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Emphasize Thought Leadership

The nature of LinkedIn differs from other platforms in that it’s made for professional networking. While LinkedIn is often used to share employment opportunities or celebrate company milestones, it also provides ample opportunities to showcase employees and participate in – and even lead – industry conversations.

Sharing educational content on your business page works to expand your page’s audience while also bolstering your company’s or employees’ positions as industry thought leaders. This contributes to building a stronger brand image that will help your organization stand out among competition. Evidence also suggests that this is among the best types of content on the platform. Buzzsumo examined the top-performing B2B headlines shared on LinkedIn in 2017 and found that “How To” was most shared two-word phrase on the platform, with “X Ways To” being the top three-word phrase.

The value in thought leadership content lies in its ability to keep followers engaged with your brand’s posts. Rather than just promoting specific products or services to reach new customers, brands that share useful educational content demonstrate the value of the LinkedIn page itself as a source of quality insight from experienced professionals. This incentivizes people to follow the page and regularly interact with posts.

When sharing educational content, it’s wise to put specific employees front and center, tagging their own pages in the process. This helps your audience connect with key team members to expand their own networks. Future content featuring such employees will also generate more engagement as more users become accustomed to the company spokespeople.

With this strategy also comes a need for consistency. Posting at least weekly is crucial, as brands who post at least this often will see double the engagement of those who don’t post enough. However, posting on a daily schedule is the best way to keep your audience interacting with your content.

Analyze Audience Demographics

For any social media platform, content should be specifically built to appeal to your target audience and followers. LinkedIn offers a unique opportunity for B2B marketers to see detailed characteristics about their brand’s followers beyond basic demographic information. While the location data can be useful, knowing the distribution of your followers’ job functions, industries, company sizes and seniorities can help you make more informed decisions about content based on the people who are most likely to see and interact with it.

Analyzing follower demographics can also be useful when optimizing a sponsored LinkedIn post strategy. Identifying the key job functions, industries and company sizes can help expand your ads’ and page’s reach to more people with similar professional backgrounds.

Test Different Creative

As I’ve discussed in my previous blog post, quality imagery is paramount for producing successful content on any social media platform. Visual elements are especially important on LinkedIn, as posts with images typically receive twice as much engagement than those that don’t include image. In terms of size, LinkedIn recommends images be 1,200 x 628 pixels. However, square images can also lead to heightened performance, so be sure to test a few variations and determine which would be right for your audience.

When promoting events or speaking engagements, images also allow content to convey necessary information, such as location, date and time, so the post copy can be used to explain the benefit in downloading, registering or attending. This also offers another chance to test variations. Consider featuring headshots or photos of the team members participating or presenting in said events. In many cases, your audience may be more drawn to images with real people, which also helps with the aforementioned approach of establishing certain employees as company spokespeople.