Can Tagging on LinkedIn Boost Engagement?

Law firms that congratulate their employees through tagging on LinkedIn can boost engagement and improve social media employee advocacy programs.

The secret behind many of the most successful companies is great employees. But have you ever wondered how your employees could play an even bigger role in your company? Social media employee advocacy programs have been shown to positively increase brand awareness, improve staff retention and engagement, and aid in PR management.

As you work toward improving your social media employee advocacy, positively featuring employees on company social media posts is a great way to show off the people behind your brand. Law firms in particular often recognize particular employees for their work for clients or other accomplishments, so if you run a social media account for a law firm, you may find yourself posting about your attorneys frequently. LinkedIn is the perfect platform to leverage employees toward your brand strategy by sharing their content and by developing content that includes your employees. However, you may wonder which type of employee-related content will help your brand the most. I looked at different types of content featuring employees on one law firm’s LinkedIn to find out.

Methods

I decided to discover whether featuring employees through tagging on LinkedIn increases engagement, specifically for law firms. I chose the largest law firm in the United States, Kirkland & Ellis, and created a corpus of all their LinkedIn posts from the most recent three-week period (from September 21 to October 12, 2022). I did a simple random sample of 40 posts that tagged employees and 40 posts that didn’t tag employees to compare their engagement (likes, comments, and shares). I also coded the posts that tagged employees by the context in which the employee was mentioned (see the codebook below). An independent coder tested my codebook to achieve Cohen’s Kappa = 1.

Codebook:

Code	Description	Example
1	The post uses congratulatory language to mention an employee	We congratulate Jane Doe on exceeding the quarterly goals for our company this period.
2	The post mentions something an employee has written	Read the article that National Geographic staff John Doe wrote for this month's issue.
3	The post mentions an employee hosting, speaking, or moderating at an event	Our employees Jane and John Doe will be moderating a panel this weekend titled "Crunchy or Creamy: Which peanut butter is best?"Register here:
4	The post welcomes a new employee	We want to welcome our newest financial advisor John Doe to Simon & Schuster beginning January 2023.
5	The post notes an employee being quoted or featured in an outside source like an article	Facebook team member Jane Doe was quoted in Hootsuite's article "Twitter for Old People." Read the full article here:
6	Other	Listen to our team membersJohn and Jane Doe discuss their experiences at our company in this video:

Results

I found that, on average, LinkedIn posts tagging employees had only 8% more engagement than posts that did not tag employees, which was somewhat surprising. However, posts that used congratulatory language had the highest engagement among posts that tagged employees (see the figure below). On average, posts that mentioned an employee hosting, speaking, or moderating at an event had the second highest total engagement.

So What?

Even though tagging on LinkedIn only marginally helped boost engagement over not tagging for this small-scale study, it turns out the way you post about employees matters! Tagging employees in congratulatory posts will likely increase your total engagement. In addition, featuring your staff in positive, constructive ways may help build good feelings toward the brand and encourage them to interact with social media posts by liking, commenting, and sharing.

All of these small actions will help you achieve your goals of social media employee advocacy. Featuring or congratulating the attorneys at your law firm is an easy action that could bring you big results in terms of interaction with your content, which in turn could lead your firm to more exposure and new clients. So in your next posts, try congratulating your employees on their accomplishments and highlighting their achievements and see how it boosts your LinkedIn engagement!