12 Aug Harriet Green: A Devoted Advisor on Social Media
Throughout her long career, Harriet Green has had extensive experience in the executive role. She’s the former chairman and CEO of IBM Asia Pacific and the former CEO of Thomas Cook Group.
Aside from her business endeavors, Green is also an activist promoting diversity and an inspirational advisor. She shows this side of her life on social media by creating an authentic and welcoming community across LinkedIn, Instagram, and Twitter.
In this article, we look at her presence on LinkedIn and Instagram to analyze what makes her an influential advisor on social media.
Words of Wisdom on LinkedIn
On LinkedIn, Harriet Green has over 61,000 followers and was named one of LinkedIn’s Top Voices. She shares a variety of topics including personal posts related to her interests, advice to help others achieve success, and newsletters written about her experiences. Sharing tips is an effective type of content because it keeps followers engaged and offers a lot of value to them. Green has positioned herself as a thought leader in the business community because of her commitment to sharing advice online and her consistent posting.
She keeps up with her community and employs best practices by responding to many of the comments, using relevant hashtags, tagging other advisors, and asking questions to increase engagement. These are all effective ways to increase engagement on social media and build trust with followers.
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Green’s posts are longer than average, but she has done an effective job at making sure they are still easy to read. For example, in the post above, she starts with a general title and emoji that catches people’s attention. She also includes line breaks to help format her long post. Short captions are effective for many reasons, but for an advisor, long-form content can help create more engagement by adding more value to the post.
Green often opens her post with a short, isolated title or eye-catching sentence. In most cases, it causes LinkedIn users to stop and think about the topic, increasing their chances of commenting on her post. With longer posts, executives also have the opportunity to add more relevant keywords, making the post more accessible from searches or recommendations.
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She makes effective use of LinkedIn’s Newsletter feature. By keeping all of her content on the same platform, she’s increasing the chances of users both reading her newsletter and interacting with her posts. At times, LinkedIn will also promote the newsletters as they are hoping to gain attraction to the feature.
Last but not least, another way her LinkedIn content is effective is that she often uses bright colors in her post images. The vibrant visuals are distinctive when scrolling through the general feed and help draw more attention to her posts.
Personal and Casual on Instagram
On Instagram, Green repurposes the same content from LinkedIn but also shares more personal content, such as posts about traveling and her family. She effectively uses the Stories and Highlights feature on Instagram by including custom Highlight thumbnails and short titles. When creating Instagram Highlights, we always recommend using one or two short words. Longer Highlight titles will get cut off, which means other Instagram users can’t read them.
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Although Stories self-delete after 24 hours, adding them to a Highlight keeps them pinned to the top of an Instagram profile. This can be an effective way for executives to save their content into distinct categories.
Taking a look at Green’s overall Instagram feed, her images are a collection of illustrations, text-based content, and photography. Her content format is also diverse, including single-image posts and videos.
Lastly, her profile section at the top is effective for a number of reasons. First, the use of emojis makes it visually appealing. Second, it also outlines her passions and what matters most to her. While Instagram’s profile bio has a short character limit, Green has done an excellent job at using all of the space to share more about herself.
Improvements: High-Quality Images
An area of improvement is to consider building a color palette for her personal brand and online presence. While the colors she uses do grab attention, the overall feed feels like each post came from a different creator — there’s no consistent use of colors or other visual elements to create a cohesive feed. Especially on Instagram, visual style is one of the key components of what makes content engaging. Visual trends come and go, so executives on this platform must stay up to date on what’s appealing to most users.
Additionally, long-form captions aren’t as successful on Instagram as they are on LinkedIn. Her images tend to have a lot of text as well, such as this post. We would suggest replicating the same type of helpful content with shorter captions in a way that is more digestible on Instagram, such as shorter paragraphs or using more bullet points. We also noticed that she rarely uses carousels, which can be an effective way to split a lot of text across multiple slides.
A Valuable Source of Advice
Harriet Green has created a community of social media followers who are engaged with her advice and tips. She posts consistently, has an authentic voice, and shares inspirational content that many find helpful. For executives who want to be advisors on social media, consider ways to leverage social media’s long-form content features, such as LinkedIn’s Article or Newsletter section, and Instagram’s videos.
Keeping up with trending social media content as an executive can be difficult. Our marketing experts can help. Having your brand’s executives on social media can boost brand identity and drive engagement. Check out our services linked below and follow our LinkedIn for more insights!