LinkedIn is notable for being the most powerful B2B social media platform on the Internet, but what’s not so obvious is the best content for LinkedIn. You want to present your business as creative and credible from your first post, but tastes on LinkedIn can change quickly and it can be hard to amass a following. Here are some examples of what you’ll want to post on LinkedIn.
Lay the Groundwork
Before you start posting the content that will draw followers to your page and make you a thought leader on LinkedIn, it’s a good idea to take a step back and figure out what you really want from your LinkedIn page. Is this a page to attract attention from the buying public, or is it a recruitment-based page that’s geared toward job searchers? How do you want to brand your content? In what way do you want to be seen as a thought leader? And most importantly, what does success on LinkedIn look like to you?
In this evaluation phase, it’s wise to create audience personas. Just as marketers use buyer personas to inform their marketing message, you can use audience personas to identify the exact type of person you’re targeting on LinkedIn. Racking up a high follower count is only useful if you can use your content to move those followers in your desired way — whether that be moving them down the sales funnel, establishing your voice as an authority within your industry or simply showing the world how your employees are embodying your company’s brand message. Whatever your goals are for LinkedIn, be sure that your content is in line with those objectives.
Educate Your Audience
In theory, LinkedIn is a place where professionals gather to discuss their professional lives, network, and make new connections. In reality, it’s a place where everyone is trying to sell something. New college grads want to get hired. Upstart businesses want to promote their products and services. Freelancers are looking for their next gig.
Therefore, the best content for LinkedIn is content that avoids these calls to action entirely. By educating your followers, you’re avoiding the sales clutter, and you’re giving actual value to your posts. This makes you a much more enticing follow, both for your target audience and for the general population as a whole. It also helps your content strategy — you’ll get many more posts out of an education slant than you would out of high-pressure sales tactics.
Best of all, educational content is eminently more shareable than sales pitches. For instance, if you’re a car dealership, don’t just talk about how you’re offering 0% APR on a new vehicle. Instead, take people behind the curtain. Show them how the process works. Explain how the economics of car sales works, and how your dealership passes along savings to the customer. Show what goes into a sales promotion, and clearly demonstrate a commitment to your audience that no other dealership can touch. This not only gives you months of shareable content, but it goes a lot further than conventional advertising.
Keep Your Posts Short
LinkedIn’s algorithms have changed significantly over the years. The platform has gone from preferring long-form posts to shorter, bite-sized pieces of content. These shorter morsels are easier to consume and share, and it allows businesses the chance to go viral.
From your first post, you should strive to limit your posts to 100-200 words. It might take a little practice to craft your message in such a short space, but there are plenty of examples out there that will show you how you can get creative within these limitations.
A hundred words might not sound like a lot, but these parameters actually serve to benefit you as a marketer. Not everybody has the time to read a thousand-word blog post. But they can scan a shorter post and evaluate your company based on that little nugget of wisdom. And if people like what they see, they’ll be more inclined to share it with others.
Incorporate Media
Much like personal-based social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, LinkedIn has embraced media like photos and videos. As a marketer, this helps you for a few reasons. The first is that people flat-out respond to this type of content more than they do to plain text posts. LinkedIn’s own metrics show that media-based content gets 98 percent more comments than text posts. You don’t even have to change anything about your content to achieve this effect. Simply attaching media to your regular posts will help to drive engagement.
Additionally, using media also has SEO implications that might not be obvious at first. As you garner a following on LinkedIn, your posts will be popular enough to be indexed by the search engines. This means that image or video posts will also be accessible when people conduct video and image searches on Google. Think of this as a nice residual bonus for a well-executed content strategy. It’s another way for people to find your company.
Encourage Posts from Employees
The entire premise of networking is that it allows an individual to have multiple irons in the fire. An individual job seeker is able to rely on a vast network of resources if they’re looking for a new position. The same principle applies for marketing on LinkedIn. You have far more at your disposal than just your company’s LinkedIn page.
Your employees are your greatest resource, and there’s no better place to embrace that sentiment than on LinkedIn. You can use your LinkedIn page to post content focusing on individual employees, such as an employee spotlight or an Employee of the Month. These are just a few ways you can showcase your employees for a job well done.
But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Your employees can also share your posts, adding in their own two cents as a comment as they share your content. You can also invite employees to craft posts and even share their own material. This not only highlights the true collaboration that goes into making your company a success, but it also encourages employees to take ownership of the company’s achievements. This helps to boost employee morale — and that’s something that makes itself very evident in your posts.
The best content for LinkedIn isn’t sales-y, high-pressure content. Instead, it’s educational and engaging content that makes people feel like they already know you. Produce creative and compelling text that gives your audience something they won’t get elsewhere, and from your first post onward, provide examples of how this approach beats conventional advertising. Focus on building relationships with followers and employees alike, and you’ll have a large and engaged following before long.
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