LinkedIn Marketing Best Practices — Defined by its Audience Behaviour
LinkedIn is the largest professional network, having an audience base of nearly 600 Million influential, affluent and educated people. These professionals consider it to be their source for driving professional growth. They come to LinkedIn to learn, share and get inspired by connecting with people and engaging with relevant content.
Most B2B marketers have leveraged the opportunity provided by this platform by posting and distributing a wave of content in the form of blogs, e-books, and whitepapers. However, they have not been able to strike a chord with their audience and get the desired engagement.
This post will delve deeper into audience’s needs and motivations on LinkedIn and recommend best practices to market on LinkedIn and increase engagement with your content.
Post Relevant Content
LinkedIn recently surveyed 9000 members to understand “What motivates them to engage with content on LinkedIn”. Their research showed that LinkedIn audience is interested in staying updated on industry trends and improving their skills.
You can use this insight and produce content that demonstrates thought leadership on LinkedIn. You need to move beyond just product-related information and provide trends and news about your industry to build engagement.
IBM’s company page is a perfect inspiration for brands. They go beyond their product page and serve broad coverage on a range of topics, such as technology, innovation, leadership, data, research, science, and development.
Master LinkedIn Algorithm
There are over 100,000 articles/posts that get published on LinkedIn every week. In this vast swathe of content, it can be a challenge to ensure the required visibility of your posts. It becomes even more challenging with LinkedIn’s spam-fighting strategy, which keeps irrelevant and low-quality content from reaching the feed.
You can leverage this to your advantage by building engagement into your posts: through native videos and by ending your posts with a question.
Native Videos: Monitor, likes, and views play a huge role in deciding the visibility of the posts. LinkedIn native videos have been proven to boosts these metrics. More than 75% of the marketers who publish video on LinkedIn consider it to be an effective strategy.
Cheddar is a great example of how to use Native Videos to build engagement on LinkedIn. They cover the most innovative products, technologies, and services in video format, which drives an immense amount of engagement for the publisher.
End Posts with a Question: LinkedIn’s algorithm monitors engagement on each post and then enhances the visibility of only those posts which demonstrate initial engagement.
You can spark this engagement by building reciprocity in the post by asking your audience to share their thoughts and views on your post.
Here is an example of how Brigette Hyacinth engages with her audience and reaches feeds of people beyond her direct connections.
Employee Advocacy
In the LinkedIn Survey mentioned earlier, it was also learned that when it comes to finding content, peers were a top source of engaging content followed by colleagues, companies, and influencers.
You can use this insight behavior by empowering your organization’s employees to share content.
On average, the employees have 10x more connections than the followers of the company. Also, according to Edelman Trust Barometer, people are 3x more likely to trust information coming from employees than from the company itself.
This can help you to increase the reach of your posts and enhance engagement on it.
Drift is a prime example of how to use this approach. They have turned their employees into brand advocates, who in-turn regularly posts native authentic videos on LinkedIn, covering Drift’s culture and a broad range of customer engagement topics.
Share Post at the Right Time
With so much content being posted, the feeds of social media platforms change every millisecond. You need to ensure the visibility of your post when the audience is most active on the platform.
There are different researches on which time works better. Some recommend posting it during the working hours of 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. while others suggest posting before and after work hours.
You need to find your own sweet spot testing across various days and time.
Conclusion
LinkedIn has grown to become a social media giant allowing B2B businesses to connect and engage with decision makers and influencers at scale. These professionals use this platform regularly to improve their professional career — By connecting with people and reading and sharing relevant content.
It is vital for you to understand the needs and motivations of the audience on LinkedIn to build engagement with the professionals and influence their decisions.
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What best practices do you follow to build engagement on LinkedIn?
