Developing a LinkedIn content marketing strategy is necessary, as it serves as a platform where you can develop your personal brand and establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry. In order to utilize the platform to its optimum, you need to know how it works, what kind of content generates the best results, how to use its features to your benefit, and how to schedule content for marketing on LinkedIn.
Why use LinkedIn for Content Marketing?
LinkedIn has a strong reputation as a job-searching platform, as its main feature was the ability to post and review digital resumes. It serves as a business-oriented social media platform aimed at bringing professionals together. It allows like-minded people to connect, share their expertise and knowledge, and collaborate for work.
LinkedIn also helps individuals as well as businesses to establish themselves as a brand and generate genuine leads. To use LinkedIn as a B2B marketing platform, you need to develop a sleek and smooth LinkedIn content marketing strategy.
Here are some benefits of LinkedIn content marketing:
- LinkedIn has 250 million monthly active users. Such an extensive pool of users allows you to reach out to a broad audience and generate leads merely through content.
- LinkedIn’s algorithm makes it super easy to make your content visible to a mass audience. The fact that all of your followers see the posts you interact with makes it effortless to promote your content. Ensure to follow correct LinkedIn post size ratio for more visibility
- It is the best social platform to generate warm leads, make meaningful connections, and get huge engagement.
- While LinkedIn is primarily a B2B social media site, both B2B and B2C companies can reap benefits through publishing content on it.
- Owing to its professional base, LinkedIn allows you to create brand awareness and build brand authority by sharing the right content with your audience.
How to do LinkedIn Content Marketing?
1. Understand how the algorithm works
Before you start creating content and post it on LinkedIn, you need to understand how its algorithm works. It is believed that LinkedIn’s algorithm doesn’t prefer one content format over the other. However, it puts heavy emphasis on 2 things – relevance and likelihood of engagement.
Relevance is important as it decides how your post will appear in others’ feeds. The content that matches with the past behaviors of users gets ranked higher. Past behaviors include the posts that they have liked, commented on, or shared.
The likelihood of engagement factor goes hand in hand with relevance. When you share content on your feed, LinkedIn’s algorithm notices the number of users that interact with your post. Thus, you need to post quality content at the right time. You need to find out the best and worst time to post on LinkedIn to make sure that you post content when your audience is the most active.
2. Work on the basics
After you have created a LinkedIn account for yourself or your company, you need to work on the small but essential elements. Completely fill out your profile details to appear professional and build credibility.
Set a clear profile picture, cover photo, fill in the ‘About me’ section and answer each and every question that pops up. If you are a company, fill in the description with a clear and concise copy that talks directly to your target audience.
For the cover photo, convey something about your company (products or services that you offer), or build an emotion that you want users to associate with your brand. Use an eye-catching design/illustration or an easy to understand text, along with a call to action.
3. Post quality content consistently
Every social media platform demands one thing in common – quality content. If your content does not provide users value, it will not get ranked by the algorithm. LinkedIn is a platform where people appreciate informative content more than entertaining posts.
Like any other social platform, you need to be consistent here too. It is recommended to post at least once every day to get maximum views on your content as well as profile. Stay consistent, but don’t go beyond 40 posts in a month.
If you find it difficult to post every day manually, you can use Linkedin scheduling tools to help you out. RecurPost is a tool that provides a LinkedIn Post Scheduler, as well as RecurPost works as a great Tweet scheduler, using which you can schedule months’ worth of content well in advance. Also, you won’t have to worry about the best times to post, as it provides AI-based share time optimization, which will automatically schedule your posts for the right time.
4. Share more visual content
People think that text-based posts work the best on LinkedIn, but it’s not always the case. Research claims that posts with visual content get 94% more views as compared to text posts. You can add images, infographics, videos, PowerPoint slides, or even documents to your posts. You can also share your podcasts.
Documents are actually shared as a carousel post on LinkedIn. When you upload a series of images as documents, it will be displayed as a carousel that users can swipe through and see. Also, LinkedIn prefers that users should upload media directly into a post, rather than putting a link to another site hosting it. For example, if you wish to share a video, you would prefer to directly upload the video from your device instead of sharing a YouTube link. Additionally, with the introduction of LinkedIn’s short form video feature, you have an even more dynamic way to engage your audience with compelling visual content.
5. Reshare others’ content
LinkedIn is not just about sharing your own content. TippingPoint Labs and Joe Pulizzi of the Content Marketing Institute suggested the 4-1-1 rule of posting. This rule was first proposed for Twitter but now works for LinkedIn too.
According to this rule, for every self-written post that you upload, you should repost one relevant post and share four pieces of relevant content posted by others. While sharing others’ content, it is also important to add your own opinion or raise a question related to the post.
Talk about what you think of the points written in your sharing content, and don’t be afraid to leave constructive criticism. This can start a debate in the comments section, and you will notice that your reshared posts will get much more engagement.
6. Try out LinkedIn life
Like other social platforms, going live on LinkedIn will provide you an opportunity to connect with your followers at a personal level. 79% of marketers on the platform say that live videos help them attract more genuine interactions. Also, 82% of the audience say that they prefer watching live videos from a brand over reading a post.
Live videos also get more engagement, 7 times more reactions, and 24 times more comments than video posts. You can do literally anything from a monologue to the camera, webinars with other LinkedIn members, or live streaming of an event.
7. Leverage stories
LinkedIn was a bit late to introduce the concept of stories similar to Instagram and Facebook. Still, it received a great response from the users. Stories are one of the best ways to connect with your audience authentically.
And if you are already using Instagram and FB stories for your brand, LinkedIn stories will be fun to use too. Some great ways to use LinkedIn stories are posting behind the scenes content, sharing day-to-day activities, countdowns for big events or product launches, share important details about projects you’re working on, and hosting QnA sessions.
Such stories receive a lot of engagement as compared to normal posts and give a personal touch to your brand.
8. Run paid ads
LinkedIn also allows you to run paid ads on the platform. You can target people on the basis of their demographics and interests. Also, the ‘Matched audiences’ feature works wonders. It can help you put your business in front of a highly selective and profitable audience.
It helps you directly target the people who have interacted with your company’s profile or visited your website in the past, and the ones whose contact details you already have. Through this, you can solely focus on conversion as the users are already past the awareness stage.
With continuous exposure to your content as well as ads, you will stay at the top of the minds of these users. You can also use email contacts to target with LinkedIn ads.
9. Join relevant groups
A great way to connect with like-minded people on Linkedin from your industry is through joining groups. They are spaces where you can go and initiate conversations on topics related to your niche with the people who will be interested in them the most.
You can see how active the group is, which conversations have been the most active, and join them. You can also discover new groups in your industry or create one on your own. Once you join a group, you can have conversations with all the people who are a part of it. Share ideas, insights, or ask questions to specific professionals and easily build connections, along with promoting your company.
10. Use hashtags
It’s a rule of every social media platform to add hashtags in posts if you want more reach. Adding them will help your content get discovered, as it will be differentiated by LinkedIn by other posts. You need to find out hashtags that are relevant to your posts. Don’t just use random popular hashtags as they might harm your engagement instead of increasing it.
Using hashtags enables people to find your content easily through the search section. It ensures that when users are looking for information on a certain topic, your post or article shows up.
Also, keep in mind not to use more than 6-10 relevant hashtags. If you add more, your post will look spammy and will distract the readers.
In a nutshell,
LinkedIn holds enormous potential – whether you want to grow your brand or build your personal identity, whether you want to establish a community or show thought leadership – it can be used for everything. So note down all the strategies listed above, find the right LinkedIn automation tools, and start your LinkedIn content marketing efforts. #LearnwithRecurPost to know more about all marketing nomads.
Frequently Asked Questions
To do content marketing on LinkedIn, take note of the following steps:
– Plan your content in advance: Create all the posts that you want to share in the coming month, the articles that you want to upload, and the media you want to insert in your posts. Create a LinkedIn content calendar and schedule all the posts using a social media scheduling tool like RecurPost.
– Determine your frequency of posting: Decide whether you are going to post 3-4 times in a week or daily.
– Analyze your results: When you post consistently on LinkedIn, you will see more engagement on your posts, more reach, and more profile views. Analyze these results and start finding opportunities for collaboration and building new connections.
LinkedIn is a social hub for professionals and can be successfully used to market your products and services to the right audience. To establish yourself as a trusted person and a thought leader, you need to be active on the platform and post valuable content.
Preparing a LinkedIn content strategy will help you sort out the kind of content you want to post and raise huge engagement rates through it. In your content strategy, you should include informative posts, how-to posts and videos, infographics, tutorials, and anything else that can provide some kind of value to the readers.
Here are some tips for creating an awesome LinkedIn content strategy:
– Curate simple and well-organized content
– Find out your target audience and connect with them
– Tell personal stories
– Post consistently – at least 3-4 times a week.
– Add visuals to your posts
– Share company updates
– Go live and conduct webinars
– Share list posts, templates, and infographics
Here are some Linkedin post ideas that you should start implementing:
– Try writing long-form content on LinkedIn pulse
– Share industry-specific content
– Talk about the latest trends
– Share tips and tricks
– Upload how-to posts and videos
– Share behind-the-scenes content
– Participate in group discussions
The overall best time to post on LinkedIn is on Wednesdays from 12 PM to 2 PM. To find out your own unique best time to post, have a look at your analytics. See the posts that got the maximum engagement and note the times when they were posted. Carry out a test and experiment posting at different times throughout the day. This will give you an insight into your best times to post on the platform.
If you still can’t figure out the perfect time to post your content, leave the heavy task on a social media scheduling tool that offers the feature of AI-based scheduling. RecurPost is one such tool that has the unique feature of auto-scheduling your posts for the best time.
Here are some of the top expert advice to create engaging content on LinkedIn:
– Get personal on your updates
– Tell stories about your personal and professional journey
– Post articles on LinkedIn pulse
– Post quality content and schedule them to be consistent
– Share more images, videos, and other visual content
– Reshare others’ content
– Run targeted ad campaigns
While posting on LinkedIn, try to follow the below points:
– Write your titles between 40 and 49 characters
– Post more visual content. Add multiple images in posts
– Use “How-to” and List-Style Headlines
– Divide your post into 5 headings in order to attract the greatest number of post views
– Write long-form content on LinkedIn pulse
– Write posts that display positive sentiment
– Make your content readable for a 13-year old
– Publish your posts when your audience is the most active
– Boost LinkedIn posts to reach more people
Dr. Dinesh Agarwal is a research scientist turned entrepreneur. He is fascinated with the social media world and has been working in the industry since 2013, where he built his first social media management tool that got acquired a few years later. He likes sharing his experience on podcasts, conferences and via his articles.