If your company is involved in B2B, recruitment, or other professional services, LinkedIn should be one of the key platforms that feature in your communications and marketing strategy. You should have a dedicated LinkedIn content strategy to help you make the most of the platform.
In this post, we will provide you with a step-by-step guide for developing a LinkedIn content strategy. This guide covers how to formulate your strategy, what kind of posts to use, and the best times to engage your target audience.
Developing a content strategy for LinkedIn should follow the best practice principles for developing a content strategy for any platform. You should define your audience and objectives and develop a measurable strategy to get your relevant content in front of the right eyes at the right time.
Your approach to sharing content on LinkedIn will be guided by what you actually want to achieve on the platform. To define this, you should be asking yourself who your target audience is and what you want them to do.
Your answer to this question could be:
Once you have identified your goals and objectives, it is time to consider how you might achieve these on LinkedIn.
This should involve auditing your existing LinkedIn activity to see what you are already doing that drives target audiences to engage in the way desired.
This process should also involve competitor research and understanding what type of content and which topics and keywords are most likely to facilitate your goals.
On the back of this research, you should be able to develop a content strategy that outlines what type of content you will post, when, and in what format.
At this time, you should also define your key performance indicators (KPIs), such as your followers’ demographics, how many followers you have, and your page’s impressions and reach. Your KPIs help you determine how successful the individual elements of your content delivery approach are in achieving your goals.
It is then a case of delivering your content strategy, measuring your success, and reviewing and adapting your approaches. You learn what works and what doesn’t on this particular platform.
You can learn more about developing content marketing strategies from the Content Management Institute.
To develop a content strategy specifically for LinkedIn, you will need to know what kind of content types are available to you and what they are good for. The most popular LinkedIn content types are status updates, articles, SlideShares, and direct messages. They have also recently introduced a Stories format.
Status updates are the quickest and easiest way to stay in front of your audience daily without having to put a lot of work into developing long-form content. You can post a brief update, very similar to the way you would on Twitter.
Status updates work very much like Facebook posts. A white box is located just below your profile picture where you can post a brief update about what is on your mind. This update will then be shown in the feed of all your connections unless you actively choose to limit the post’s visibility before publishing.
What kinds of things can you share here?
Seeing your name come up in their feed as they scroll past will keep your brand in your audience’s mind, but the brevity of your content will mean they don’t feel like they are being spammed if it isn’t of immediate interest to them.
According to LinkedIn, less than 1% of their users have published an article on LinkedIn, despite the format getting very high levels of engagement.
According to Alex Pirouz, Managing Director of influence, the first time he posted a long-form article on LinkedIn, the content got more than 70,000 views, 11,000 shares, and 500 comments. This is definitely a case of getting the right content in front of the right audience.
Publishing articles is as simple as posting on any online platform, and you can repurpose content that may have been created for a blog, medium, or other platforms.
All your connections will receive a notification in their feed that the article has been published, so it should get viewership from your target audience. If they, in turn, choose to share the article, then you could go viral.
Always include a covering picture as part of your article, as articles with images tend to receive 98% more comments.
LinkedIn also allows you to post native videos onto their platform. This is better than posting links to videos that you might have shared on YouTube or Vimeo, as native videos will begin to play automatically when users are scrolling, making it more likely that they will slow down and take notice.
While we might think of LinkedIn as a more “academic” platform where users are more likely to read long-form content than watch videos, according to LinkedIn’s own statistics, videos receive five times more engagement than other posts.
Whatever you do, don’t forget to add subtitles to your video, even if they are auto-generated, as 80% of people watch social media videos without audio.
SlideShare is a tool owned by Linkedin that allows you to share presentations online with a large audience while protecting your copyright. It is an independently searchable platform, and content can also be posted from SlideShare directly to LinkedIn.
While it was originally designed for slideshow presentations, such as those used at live events, you can post a wide variety of content, including video and infographics. However, unless you are posting slideshows, it is probably better to post your content directly to LinkedIn.
LinkedIn has only recently released its version of the “stories” content type, which can be posted from the LinkedIn mobile app and shows content that is only available for 24 hours. Much like on Twitter, which also recently embraced the format, it is unclear what it is best used for and its effectiveness.
However, it might be worthwhile playing with the format as you can mark yourself out as a pioneer on the platform. Though be careful to keep content professional.
Currently, you can only post stories from the LinkedIn mobile app.
When it comes to headhunting, recruitment, or if you are using LinkedIn for sales, the personal approach is best, so you will want to engage with LinkedIn contacts through direct messages or export their contact information from LinkedIn and contact them directly via email. Read our post about how to manage LinkedIn contacts.
Every social media platform has its own natural rhythm, and you need to fit your posting into that rhythm to get visibility and engagement. When it comes to LinkedIn, always post during the working hours of your target demographic, and if you only post once a week, do it on a Wednesday.
On any social media platform, you need to post regularly; otherwise, you will simply be lost in the noise of your connections’ feeds. In the case of LinkedIn, this means posting at least once a week. Engagement will be significantly higher if you post on a daily basis, but posting more often than this doesn’t seem to provide any significant gains.
To make this manageable, you could post status updates on a daily basis, and longer content, such as articles or videos, on a weekly basis.
The cadence with which LinkedIn users tend to check their profiles suggests that content gets the most visibility if it is posted on Wednesday, followed by Mondays.
Whatever day you choose to post on, post during working hours for the time zone of your most important audience. LinkedIn users tend to check in while they are working rather than on evenings on weekends.
Just like for any social media platform, you shouldn’t be managing your business account the same way that you manage your personal account by posting on the fly. There are great tools out there to help you manage your LinkedIn content strategy with regard to your posting, tracking your engagement, and evaluating your success.
Growth-X are particularly strong for B2B sales as their tools specialize in targeting and engaging contacts personally and leading them through an engagement funnel.
The tool also lets you integrate your LinkedIn contacts and activities into your CRM, so LinkedIn can become an integrated part of your overall communications and marketing strategy.
Have you used the Growth-X tool to manage LinkedIn? Why would you recommend it? Share your experience in the comments section below.
‘’Growth-X is the #1 automated LinkedIn engagement service for managing, engaging, and building your network of leads on LinkedIn. Growth-X works on a variety of social media platforms and is the leading social media management tool for B2B sales.’’
I'm Growth-X's digital marketing, copywriter, and customer success expert who focuses on growth hacks for B2B companies. When not working, you might catch me doing yoga or planning my next adventure.
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