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LinkedIn has an irreplaceable spot in many companies’ marketing strategies. When we polled 65 marketers about their LinkedIn practices, 60% answered that LinkedIn is very important to their marketing efforts.
To help businesses get the most out of their LinkedIn presences, we analyzed our Benchmark Groups data, ran a survey including questions like the above, and interviewed Funky Marketing’s Nemanja Zivkovic. The result is the report you’re reading now.
Out of the 65 marketers we interviewed, 44.62% work for an agency, 29.23% represent business-to-business (B2B) companies, and 26.15% work at business-to-consumer (B2C) companies. The majority of them have significant experience with LinkedIn. While just 9.23% have a profile with less than one year of history on LinkedIn, 33.85% have one to three years of history, 29.23% have three to five years of history, and 27.69% have more than five years of history.
Before we can explore how to succeed on LinkedIn, we need to define that success in the first place.
Companies mainly aim to raise awareness of their brand using their LinkedIn pages. Out of our respondents, 46.15% had this goal. Trailing behind in second was lead generation as a goal, with 16.92% of participants prioritizing it.
Many of the marketers we consulted measure their progress toward their goal using their engagement rate and similar engagement indicators such as clicks and shares. On LinkedIn, engagement means that their content resonates with their followers and their followers are interested in their brand and message. Engagement also leads to more visibility on timelines since the algorithm values high-performing posts.
Looking at the data from our Benchmark Group for LinkedIn profiles in all industries, it’s challenging to earn reach and engagement on LinkedIn.
Data from 1151 contributors shows that the median number of impressions was 2,070 in August 2023.
Among 890 contributors, the median number of reactions in August 2023 was 76. However, the median for top performers was more than three times bigger at 245.
Looking at unique impressions, also known as reach, 597 contributors had a median of 1,080 unique impressions in August 2023. The highest-performing pages had a median of 3630 unique impressions.
Clicks had one of the biggest disparities between its total median and median for top performers. In August 2023, the overall median for clicks was 84, but the median for top performers was 347. That’s more than four times the regular median.
Companies received a median of 27 new followers in August 2023, while top performers had a median of 96 new followers.
While LinkedIn Company Pages have overall low engagement numbers, it seems that you can improve by following the right tactics. It may also take effort outside of your LinkedIn page to convert people to followers and increase your post visibility. Let’s explore those options.
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To better understand how to succeed on LinkedIn, we talked to Funky Marketing’s founder, Nemanja Zivkovic, who has almost 30,000 followers. We learned that you need to approach your LinkedIn following as a community using posts from your personal profiles and company page. Here are the three main takeaways we got:
Zivkovic recommends starting with your personal LinkedIn profile to improve your page performance, telling us, “When you start, focus 100% on a personal profile, but, there’s a but. If you have in mind creating the brand, don’t communicate as ‘I’ but as ‘we’. Name it. Make sure you have a story right from the start, what you want customers to see when they see anything related to your company.”
“At the same start, when creating content for your profile, just rephrase it, add visuals, a deck, or wherever is easiest for you, and post it on the page, too. Just don’t do the same posts on the same day on your profile and on the page,” Zivkovic continues.
We asked: When you a company write organic content on their page versus its personal profiles? Zivkovic had this fun fact to share:
“Let me tell you a fact: since we stopped posting content on the Funky Marketing page, and started resharing my posts over there, the page became much more visible in the feed. Mind blown, right?”
Nemanja Zivkovic
Founder & Strategist at Funky Marketing
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So, posting as people first and using your company page as a place to curate those posts could be a sound strategy for getting more engagement. It’s one way to approach a LinkedIn employee advocacy strategy.
Zivkovic also advises you to take advantage of LinkedIn’s features for companies with more than 30 employees if they apply to you. “If you’re building a bigger company, you need to at least be present on your company page. After 30 employees on LinkedIn, you’ll get additional features to help you recommend content for your employees to share, do employer branding-related things, etc.,” Zivkovic says.
Related: The Most Effective Way of Marketing a Company on Linkedin: 7 Tried & True Tips from Experts
Once your team starts posting on your personal profiles, direct that energy to your page by posting engaging LinkedIn content and tagging your page.
Zivkovic points out that pages appear less often on his LinkedIn timeline than personal profiles. This could be because, as Social Media Examiner explains, personal profiles have the advantage of interacting with other profiles. They don’t necessarily have a built-in disadvantage in the algorithm, but their fewer features make it harder for them to succeed. “Somehow, we’re our true selves on our personal profiles, and we become something like corporate robots on company pages, and create uninteresting content,” Zivkovic adds.
So what does the Funky Marketing team share on its pages to get engagement?
“[M]emes and gifs are always ok, and generally in-feed content. To that, we add short videos from our podcast episodes (vertical ones with headlines and transcript), but we also had videos where we were inside the old TV frame. That got a lot of attention just because it’s different. In those videos from podcasts and interviews, we focus on the guest and build his/her brand on our page. This is how we create the environment for them to share it with their audience, and tag them so they can see it, and it always brings new people to the page.”
In one case, the Funky Marketing team created a competition for the best marketer in the region. With the competitors rallying for themselves on LinkedIn, people constantly visited the company’s page to vote for their favorites in polls. Best of all, the competition gave them content to work with for months to come.
“We created a Funky Marketing Top Voices list, invited huge names to accept it, did podcast episodes and interviews with them, and created materials for our page for the next 6 months – videos, quotes, interviews, etc,” Zivkovic says.
But don’t sweat it if you operate with only a few employees. “When you’re a small team, just sharing posts from your own profiles will do the work,” Zivkovic explains. “Get out of the box, and do what others are not doing.”
If you plan on sharing some of your website content in your LinkedIn community, you can make it work, but you need to be careful. Zivkovic says, “If you wanna develop a page, give value in the feed, and post links to the blog or YouTube links (Vimeo performs better, for some reason) as 20% of your content (or less).” According to Zivkovic, links can reduce page performance, so proceed with caution.
Zivkovic suggests this strategy to get engagement and share your content: “Instead of links, break them down into posts, add visuals, gifs, or videos, and people will consume them in the feed.”
Related: Harness Generative AI to Create Content
On top of building a community around your page, you can also invest in LinkedIn ads and boosted content to increase its visibility.
Zivkovic uses this tactic to source ad ideas: “If we have a few pieces of content we want our target audience to see, we can post them on the company page, get organic reactions, and then add them to ad campaigns to make sure the right people see them and consume them. If they engage and watch videos, we can retarget them and move them to the next step.” If you’re new to retargeting, try using the LinkedIn pixel to introduce it to your strategy.
According to Zivkovic, you can also boost high-performing posts to get more followers for your page.
Related: Understanding the Cost of Advertising on LinkedIn in 2023
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:
and more…
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Successful LinkedIn marketing has an underlying strategy behind it. These best practices from the marketers we surveyed will help you develop the right tactics for your page and community:
On top of Nemanja Zivkovic’s suggestions to create a community surrounding your LinkedIn page, some of the respondents to our survey had similar ideas. These participants go beyond posting on their pages to engage their followers.
At Sculpt, Josh Krakauer uses the company’s LinkedIn page as a cornerstone for community. “We don’t expect our Company LinkedIn Page to drive new customers. That takes the pressure off of making every post a slam dunk with a CTA. Instead, we consider our Page a source for engaging a community of career seekers and brand advocates — past and present employees and clients,” Krakauer says.
The Sculpt team sources a lot of their content from the people surrounding their company. Krakauer says, “To engage them, we found re-shares work surprisingly well. We source content from clients, employees, and our CEO — then re-share with commentary from the company page.”
While the Sculpt team brings content inward, Luke Hancock of Bin There Dump That performs outward interactions that nurture connections. “I actively engage with employees’ and followers’ personal posts to foster a sense of community and build strong relationships with our audience. This interaction boosts their engagement and willingness to share our content, which leads to increased brand visibility and broader reach,” Hancock says.
In addition, Hancock focuses on posting meaningful content on the Bin There Dump That page to make it worth the follow. Hancock says, “To make our company page worth the effort, we prioritize delivering relevant and valuable content that resonates with our target audience. By focusing on informative, engaging, and authentic posts, we encourage more followers to interact with us and follow our page, ultimately resulting in improved brand awareness and a positive impact on our online presence.”
Related: Strengthen Your B2B Brand: The Essential Guide to LinkedIn Employee Advocacy
After building a community with their LinkedIn pages, some respondents also go out of their way to encourage conversations with their followers. They encourage discussions on and off of their pages to gain more engagement and therefore more visibility on timelines.
Content marketer Noel Cabral got results from creating helpful content and interacting with followers:
“We use our LinkedIn page to share helpful stuff like articles and trends. We also ask questions to get people talking. We team up with important people to make interesting posts and do webinars. This has made our page get 30% more followers and our posts are 400% more popular. Sharing useful things, starting chats, and showing we know our stuff is what makes our page worth it. It helps people trust us, makes them like our brand, and gets us more business opportunities.”
Noel Cabral
Content Manager and Writer at NoelCabral.com
Jarik Oosting and the SmartRanking team take a similar approach, except they also run collaborations for even more interaction. Oosting says, “Our LinkedIn company page thrives on a blend of insightful content and interactive engagement. We regularly share posts about SEO trends, digital marketing tips, and success stories to offer value to our audience. We encourage discussions by asking thought-provoking questions and responding promptly to comments.”
Oosting adds, “Additionally, we collaborate with industry influencers for guest posts and host webinars to further engage our followers. As a result, our LinkedIn page has witnessed a 40% increase in followers over the past year, with posts receiving an average of 300% more engagement. This strategy has not only expanded our online presence but also positioned us as authoritative figures in the field.”
Like with any social platform, the LinkedIn algorithm values consistent posting. The respondents’s posting frequencies range anywhere from two times a week to two times a day. According to Buffer, LinkedIn itself recommends two to five times per week.
Marketer Kurt Uhlir sticks to a feasible and consistent goal. “Our LinkedIn corporate profile includes a range of interesting information, including as insightful industry articles, client campaign success stories, behind-the-scenes looks, and educational videos. Consistency is a top priority for us, and to boost visibility, we post two to three times each week and use pertinent hashtags,” Uhlir says.
Oliver Farmiloe and the Matchable team also stick to a smaller weekly posting cadence. “We try to stay consistent with posting quality content at least 2 times a week from our company page. We post a mixture of thought leadership content, brand partnerships, and team content. We place a lot of value on brand partnerships and/or tagging clients in posts so that we can hopefully get in front of their audiences/networks too and grow our brand awareness on LinkedIn. We’re also testing various different content formats including polls, text-based posts, videos, and sharing blogs,” Farmiloe says.
Meanwhile, at KORTX, Kaylee Pope and the team post much more frequently. “Our LinkedIn strategy focuses on consistent and frequent engagement with our audience. We make at least two posts per day, sharing a variety of content from our blog, including industry guides, trending topics, and company culture updates. To promote our blog posts, we schedule them once directly through LinkedIn and tag all contributors, primarily internal subject matter experts (SMEs). We use the Buffer tool to save time and efficiency for all other posts.”
While KORTX is currently focusing on building its follower count on LinkedIn, it soon plans on switching its goal to lead generation. “Since starting this approach in December 2022, we have experienced impressive monthly growth, gaining approximately 500 followers and witnessing a +160% increase in LinkedIn traffic to our website,” Pope says of the team’s current LinkedIn strategy.
The Growth Hackers team has the highest posting frequency. According to CEO Jonathan Aufray, “We share around 12 to 20 pieces of content on our LinkedIn company page per week. 2 to 3 on weekdays and once on weekends. Our objective is to diversify the types of content we share to keep our audience engaged. We share blog posts, videos, images, and carousels. Most of the content we share is top-of-the-funnel content, or in other words educational content such as tips.”
Aim for a variety of content types to appeal to different parts of your audience and keep your followers interested in your content. Focusing on formats that encourage discussion can especially improve your engagement.
Karan Rawal from Ace Infoway says, “[O]ur LinkedIn company page focuses on creating valuable content and fostering engagement to maximize its impact. Our content strategy includes a well-balanced mix of industry news, thought leadership articles, company updates, and employee highlights. We consistently post at least once per week and ensure the inclusion of at least one video per month to diversify our content format.”
The Ace Infoway team also approaches interacting with community members as its own important content format. Rawal says, “Additionally, we recognize the importance of engaging with our employees’ and followers’ personal posts regularly. By actively participating in discussions and showcasing our expertise, we have been able to build a strong community and establish ourselves as a trusted industry resource. This approach has resulted in increased brand visibility, a growing follower base, and improved networking opportunities. To make our page worth the effort, we prioritize staying up-to-date with the latest industry trends, delivering valuable content, and actively engaging with our audience to foster meaningful connections and drive positive outcomes.”
VEM Group’s David Reid also values a healthy variety of content. Reid says, “Our LinkedIn company page is designed to provide a well-rounded mix of content to keep our audience engaged. We share industry news to demonstrate our expertise and stay relevant. Thought leadership articles showcase our industry insights and establish us as a trusted authority. Company updates keep our followers informed about our latest developments, while employee highlights humanize our brand and showcase our talented team. We aim to post at least once per week and include a video every month to diversify our content format.”
Like Ace Infoway, VEM Group treats community conversations as an important content pillar. “We create a sense of community and encourage conversations by paying special attention to engaging with employees’ and followers’ personal posts. This fosters a positive and interactive environment, building stronger relationships with our audience,” Reid says.
Reid summarizes the team’s results so far and how they find the right content to post: “As a result, our LinkedIn page has seen increased engagement, including likes, comments, and shares, which has helped expand our reach and visibility within our target market. Consistency and relevance are crucial in making our LinkedIn page worth the effort. We ensure that our content aligns with the interests and needs of our audience. By listening to their feedback and monitoring analytics, we identify which types of content resonate the most, allowing us to refine our content strategy and deliver more engaging posts.”
On LinkedIn, trends matter. It’s popular for thought leaders to post about their expertise in relation to what’s happening in the world. Posting about current events can even land you a spot in one of LinkedIn News’ articles, which feature posts related to the subject covered in the article.
Trends are an important aspect of Vulse’s LinkedIn strategy. According to team member Mercy Fulani, “Our calendar consists of a minimum of one blog per week, company updates, key dates, memes, and upcoming events. We keep up with current trends (a most recent example being the release of Barbie and Oppenheimer) which brings traction to our page. Though we have only been implementing our strategy for a while, we have found it effective in the number of people that have pre-registered and signed up for our newsletter to stay in the loop and be first to hear news about our platform.”
You don’t have to source all of your LinkedIn post concepts from scratch. In fact, sourcing post ideas from your existing content gives you more opportunities to promote that content.
“We decided early on that LinkedIn would be the platform where we made consumption of our thought leadership possible,” says Convert.com’s Trina Moitra. “ Our blogs are 5000-word behemoths. So many readers value them. But so many more want a TL;DR.”
On top of these posts, the Convert.com team experiments with a variety of formats to keep their content exciting. “Our posting calendar is simple. It follows the values of human-diverse experimentation (trying new things). We make sure we spotlight our partners & experts, we give sneak peeks and do behind the scenes, and we educate – in all formats,” Moitra says.
Even when you know what kinds of posts you’ll create on LinkedIn, it’s another obstacle entirely to figure out what to post about. We also consulted our survey respondents about their brainstorming techniques to inspire you.
An underrated benefit of building a LinkedIn community involving your employees is having a testing ground for new ideas. A few of our respondents try out new topics on their personal profiles before running them on their pages.
At Operation Nation LLC, Josien Nation looks at content from both company employees and competitors: “We look at what has worked well for our personal accounts and try to replicate that for our business page. But we also look at the competition. What works for them we can do too, but improving it to make it even more helpful to our followers.”
Layla Acharya from Edwize uses a mix of personal profile content, reader preferences, and past content to inspire future posts. “I gain insights from analytics of the past content. The topics that already resonate most likely remain relevant. I test new topic ideas through smaller side projects before major investments. Then I ask readers directly for topic suggestions through polls or forums to provide valuable perspective. As I expand my understanding of their wants and needs, it allows me to develop an intuitive sense of what sparks their engagement. Maintaining a consistent evaluation of topics against your audience’s interests will ensure you focus efforts on the most impactful areas for meaningful conversations and value exchange,” Acharya says.
Another tactic for coming up with new post ideas is examining what topics your audience engages with the most. Use the knowledge you have about your followers to come up with topics that’ll resonate with them.
Alice Corner explains how the Dig Insights team approaches post topics: “For LinkedIn, we focus on maintaining a 40-60 ratio of company culture – brand building content. We focus particularly on thought leadership and educational content. As a market research company, it’s important that we’re using our own research studies to offer genuine insights relevant to our audience’s own work. Lately, we’ve been experimenting with ‘boosting’ organic posts to paid audiences when the content is resonating with our following. By looking at the engagement on posts and paying particular attention to comments and shares, we can tell which content is most relevant. We also have a great relationship with clients and industry partners, so are aware of the topics and trends they’re most concerned about, and cater our content accordingly.”
At Coalition Technologies, Jordan Brannon and the team use the audience information they get from their other marketing work to address pain points. Brannon says, “We work with hundreds of digital marketing clients daily, so we tap into the real-world pain points they bring to us to solve daily. We stay on top of algorithm updates and post what we’re doing to stay ahead of them.”
“We pay attention to trends and offer our unique perspective on what’s on everyone’s minds. We are constantly incorporating the latest ecommerce platform updates, opportunities, and our clients’ pressing needs into our digital marketing strategies. We share the “whys” and ‘how-tos’ behind those activities so others can learn from Coalition and trust our methods and expertise,” Brannon adds.
If you want to know where you stand when it comes to industry benchmarks, you can check out our Social Media Benchmarks by Industry for 2023 report. In this report, we determined that according to our Benchmark research, the median number of unique impressions across all companies on LinkedIn for July 2023 was 1.57K. Based on this, you can decide whether or not you need to take steps to get your audience even more interested.
Another human-centric strategy for coming up with post topics is to make your team members the star of the show. Highlight their thoughts and accomplishments to show your human side and lend authority to your team. As a bonus, you’ll encourage your employees to share your content, giving it more visibility.
Meara McNitt from Online Optimism uses this exact strategy:
“Our goal is to keep our team members front of mind so that visitors see us not as a company, but as the people that make up the company. This includes prioritizing thought leadership from team members, highlighting accomplishments, and peeks into company culture. We try to post at least twice per week and regularly share in our internal Slack channels for employees to engage with posts.”
Meara McNitt
Senior Director of Social Media at Online Optimism
Your LinkedIn analytics are another valuable source for content ideas. Break out your favorite LinkedIn analytics tool and identify what posts get the best results. Then, look for trends in the topics those posts cover.
Here’s how Pulse Recruitment’s Tarlia Smedley uses this tactic: “Identifying topics that our audience finds engaging requires a combination of data analysis and understanding our target audience. We employ several strategies to gauge the interest and preferences of our LinkedIn followers. We closely monitor the performance of our content through metrics such as clicks, click-through rates (CTR), engagement, and shares. By analyzing these metrics, we can identify which topics or types of content generate the most positive response from our audience. This data-driven approach helps us refine our content strategy and prioritize topics that resonate well.”
Measuring your post engagement is crucial to understanding when you need to jump in and make relevant changes. With this free LinkedIn Engagement Drilldown Dashboard, you can do just that, and monitor such metrics as LinkedIn post impressions, Shares, Likes and more.
The strategies we covered in this blog post require a deep understanding of what posts and tactics serve you well across multiple profiles. That’s a lot of data to go through!
Databox organizes data from thousands of platforms, including LinkedIn Company Pages and LinkedIn Ads. Using our intuitive reporting tools, you can pull the most important analytics from both channels and place them on the same databoard. Then, at a glance, you’ll see how your content is performing.
It’s free to use with three data sources (plenty for your LinkedIn channels) and three dashboards. Give it a shot by signing up for an account today.
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Melissa King is a freelance writer who helps B2B SaaS companies spread the word about their products through engaging content. Outside of the content marketing world, she writes about video games. Check out her work at melissakingfreelance.com.
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