If you’re like many marketers, you’ve spent a lot of time creating incredible content. But then posting it on social media, there’s only crickets. Wanna grow your business with LinkedIn marketing? There are actually a few tips that can help completely transform your LinkedIn reach and engagement. Today, we’re going to break down exactly what that is!
The best types of content tell a story, customer stories, employee stories, personal stories. Any time you can paint a picture and evoke emotions, your content is going to perform better. But what types of posts perform best? And how do you actually create content that resonates with your audience? Here are 5 ways to improve your LinkedIn reach and engagement, as well as bonus LinkedIn algorithm tips!
1. LinkedIn Polls
Let’s start with one of our favourite types of content on LinkedIn, polls! Love them or hate them, polls work. Trends are a great place to start, when it comes to posting a new poll. Global events, holidays, industry events, industry news – anything that you can piggyback off is going to be great and increase your chances of a poll going viral. When possible, add your opinion in the content section of the poll, then ask others to share their opinions as well!
It’s possible to leverage this strategy to get over 100,000 views on your polls. However, you want to be posting polls, at most, once a week. This is only if you post frequently on LinkedIn. If you don’t, try posting maybe one or two polls a month. When you are creating your poll, LinkedIn gives you two options. You can leave the poll open for seven days or 14 days. We recommend leaving it open for the entire two weeks, that way you can leverage the poll in your lead generation efforts.
2. PDF Carousel
Another popular post type that gets great engagement and views is the PDF carousel post. So this is very simply a PDF that you upload to LinkedIn. It creates a slideshow for your viewers, and they’re more of a visual type of engagement. So what you wanna do is make it aesthetically appealing, matching your brand colors, aesthetic vibe, and also large, catchy phrases. Anything like statistics or customer testimonials can work well. You can even take a lead magnet and break it down into the most key important points, and then turn that into a PDF carousel post! There’s lots of ways that you can do this, and LinkedIn loves these carousel posts.
Here’s an example of a carousel post. Now, these are really great opportunities to boost your thought leadership, repurpose your content, and get more exposure to your blog, because you can link to the full blog in the comments.
Actionable tips also work really well on carousel posts. And so what you wanna do here is give people a step-by-step list of things they need to do in order to accomplish their goal with that specific topic. This not only builds goodwill with your audience, because you’re helping them and giving them valuable tips, but it also leaves them wanting more, which is why you need to include a call to action, where they can contact you or discover more information about your products and services.
3. Text-Only Posts
You don’t have to post a poll or a carousel post to get incredible engagement on LinkedIn. You can do that with a text-only post. The problem is, most people are doing this wrong, so they don’t see the engagement and reach they want. The most important part of a text-only post is you have to hook people in early so they wanna click that see more button to read the rest of your post.
How you wanna treat your hook is basically like a blog title. A couple of examples for you are, “How to X/Y/Z,” “Top 3 Ways You Can A/B/C,”. 3 Tips to Accomplish (blank).” These are just a few examples that can entice people to wanna keep reading your text. LinkedIn also increased their character limit to 3,000 characters, so you can also repurpose blog posts into longer-form content on LinkedIn.
Speaking of, LinkedIn has an Articles feature. Historically, these have been a great place to, once again, repurpose blog posts. The challenge is they do not get nearly the reach and views that your posts receive. So instead of leveraging LinkedIn articles for your long-form content, we highly recommend you leverage LinkedIn posts!
4. LinkedIn Video
There is no better way to build trust and authority with your audience than video. You wanna make sure you are posting native videos. For example, if you have a YouTube channel, instead of posting the link to the YouTube URL, you wanna take it and upload that on LinkedIn. Shorter videos perform better on LinkedIn, so anywhere from 30 seconds to 3 minutes. If you have existing video content that is longer, we would say up to ten minutes. Do some testing to see if it performs well with your audience. Iff it doesn’t perform the greatest, maybe try trimming that video and reposting it to see how it performs.
A couple of quick tips to optimise your videos and get maximum engagement. Always, always add captions or subtitles. Studies show that 69% of people watch videos without the sound on! You can either upload the SRT file directly to LinkedIn, or you can bake in those captions using your favourite video editing program. The goal is to entice them to watch the actual video. So give them a call to action to watch the video and spell out what is in it without giving everything away. It’s also helpful if you can let them know how long the video is. So watch the 30-second video, or 60-second video, for example.
LinkedIn Live
Another great LinkedIn video feature is LinkedIn Live. It’s available for most users via an application. This is a great way to build up your community, your sense of trust, your authority, but it’s also great for repurposing that content. For example, you can go live once a month, and take those snippets from the LinkedIn Live and turn them into mini video clips.
Short-form videos, like TikTok videos, also perform really well on LinkedIn. The key there is to make sure that it is related to your business, if you can provide value, or something motivational or inspirational. If your video receives significantly lower views than any other post type, don’t let that discourage you. You do need to be consistent with your videos in order to reap the benefits of video marketing on LinkedIn.
5. Personal Posts
Another reason why we love video is because it lets people in on them as a human and their personality. You can accomplish this from other post types as well. People used to consider LinkedIn as a business-only platform. However, things are changing! You have to mix in some personal content these days, because people wanna know who they’re doing business with. These can be anything from a lesson that you learned, a trip you went on, an anniversary that you just celebrated. But unlike Instagram or Facebook, let people in on your life, but also turn it into something of value that they can learn from or feel inspired from. Personal posts perform best when coupled with a photo of you, your family, an event. It could also be a screenshot of a tweet, or an inspirational quote.
LinkedIn Algorithm Tips
So we’ve just shared with you the post types that will help improve your LinkedIn Reach and engagement. But ultimately the algorithm is responsible for surfacing those posts so that maximum viewers actually see them.
Three key factors affect the LinkedIn algorithm. The first one is personal connections. LinkedIn is going to show your posts more with people that you are connected with and people that you engage with.
The second LinkedIn algorithm factor is relevance. How relevant is your content to your target audience? This could be anything from LinkedIn looking at keywords that you use in your posts, hashtags, or anything in the comments section.
The third LinkedIn algorithm factor is probability of engagement. So what LinkedIn is doing here is they are judging how likely your post is to get engagement. So you wanna make sure that you are getting maximum views, likes, comments, all the things, in the very first hour, because that tells LinkedIn that this is something that people are engaging with, so I’m going to show it more in people’s feeds. All that said, how can you make the algorithm work for you, and not against you?
#1. Make content easy to read
Firstly, you wanna make it really super easy for people to read your content. Make sure it is appropriately spaced out. I like using bullets or emojis, putting one sentence per line, and then I put spaces in between every sentence. Spacing out your content is also great for encouraging people to click that see more button, and this is a micro engagement that factors into the LinkedIn algorithm.
#2. Avoid third-party links
The LinkedIn algorithm also does not like third-party links. So when you take people outside of LinkedIn, they are not going to reward you for doing so. So what you wanna do here is put the links in the comment section of your post, so you can have a call to action in the actual post itself, and say, click the link in the comments to see more. When it comes to using hashtags on LinkedIn, ideally, you wanna do less than nine. Because every time you go over nine hashtags, it flags the spam filters in LinkedIn, which means your post might not be seen as much.
#3. Tag people
Another way to increase engagement on LinkedIn is by tagging people. If you have a post that you can list certain subject matter experts, do that in the post itself. If you want people’s opinions on the post, do that in the comment section. This is going to get more eyes on your content, and it’s also going to encourage engagement, aka comments, which is then going to tell the algorithm to show your posts to more people.
#4. Space your posts
If you are someone who posts multiple times a day, make sure that you’re leaving at least four hours in between posts. If you don’t, then the algorithm is only going to favour one of those posts, and you’re not gonna get maximum views on all of your content.
#5. Reply to every comment
You also want to respond to every single comment that is left on your post. So this is not only being friendly and inviting, it also helps the algorithm, because you are triggering it to show up more by responding to comments. If you want people to actually engage with your comments and leave comments, then you need to engage with them. The more comments you are leaving on other people’s posts, the more likely they are to leave comments on your posts.
And leaving engaging comments is just step one in our LinkedIn connection strategy, which we will go into more detail in a later post!
