LinkedIn has over 774 million users and has solidified itself as a significant player in the social media space. Since 2003, LinkedIn has played a pivotal role in B2B connections, monitoring competitors, finding potential employers, and building professional relationships with other professionals in different industries. Even though LinkedIn has tapped into a more narrow audience than Facebook or Twitter, businesses should maintain an active presence on the platform and dedicate at least some of their marketing efforts to its users.
Out of all the social media platforms I’ve covered in my articles, LinkedIn is by far the most underutilized. The tools you gain access to with LinkedIn’s site can build your network of followers, increase revenue and leads, and improve your brand awareness.
In this article, I will be discussing ways you can improve your marketing efforts on LinkedIn. As I’ve said in previous entries, this is not an exhaustive list and needs modifications as the landscape of social media changes.
Effective Hashtag Use
Like many other social media platforms, the easiest way to gain more organic impressions and eyeballs on your post is to use hashtags. Hashtags help the audience find posts that relate to a specified search term or phrase. They also provide businesses with the opportunity to reach new audiences and increase their brand’s reach.
Before you start throwing a million hashtags on your content, you should do some research on trending hashtags and their relevancy to the content you’re posting. The easiest way to get started is using the built-in search engine on LinkedIn. Search for a hashtag and see how often people are publishing content with the corresponding tag. While you’re searching for hashtags, be sure to keep in mind a balance between relevant tags and popular tags. Not all popular tags will make sense with what you’re posting, and not all relevant tags will be popular.
If any of you have read my previous articles on SEO and SEM, hashtags follow a similar train of thought. Always make sure that hashtags make sense with the content you are posting. For example, while Market Doctors uses #digitalmarketing to find professional audiences interested in marketing, #beautyindustry (let’s assume this is a trending tag) may not be the right fit for our content. Hashtags with little to no relevance to your content can harm your brand’s reach and may be viewed as spam by your audience.
Optimize Your Post Length
We’re writing for business professionals. All professionals have moments where they’re inundated with work or winding down from a long day. Your business’s content should have varying lengths to accommodate for whatever situation the reader is currently experiencing. Ideally, your audience will read short, concise posts on their breaks and engage with longer posts when they have time to kill. It would help if you also considered adding multimedia occasionally to spice up an otherwise mundane post.
Sharing Industry Articles and External Sources
Not all of your posts have to be specific to your company. Sharing articles about industry news, engaging blog posts from your favorite industry-related blog (hint hint), and helpful websites your audience can visit, are all ways to boost engagement. As long as they provide some value to your audience, share it! Not only does it save time from curating original content, but it can also show other industry insiders that you’re worth following for reliable information.
Whenever you share content created by someone else, you must give credit to the original author. Plagiarism is unacceptable in any capacity and one of the many cardinal sins of posting content on the internet. Many social media outlets automatically credit the original author when you share content directly from the platform. However, it would be best to rely solely on these features as external content won’t automatically credit the author. Therefore, it’s better to be on the side of caution and tag the original author or media outlet when making these posts.
Keep it consistent – Scheduling Posts.
Inherently, people like structure. They expect their news at a particular time, so why shouldn’t they hope their content to have a scheduled time as well? LinkedIn is unique in that you don’t have to be posting updates daily constantly. According to The Refinery (2021), LinkedIn has one of the most extended lifespans of a social media post at 24 hours. However, it would help if you were consistent with your daily posts.
Determining the correct times and days to publish content is variable, like many other social media platforms. There is no one-size-fits-all answer to this predicament (as I’ve also mentioned in previous articles). The best way to determine when you should be posting is by trial and error.
Once you’ve created a content publishing schedule, use a free service like Hootsuite to schedule these posts in advance. Scheduling posts ahead of time saves you the trouble of having to remember if you’ve posted at the right time or if you even remembered to post at all.
Conclusion
LinkedIn is a powerful tool for marketing your business. While it may not be as flashy as other social media outlets, it targets a particular audience and does so better than anyone else.
Remember, effective hashtag use can make or break your reach. DO NOT include hashtags that have little to no relevance to your content. Make sure to keep a balance between popular tags and tags relevant to what you’re posting.
Your content should be variable in length. For example, posts should be shorter or longer to accommodate busy schedules or downtimes.
Don’t be hesitant to share articles or content written by other companies. Creating original content is a time-consuming process and isn’t always necessary, especially on a platform like LinkedIn. Instead, your business should share industry insights, news, and helpful tips to become a trusted source of information for other industry insiders. Make sure to credit all content authored by others.
Keep and maintain a schedule that your business follows when making posts on LinkedIn. Although these posts have a longer lifespan than on other platforms, a weekly schedule at specific times can increase the amount of engagement on your posts. Stay consistent for your audience, and they’ll know when to interact with your content.
If you have any questions about LinkedIn marketing or any of our services at Market Doctors, feel free to reach out at any contact information on this website.
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