning there are tons of people active on the platform, but few are posting, especially in the M&A market. For our market, 77% of 300 senior PE professionals studied have never posted on LinkedIn. This content deficiency means that those who do post will get thousands of views. Try that on Facebook and you’ll get 100 views because that platform has matured.

77% of 300 senior PE professionals studied have never posted on LinkedIn

One post from our client got 70,000 views, 600+ reactions, and generated 15+ deal inbounds.

2) Compliance.

The constant need for firms to remain compliant can be the dead end for private equity professionals looking to expand their online presence. While these requirements can be daunting, 51 Labs has developed a number of strategies to help firms get online in compliant ways and, most importantly, see results.

During our recent webinar, “How to Balance Great Content and Compliance”, we teamed up with sponsors HKW and ACA Compliance to dive into all the moving parts behind a LinkedIn consulting engagement: how posts are generated, how they are approved, and how they perform.

3) Establish a process.

Depending on the size of the firm, a post may only need to be approved by one person, or you may have a team of ten involved in creating and approving a post. Whatever the scale of the operation may be, it’s important to establish clear processes and timelines for the creation of the post, approvals from any mentioned parties, sign-offs from compliance, and posting to LinkedIn.

Don’t drag your feet--begin your LinkedIn journey with this framework. It’s likely that your desire to utilize LinkedIn is due to exciting developments at your firm: new hires, deal announcements, etc. You don’t want to waste any time getting started, and you certainly don’t want great content to get lost in the pipeline.

4) Get ahead of compliance.

The sacred piece of compliance scripture is as follows: do not condition the public mind or arouse public interest in securities offerings. For many, that sentence reads an awful lot as: don’t post, don’t like posts, don’t comment. This can feel limiting, but a little creativity can go a long way in preventing compliance issues before they arise.

There are three categories of content: industry, company, and personal. But there is one category that is least likely to set off any compliance alarms: personal.

For example, let’s think about deal announcements. When the time comes to draft a deal announcement post, there are a number of potential compliance pitfalls around sharing numbers, word choice when describing the company, your firm, etc. Guess what will be compliant? A story about how you learned the value of discipline when you worked the night shift at the pizza place in college, and how your new portfolio company exemplifies that core value--that’s compliant.

In addition, if you take the personal route, your connections won’t have to worry about engaging. While likes and comments can be considered “endorsements”, no one puts themselves at risk by endorsing your personal story.

You can spend your time putting out compliance fires, or you can fire-proof the whole operation from the start.

5) In uncomfortability lies the gold.

The good news about personal content: it will almost always be compliant.

The bad news about personal content: people will almost never want to share it.

The idea of sharing these sorts of stories on a business-first social network can be both confusing and daunting to many. Efforts to humanize the M&A market always feel foreign to an otherwise bland, corporate landscape. But if the content you’re sharing doesn’t make you sweat even a little bit, then your audience likely won’t care.

6) The content that makes you a little uncomfortable will be a homerun.

Our advice on getting people comfortable with the uncomfortable? Let the content speak for itself. Find one or two key people at each firm who are willing to dive right in and share a personal story. The results will inspire those around them to share similar content in search of similar results. 

Let the deal inbounds speak for themselves. It won’t be long before you have a team of compliant and creative LinkedIn influencers (is that a thing yet?).

You should be getting 5,000-10,000 views per week on LinkedIn if you are principal to partner level.

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Click HERE for a link to the full-length webinar featuring:

HOST

Jordan Selleck | CEO & Co-Founder, 51 Labs

SPONSORS

Ted Kramer | President & CEO, HKW

Constantine Rakkou | CFO & CCO, HKW

Michelle Ball | Marketing Manager, HKW

Chad Allen Neale | Partner, ACA Compliance

51 Labs is a marketing firm for the lower middle market M&A community

Selected clients: MiddleGround, HKW, EIV Capital, Diversis Capital, Caprice Capital, NepFin, Live Oak Bank

51 Labs Services:

Video: firm overviews, portco highlights, AGM videos, etc,

LinkedIn content marketing

Events: e.g., virtual AGMs, webinars

CRM overhauls

Email marketing

Podcast & vlog production

Website design