My quick guide to LinkedIn marketing
LinkedIn is becoming a growing social media platform that you shouldn’t overlook, especially if you are a B2B (business to business) marketer. It’s now a promising channel to generate quality leads, drive traffic and more.
Here is my guide to LinkedIn marketing, everything from figuring out how often to post on LinkedIn to learning about your audience and performance.
1. Post industry trends and how-to articles
One of the first questions that will come to you when thinking about marketing on LinkedIn might be: What should I post?
What works on other platforms won’t always work on LinkedIn. So it’s effective to customise your message for your specific audience, like any other social network.
BuzzSumo analysed the headlines of 10 million articles shared on LinkedIn to find out the topics that resonate best. They looked at the top phrases used in the headline of the most shared articles, and these two types of content stood out: Industry trends and how-to articles.
This means people on LinkedIn are generally interested in educational and informal content.
2. Use images and videos
Just like every other social media platforms, using images and videos in your posts will increase engagement. LinkedIn found that images lead to a 98% increase in comments while links to YouTube videos can result in a 75% increase in shares.
You can now upload videos directly onto LinkedIn rather than posting a link to your YouTube video. Videos uploaded to Facebook have a 110% highest interaction rate and a 478% share rate than YouTube videos on Facebook. It’s likely to have an increase on LinkedIn too.
3. Use data to find your best time to post
Now you know what to post. When’s the best time?
I believe that there isn’t a universal best time to post on social media. With LinkedIn’s algorithmic feed, a best posting time is now less relevant. Instead, focus on your brand’s best time to post. Here’s how you can find your best time:
- Experiment with different posting times and record those times
- Go to the “Updates” section of your LinkedIn Company Page analytics
- Identify the top posts with the highest clicks or engagement, depending on your goals
- Compare those posts with their posting times
Is there a trend? If not, experiment with a few new posting times.
4. Schedule 1 post per weekday
When you know what to post and when, you may want to know how often to post.
LinkedIn discovered that 20 posts per month can help you reach 60% of your unique audience. Start with this and increase it if you see that a fuller schedule gets more benefits. By posting once a day for four weeks and skipping the weekends, you’ll hit 20 posts on the dot!
5. Study other Company Pages
Facebook Pages to Watch is a great Facebook marketing tool. And just like Facebook, LinkedIn has a feature called Companies to Track. You can find this table at the bottom of the “Followers” section of your analytics.
Here, LinkedIn shows you similar companies to yours and some key metrics, such as total followers and social engagement. You can use this information to benchmark your LinkedIn Company page performance with theirs. See what type of content is doing well for them, and if your Company Page is growing as fast as others.
A good place to start is by looking for Company Pages with a similar follower size as you but a higher follower growth of engagement rate.
6. Explore LinkedIn ads
There are three types of ads you can create on LinkedIn:
- Sponsored content – ads that appear in the LinkedIn feed
- Text ads – PPC (pay-per-click) or CPM (cost-per-impression) ads that appear on the side
- Sponsored InMail – ads that allow you to deliver relevant and personalised content through LinkedIn Messenger
Here is a great starter guide to advertising provided by LinkedIn. It covers creating an ad, choosing your audience, setting your budget, and measuring your campaigns.
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