While LinkedIn is typically known as the social platform specifically for networking professionals and recruiters, increasingly people are turning to LinkedIn to find more than just their next job opportunity. In fact, 91% of executives rate reading and posting on LinkedIn as their first choice for professionally relevant content.
Whether you work in the B2B space and want to generate leads, want to network with others in your industry or are looking to recruit new employees, LinkedIn is a powerful tool to use. Here are a few LinkedIn best practices to make the most out of LinkedIn marketing today:
LinkedIn has a unique user-base that responds differently to the types of content you share. Here are some of the best content types for posting on LinkedIn to ensure your posts perform well on the platform:
Like other outlets, the content you post on LinkedIn will depend on what kind of audience you’re trying to target. Most people and businesses use LinkedIn to network with other professionals in their industry, either to fill job vacancies or develop their skills and knowledge. However, some utilize posting on LinkedIn to market to their customer base, especially for B2B products and services.
Figure out who you’re speaking to in order to be sure that you’re sharing content on topics that interest your target audience. Look into what news outlets and magazines people in your industry follow, then share related content to capture their attention. For example, a CEO seeking to network with other CEOs and leaders in their industry could share content about the latest market trends, advancements in their industry and leadership tactics.
Visual content has become an expectation on social media outlets, and LinkedIn is no exception. Images, graphics and other visual elements help catch attention as people scroll through their social media feeds. LinkedIn best practices are to always include a visual element when posting.
Most professionals on LinkedIn today know they need to include visuals, but don’t understand the true value. They add a simple stock photo to their blog post to make it “visual,” when there are lots of more valuable ways to create visual content on LinkedIn.
Share an infographic of industry data, or pull out and visualize an interesting quote/statistic from the article your sharing. Sharing photos from business events and conferences can also give people a personal look into your company atmosphere:
Just like other outlets, video content on LinkedIn performs extremely well compared to text only content. As a result, a lot fewer people are taking advantage of this content type to capture their audience’s attention and stand out from the crowd. Our LinkedIn posts best practices make specific mention of video for good reason: video posts tend to get 3x the engagement and 5x the comments of text only posts on LinkedIn. Like Facebook, LinkedIn will auto-play videos. When posting on LinkedIn, be sure to share captivating video content to educate and offer value to your audience.
Here’s a great example of a post that uses video to capture audience attention and entertain:
LinkedIn articles are LinkedIn’s native microblogging platform. Many marketers don’t bother using this valuable feature because they already publish content on their website blog. But LinkedIn articles have unique benefits that can help your content get more visibility.
LinkedIn articles are an underutilized post type: of 500 million LinkedIn users, only 0.2% have published an article using LinkedIn’s Publisher platform.
For one, there’s native audience targeting and tagging features you can use to reach the right people with your content on LinkedIn. Posting on LinkedIn is also great for SEO — since LinkedIn is such a high authority domain, your Pulse content has a better chance of ranking well in search results than native blog content.
Use LinkedIn Articles to:
Educate
Teach your audience about topics that interest them. Offer value by showing them how to navigate certain tasks/challenges related to your industry. A recent guide found that 91% of executives rate LinkedIn as their first choice for professionally relevant content. Make sure that when posting on LinkedIn, your content is focused on providing educational value.
Become a thought leader
Most successful LinkedIn marketers use articles as a platform to create and share thought leadership. In fact, 94% of leading B2B marketers use LinkedIn to publish content. Go beyond just discussing the latest trends in your industry and actually take a stand on controversial topics. Maybe last week someone published an opinion in Forbes that you don’t agree with. Explain why in a post on LinkedIn Pulse. You can also stretch beyond industry topics when creating thought leadership. CEOs, COOs and other business leaders often share insights on how to run a business and manage teams in general.
Develop your brand presence
LinkedIn articles are a great platform to share what’s going on at your business. If you use your native blog to market to potential customers, then use LinkedIn Pulse to share and discuss business with your industry. Share updates about major company events like product launches, mergers, etc. You can also use examples from everyday life at your business as anecdotes in your thought leadership articles.
LinkedIn Analytics is one of the best social media analytics tools out there. You can use it to look at important things like:
Monitor key metrics on LinkedIn Analytics to monitor your marketing performance and make informed changes to your strategy.
Every social media platform is different, and LinkedIn is particularly unique. It’s the only major social platform that’s specifically for professionals. LinkedIn best practices are specific to this audience. So even if you’ve been optimizing your social media strategy for a while, don’t assume that what works on one platform translates well to the other. Follow these best practices when creating content for LinkedIn, then monitor performance and adjust.
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