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Many people are posting on LinkedIn nowadays and garnering 100s of comments and massive visibility in front of their network. It seems easy for them, but it doesn’t seem to be working for you too.
What are they doing right that the rest of us can’t seem to do? Why is their post engagement rate so high, whereas we’re lucky if we can get 2 people to comment on our post?
Posting on LinkedIn is part art, part science. And that’s exactly what 53 social media pros are discussing in today’s post.
If you’re ready to bring your A-game to Linkedin, let’s dive right in.
On LinkedIn, it’s preferable to post once a day or three times a week.
LinkedIn itself recommends posting 20 posts a month, or one post every workday to reach 60% of your audience.
Now, next question – when should you post?
The time depends on the type of audience you’re catering to. If it’s a B2B audience, then in the morning between 8 AM to 2 PM should work best.
There are several differences between LinkedIn’s posts and articles.
The main difference is the length. While LinkedIn posts and status updates are limited to 1,300 characters, LinkedIn articles can be up to 125,000 characters in length.
However, while LinkedIn articles provide you with a lot more space to write authoritative content pieces and demonstrate your expertise in front of your network, they also generally revolve fewer views than LinkedIn posts.
It’s always preferable to do a mix of both types of content, but if you only have time and resources for one, go for LinkedIn posts.
Related: How to Use LinkedIn for Marketing: 19 Tried and True Tips
Now we’re onto the best part – how to write a LinkedIn post that attracts engagement, views and helps to bring you in front of your target clients and customers.
After all, LinkedIn is 277% more effective for lead generation than other social media platforms.
We asked 53 social media pros their best tips for posting on Linkedin, and here’s what they said.
Personal branding is one thing, an important thing, but so is helping your company grow. You may not have direct control over who follows you, but you can influence them with your posts, comments, and other kinds of engagement. To do that, you need to know who they are and what their interests are. You can align yourself with your LinkedIn company page followers by analyzing:
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“Be conversational.” Says Jose Gomez of Evinex. “Consider starting your caption with a question and an appealing call to action. Also, try to trigger the ‘read more’ link in a way it interrupts a sentence. Your post reach is going to be affected by the number of engagements during the first hour. Every click counts. Remember to start a conversation with your audience and to encourage your readers to comment.”
“A great way to start a conversation with your readers,” says Mian Muneer of Beaufort Associates, “is to tag people you know. When you tag someone in your LinkedIn post, their connections and people who follow them will also see that content. And if someone engages with the post, that is also seen by those people’s followers and connections. Of course, that doesn’t mean that you should tag anyone in your post. The best approach is to tag people you have quoted or referenced in the content you are sharing.”
Emily Lyman of Branch & Bramble agrees and recommends businesses to “Highlight individuals who are thought leaders at the company and in the industry. To maximize this, always utilize tagging when posting from the brand page. Tag the writer of the article, an employee, another organization, or publication.”
Nikola Roza further opines, “People love conversations. Give them a chance to engage with you. And when they do, engage right back at them.
Ask them questions, ask for their opinions. Let them contribute their thoughts about the topic of your post. Do it, and you’ll find a bunch of passionate people who’ll not only engage with you but will also spread the word around because it’s sort of their post now too.”
Rachael Bassey of Databox agrees and says, “Considering that the average person’s attention span is 8 seconds, how you begin/present your post makes all the difference. Starting a LinkedIn post with a question, fact, or a phrase that triggers curiosity has proven to be super effective for me (Additionally, support your post with an image or a video).”
Kaitlyn Short of Best Company adds, “General internet writing principles apply to LinkedIn. Create easy-to-read content, starting with the headlines. The headlines should be relatively short and conversational. Make the post personal, like talking directly to the reader by using ‘we’ and ‘I’. This will improve engagement and reach.”
A great way to drive conversions is by adding value. Create content that provides information to your audience that adds value to their life.
“Add value.” Advices Sarah Turpin of Wyatt International. “If you know your audience, you should know their challenges. The more value you can offer them, the more likely they are to return and engage!”
Storytelling is another great way to catch your audience’s attention. “LinkedIn gives you space to really tell a story. So it’s no coincidence, then, that the posts that really work are the ones that tell an engaging story and catch people right from the beginning.” Explains Spendesk’s Eve Taylor.
And as Eric Izazaga of Webstacks shares, “One tip for a highly-engaging LinkedIn marketing post is to write it as if you’re talking to another human. Time and time again, we want to follow this stigma of being professional, especially on a platform like LinkedIn. The way I see it is these same people you’re marketing to aren’t always in work mode. They, too, have a sense of humor and other emotions that great marketing posts can trigger. You’re one risky decision away from creating an engaging post on LinkedIn—Take the risk and see what happens.”
Don’t put up a façade on LinkedIn – people see very clearly through that.
“LinkedIn is about success, but it’s also about failures.” Explains Kim Chappell of Bobbie. “The audience doesn’t want you only to show the shiny, perfect marketing campaigns but the hustle, grit, and flops that happen along the way as well. The more you can share the lows along with the highs or a valuable lesson learned, the better your content will resonate more with the LinkedIn crowd.”
Nicole Jackson of Foundation Marketing Inc. agrees and says, “Be human. This is basic advice for posting on any social platform, but I think people forget it most on LinkedIn. Yes, it’s a site for professionals, but that doesn’t mean you need to be stuffy and overly-sophisticated. While people react more to posts from individuals, brands also have an opportunity to let their personalities shine through. The best content is honest content that tells a story, offers advice, gets people thinking, and shares an inside look at you and/or your team. It’s not about showing off; it’s about encouraging discussion and adding value.”
Related: 30 Marketers Share Their Most Effective LinkedIn Marketing Strategies
Carol Kaemmerer notes that “Posts made by individuals are more powerful than posts from companies because we find people more trustworthy than companies. If you are responsible for posting for a company, one strategy could be to curate the article you’d like to post and ask the Chief Marketing Officer or other senior leaders from within the company post it FIRST. Then the company can share the original post.
Another strategy is to encourage company employees to re-share content shared by the company.”
Our recent survey showed similar results. When asked which posts receive more engagement – posts from your company page or posts from employees – a clear majority, 73.1%, said via employees.
Anja Djuricin of DesignRush agrees and adds, “Actually, we have seen great responses for company posts which feature employees. During this time, when businesses have digitized their workflows and moved away from an in-person approach, people seem to cherish seeing actual faces of a company they do business with.”
“In a mobile-first world, you have less time to grab people; attention spans are shorter than ever, so including visual cues (video or images) has been used even more to show vs. tell for maximum impact.” Shares Paige Arnof-Fenn of Mavens & Moguls
Catriona Jasica of Top Vouchers Code explains why videos work so well on LinkedIn. “When it comes to scrolling through different social media apps, most people are spending a ton of time. However, LinkedIn isn’t the same. People barely use this app when compared to other social media. When they use it, it’s either for job posting or exploring opportunities, so they want a quick fix. Be it an informative video or anything, make sure you post it in the form of a video that draws attention.”
Commusoft’s Cristina Maria acknowledges that creating videos is harder than creating text-based posts but explains that it’s well worth the effort.
“I know this doesn’t seem like the easiest thing to do, but no one said writing a successful LinkedIn post would be easy. My most successful posts are always the ones that include videos.
If a text post gets about 3-400 views, a video one, where LinkedIn counts only those who have watched at least 3 seconds of it, usually gets 700 or more. This means the interactions are both more personal and more intentional.
Also, adding a video doesn’t mean getting a camera crew to come around – my most successful ones were casual shots, done with my phone, where I try to offer actionable, insightful tips to my audience.” Says Maria.
Derin Oyekan of Reel Paper advises businesses to create short videos – under 1 minute – for maximum impact. “In those short videos, you can provide entertaining and educational stories that keep people entertained. They also provide more value than links.” Explains Oyekan.
“In our experience, posts with a small amount of text and video outperform everything else, so we’ve tailored our strategy towards that realization.” Says Beau Berman of www.LayerOrigin.com.
Measure the performance of your videos on LinkedIn using this social media dashboard software.
In our recent survey, over 40% of respondents said text with video outperforms all other kinds of posts on LinkedIn.
“One of the most important factors to consider when posting on LinkedIn is the content format and medium. It is no secret that videos gain much more engagement on social media. Therefore, it is important to truly tell your company story by posting videos on company culture.” Says Annika Lile of Giant Partners
And don’t forget to post your videos natively.
As Samantha Russell of Twenty Over Ten says, “Not only are videos the most engaging medium of content out there right now but uploading them natively to LinkedIn pleases their algorithms which can help your posts rank higher in people’s feeds and search.”
Caroline Lee of CocoSign agrees and adds, “One way to grab attention on LinkedIn is to post quick and informative native videos. People barely used LinkedIn in terms of time on the platform when compared to other social media. The majority are using less than two hours a week, with a large portion at zero minutes.
That’s only 24 minutes a day in a 5-day work week with a generous calculation.
People browse fast and efficiently on LinkedIn, so posting your latest blog post link and expecting 100 link clicks and a dozen shares just aren’t realistic. Nobody cares about your blog content if it’s a pasted link with a featured image.”
Related: 5 Ways to Use LinkedIn Ads to Generate Highly Targeted Leads
“Masterful LinkedIn marketing content is all about perfecting the art or demonstrating your expertise by taking a position on a subject you care about. This can be related to your craft, business, or current events in your industry or the world. It should rarely be promotional. In all cases, you want to share your thinking in a way that gets people to agree by liking, commenting, or share their opinion as a response.” Says Benjamin Collins of Laughing Samurai.
“Playing the emotional card is a great help to make your post engaging.” Says Bradley Keys of PatchMD. “Share stories about your personal experiences, or post something that they can relate to. This way, people will be interested in commenting on their insights and experiences and relating theirs to your post. It can also benefit you to expand your reach and gain more connections. Plain text is the key to engagement. You can use emojis to catch their attention.”
“Open with a hook.” Explains Katie Thomas of Leaders Online. “This could be a bold statement, a question, or anything that grabs the content consumer’s attention. Your content could be wonderful, but if it doesn’t hook the content consumer immediately, they’re going to scroll right on past your content.”
Dakota Lowe of Khoros advises focusing on your first sentence. “This should be compelling, to the point, and give the user a reason to keep reading your post. Provide value and draw them in.”
Richard Latimer of Veritas Home Buyers also believes that a headline can easily make or break a post. “Try starting with a headline that will grab the reader’s attention. Such as ‘How to’ or ‘future of’. The perfect headline leaves the reader wanting to know the future of SEO or business X. Starting off with ‘how to’ is a classic that is being used across many different platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, etc.
Finding the reader’s pain point and incorporating it somehow into your headline is key!”
Related: 23 Examples of Highly-Engaging Homepage Headlines
“When you create a post that you hope will win high engagement,” says Andrea Loubier of Mailbird, “increase the likelihood by posing a question. If your post leads to an article or some other type of information, ask a specific question relating to it, and be sure to respond to all comments.”
Connor Whitman agrees and adds, “Asking a question conversationally. This grabs people’s attention, and it provides them a platform to tell their stories.
It also offers them a chance to tag their colleagues, expanding your reach, and bringing new eyes to your content. The key is ensuring your content and questions resonate with your intended audience and that you’re cognizant of ideal engagement timeframes.”
Sean Si of SEO Hacker shares, “Always start your post with a quote or a question that can relate to your target audience. Maybe something that deals with their struggles or problems with their field of work. Anything that may let your audience relate to you. I have found that this is one of the best ways to immediately capture the attention of LinkedIn users and keep them engaged with a post.”
“My number ONE tip for hitting the hammer on the head of a LinkedIn post is,” Eduard Klein says, “to make sure that it’s relevant to your audience. Imagine you’re sitting with a group of Businessmen and Politicians in a restaurant, and all of a sudden, it’s your turn to speak. What do you do? Do you talk about food? Do you talk about the restaurant and its service? If that’s what you do, then I’m afraid you don’t belong at that table.
You need to make your LinkedIn post extremely relevant to your network’s interests. If you have a majority of tech-geeks in your network, then curate posts about the latest technological innovations and what YOU think about them. Anyone can copy-paste an article but what truly will make a post highly engaging is whether or not you have any original thought written in it.”
Matthew Stormoen of Mobibi, Inc. also recommends focusing on topics or issues you know are relevant to your business, industry, or network.
“Everything else follows from here. You can post about real issues or problems that people face in your business, industry, or network. This approach works better if you use the first-person when you post and use relevant images of your own employees or yourself in action. This strengthens the human interest elements of your post.
Additionally, this approach works better if you come up with your own original content, say your own blog articles, or thought leadership columns.” Explains Stormoen.
Jessica Taylor of Portent agrees and says, “Understanding your audience. Even the most thoughtful content could fall flat without understanding what’s relevant to your target user. Digging into followers and updating analytics within your page can shed some light on who you’re currently reaching and allow you to tailor your strategy and content accordingly.”
Ava McFarlane of Denamico, Inc shares, “The LinkedIn algorithm favors original, text-based content. Users favor relevant and thought-provoking pieces. If you’re able to appeal to both the algorithm and your audience, you will be successful in creating content that is both valuable to your company and its industry, while achieving higher-visibility and increased engagement.”
Jonathan Aufray of GrowthHackers advises creating viral content on LinkedIn to truly stand out.
“For a highly-engaged post on LinkedIn, you don’t just want to post good content. What you want is to post engaging content that makes people react to it. It could be something truly incredible, imaginative, or creative or something controversial to get the conversation starting or to post something related to the current news (Newsjacking).
Don’t just post good content, post content that has viral potential.” Explains Aufray.
The number one reason to post more content is to see more engagement, right? That’s what we’re all striving towards.
However, sometimes you’ll have to prompt people into engaging with your post.
“Engage a few people you have relationships with in the comments of your post. Getting them to engage with your post will boost the performance of your posts to their audience.” Says Steven J Wilson.
William Taylor of VelvetJobs recommends inviting your customers to join the conversation! “If your selling pants, ask your customers what type of colors they prefer and make sure you take action!” Shares Taylor.
Kevin E Groh. of Cachi Life says, “I think the best way to increase your engagement significantly is to make sure you are prompting your followers. Most commonly, this can be done by asking a question at the end of your post. Another great way is to post something that might be controversial. This will encourage discussion and increase the total amount of engagement amongst your followers.”
“And if it is a round-up post”, Rachael Bassey of Databox advises, “do well to tag your contributors, any form of interaction (likes, comments) will get your post to be seen by more people.”
Kineta Kelsall of Jellyfish Training explains, “Conversation that generates discussion. For example, posts from users that share opinions relating to trending topics. Human tone of voice, not repurposing brand content/news articles.”
Use this social media dashboard to measure your post engagement rate in real-time.
While creating your post, don’t forget to pay special attention to your post graphic, too.
Kris Olin of Social Media Revolver shares, “When it comes to engaging posts, there is one component that stands out – the image.
A photo or an image is the most important element in a LinkedIn post and pretty much any other social media post. If your image is boring or low-quality, chances are that your post will be skipped no matter how good your content might be. On the other hand, if your image is eye-catching and high quality, your post will get read even if the text content might not be top-notch. This is not actually a revelation but a proven fact from when the concept of modern advertising was created in the 1920s.”
Shoshi Goldstein of Perimeter 81 adds, “Personalize the content you are sharing. Instead of posting an article with the standard image pulled from the URL, create an image with a quote on Canva or something similar in addition to the text and link.”
“I see so many aphoristic LinkedIn posts on my feed, telling me that they discovered the key to successful copywriting or the real secret to growing blog traffic or whatever it is. But when I don’t recognize the company or the person, and sometimes even when I do, I don’t trust these comments. Without the context for their copywriting discovery or some data to back up the promise of traffic, this advice doesn’t have any weight. Worse, it looks spammy.
The best way to nail a LinkedIn marketing post and invite real engagement is to share an experience or promote content with real-life examples. When I see the evidence, I’m more likely to trust and more likely to engage.” Unstack’s Ceillie Clark-Keane explains.
“What you don’t write can make as much of an impression as what you do.” Says Beth Cooper of KNB Communications
“Tell your followers about a time…
When you used short sentences.
Made a hard return after each and left spaces in between each line.
…and then hit them with a pithy reveal.
If you tell the story in a compelling manner, people will click to expand to see the end of the post, thereby driving up your engagement.”
Golden Spiral’s Sydney Johnson agrees and adds, “Try spacing out your copy into “mini headlines” that are quick and easy to read. Users are more likely to read and engage with content when it’s easily scannable.
Using thought-provoking language — while remaining professional in tone — and using more of the text space in LinkedIn posts will prompt users to click “See more,” boosting engagement.”
“Stop thinking about what YOU want to say and what YOU want to get into the market.” Says Adam Smartschan of Altitude Marketing. “Produce something that’s actually useful – step-by-step how-to’s are great – and avoid the thinly veiled sales pitch. It’s obvious when you’re writing for yourself vs. when you’re writing for the reader. Think about what they actually want, not what you want to tell them.”
Autumn Sullivan of Mobilization Funding shares, “Don’t be afraid to make cultural references. When we referenced Frozen 2 in a LinkedIn post, it got over 17,000 views, almost 100 Reactions, and dozens of comments.
Remember, even in B2B, you’re talking to people. And people love to bond over pop culture.”
“A lot of people get intimidated by the idea of posting every single day on LinkedIn. But it doesn’t have to be daunting.” Lauren Pope of G2 explains.
“You don’t need to have a new idea every day to post on LinkedIn weekly; you really just need one good idea that you can break down into multiple insights.
Here’s how I accomplish this in just thirty minutes each week:
Then, keep track of what topics and content types your audience responds well to. This will help you zoom in on your niche, and that will make it easier to find your sweet spot.”
The number one way to write a LinkedIn post is to be authentic.
AJ Alonzo of demandDrive aptly explains, “There are plenty of people out there touting ‘LinkedIn hacks’ to help you increase engagement. Stuff like writing an effective hook (so readers HAVE to click ‘see more’), spacing your post out line by line, making sure it’s long enough to increase dwell time, etc.
All that is well and good, but the best way to get engagement is to actually post something that people want to read.
Find something that both you and your audience care about and focus your post around that. You can tell when someone is writing about a topic they care about by the tone of their post. If it lacks passion, you’ll lack engagement.”
Matt Holmes of Handshaking.com agrees. “Voice your opinion boldly, and don’t be afraid of what your critics will say. Try to keep it PG13 in the comments and try to learn from each other. Challenge your critics with numbers and sources.” Opines Holmes.
Jordan Figueredo of Online Optimism says, “By utilizing LinkedIn’s native content system, you will create content that hooks your audience and does not force them to disrupt their LinkedIn session. This tactic will not necessarily drive traffic to your site but will increase awareness of your brand. Using the native article feature will also send all connections a notification when you post, which gives you a higher chance to increase engagement compared to organically posting on your feed.”
And if you are linking to a website outside of LinkedIn, Mia Liang of Upgrow says, “do not do it in the post itself. You can either link to it in the comments or transfer the post to an article on LinkedIn. This way, it stays on LinkedIn, and the algorithm rewards it.”
“In my experience, most people are more likely to engage and follow a PERSON rather than a company or brand,’ Says Kayla Fullington of Denamico, “as it feels more natural to communicate with another human being instead of a business. You ‘connect’ with a person while you ‘follow’ a company/brand—and it’s human nature to yearn for connection and belonging. When employees leverage their personal profiles for company marketing posts, the overall engagement level on those posts will be higher.”
“Your posts can’t generate high engagement if your network is weak.” Explains Digital Now’s Marcin Nieweglowski.
“Whenever you notify LinkedIn with new content, this platform immediately tries to find a correlation to what you post with the interests of people with whom you’re in touch there. For example, your posts about HR will be linked with HR-related people from your network.
Engagement doesn’t work If your network on LinkedIn is a ragbag, in other words. The network is your target audience, remember that. If you neglect it, you’re lost and your posts as well.”
And lastly, always put yourself in your audience’s shoes.
Ask yourself these questions before posting something on LinkedIn, “Is your post relevant? Is it relatable? Is it helpful? Is it interesting? If it’s not those things, it won’t resonate, and people won’t engage. Post something that you would like to read if you were in your audience’s place.” Says Melanie Musson of StudentCarInsurance.com.
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Maham S. Chappal is a content writer for SaaS and marketing brands in B2B. She’s been published in several leading publications including Social Media Examiner. She loves writing in-depth, research-backed content that drives traffic, increases brand awareness, and boosts ROI. When she’s not writing, you’ll find her engrossed in the latest John Grisham novel. You can find her on LinkedIn or on mahamschappal.com
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