Let’s talk about growing engagement on LinkedIn. You’ve optimized your profile to target the professional audience you’re seeking and started building out a network of connections through the use of connection campaigns. Now that you’ve made the introduction, it’s time for the conversation.
With 40% of monthly active users on LinkedIn daily, there are lots of connections to engage.
Let’s talk about ways to create and increase engagement on LinkedIn.
Become a Thought Leader with Original Insight-Driven Content
Now that you’ve created a network on LinkedIn, the best way to build engagement is to create good original content that helps your audience. You want to share the expertise you have about issues your audience cares about. Your content should provide a first-person perspective on the problems that you can help solve and the insights you bring that are relevant for your particular audience.
Create
There is nothing wrong with sharing 3rd party content, particularly when it provides authority for your position, and if you also add some meaning and perspective to what you share. But the goal should be to develop your own flow of original content that makes you a thought leader in your space and with your audience on LinkedIn. That is what provides value for putting in all that time and effort to build your network.
Create 4-6 activities per week on LinkedIn
Now that you’ve created that content, it’s time to use it in a way that allows you to create 4-6 activities per week on the platform. We aim to create 2 pieces of high-quality long-form content per month, and then use those articles to get 4-6 activities per week on your LinkedIn profile.
How do we do that? With posts, likes, and comments. We like to think of it in terms of activities because everything you do on LinkedIn causes it to show up again for your network. Comments and likes both help resurface your post.
One of the best techniques is to publish the content that you create on both your website and on LinkedIn. For SEO purposes, on the article in Pulse (the blogging platform on LinkedIn), in the comments, you want to link to the original place where you posted the article on your website. Even though you have posted it in both places, you won’t have duplicate content issues from an SEO standpoint, and anybody who reads the article on LinkedIn can click through and see it and all the other content you create on your website. And that comment with the post in it increases the engagement for that post.
Unlike Facebook, which penalizes you if you repost the same content, LinkedIn does not. By pulling different quotes from the same content, you can post it to LinkedIn 2, 3, 4 times using different snippets. Even people who see it multiple times are getting a different perspective on it and you’re getting a lot more engagement out of the effort you put into creating the content. Adding graphics to your posts – along with a pull quote – makes it even more likely that your network will engage with it.
Another thing to keep in mind when driving engagement on LinkedIn is that you really have to be consistent and that means posting regularly. We like to think of it in terms of activities because everything you do on LinkedIn causes it to show up again for your network and further drives engagement.
Aim to block out 30-45 minutes daily to work on building your network and driving engagement through creating and sharing content.
Follow the Data
Now that you’ve developed your own flow of content and are posting on LinkedIn regularly, it’s time to start looking at the data to see if what we’re doing is really creating engagement. We look at LinkedIn all the time and see some interesting things. If you just post an article directly on Pulse, that creates the lowest percentage of engagement. By posting the same content multiple times, using different pull quotes and graphics, and commenting on or liking your posts, you’re driving more engagement. Engagement on the post is what LinkedIn looks at when deciding the number of people who will see your post in their feed.
There is a direct correlation between likes and comments (which have an equal weighting on LinkedIn) and how much more exposure your post gets. Every additional like or comment increases the percentage of your audience that sees it. And LinkedIn makes it easy to view analytics for articles you post. You can view it from an admin perspective with a graph icon you can click on to view what engagement looked like over time.
By creating 2 pieces of high-quality long-form content per month, and then using that content in a way that creates 4-6 activities a week, you’re creating a good foundational core approach to building your exposure on LinkedIn.
Learn more by listening to our B2B Word of Mouth Marketing podcast episode, Increasing Your LinkedIn Engagement.
All the best,
Bill Bice
CEO
