By reading this guide, you get seven tested-and-tried tips you can use to create an epic LinkedIn post. You’ll have a plethora of ideas on how you can add your voice, thoughts, and opinions on LinkedIn.
Now, let’s start optimising your posts on LinkedIn.
How to Post on LinkedIn
Firstly, to create a post on LinkedIn, follow these simple steps:
1) Go to your personal page or your business page
2) Click Start a Post. A pop-up box will appear, and you can start creating your post on LinkedIn.
3) Check to make sure Anyone can see your post. You can toggle this by clicking on the button next to your name.
4) Publish your post immediately by clicking Post. For LinkedIn Posts, there’s yet to be an option to save drafts.
Now that you have the posting mechanics down, how can you stand out by creating the right post? We’ve compiled seven tactics that you may use as part of your LinkedIn content optimisation strategy.
LinkedIn Posting Tactics
Tell a story
One of the biggest mistakes people make on LinkedIn is that they write solely factual content. In fact, some of the most viral content on LinkedIn tell a story; this means talking about how something happened, how you felt and how it impacted your business or how other people feel about the subject. Certainly, sharing your insights and expertise on LinkedIn is still essential, but a bit of storytelling goes a long way in building trust.
Optimise your content for mobile users
According to LinkedIn, 57% of LinkedIn users view the site on their mobile devices; this means that if you’re not optimising your content for mobile, you are missing many opportunities for visibility.
Content skimming is prevalent amongst the busy LinkedIn community. Hence, if your content is formatted in large blocks of text, it can be off-putting, especially to mobile users.
Make sure that your content is easy to read on smaller devices by capping each paragraph to three to five lines. Some LinkedIn influencers even limit each paragraph to one sentence, and the level of impressions and engagement they received is staggering.
Add visuals to your content
Adding a visual element to how you present your LinkedIn posts will improve how people perceive your content and increase engagement time. Visuals can be links, images, infographics or videos.
Ask questions and start conversations
LinkedIn is increasingly becoming a place for people to have real conversations rather than simply share content. So if you want to create high quality, meaningful content, ask how your audience feels about the topic. You may also ask how they would solve a particular problem.
When you ask how your audience thinks, they can give their unfiltered feedback and insight on how to solve a problem. Always be mindful of how you phrase the question and be respectful towards different opinions and beliefs.
Add How-to Posts to your content
We live in an era where how-to’s are popular on social media, and LinkedIn is not exempted from this rule. How-to posts are popular because it allows people to build their credibility and authority around a specific niche or industry.
When you give others insight into how you handle certain situations or processes, they would be more likely to recognise your expertise and buy from you. Therefore, it’s good to add how-to posts into the mix if you’re stuck on what type of content to create next.
Write updates related to your industry or niche
Stay updated about what’s happening in your industry and post about them. People will start following your content to keep abreast of specific topics related to your expertise. Successful LinkedIn influencers have seen how frequent industry updates can help grow a large following and build brand trust.
Use features like hashtags
Hashtags are one of the easiest ways to expand how people discover your content.
If you include #contentmarketing in your post about content creation on LinkedIn, your post will show up on the feed of its 650,206 followers. You can also use more than one hashtag in your post, which means your accumulative reach could easily be over a million members.
Not using them can be a missed opportunity for you to get in front of thousands or millions of people. Start discovering the best hashtags on LinkedIn without leaving your LinkedIn homepage today.
Can You Schedule Posts on LinkedIn?
No. Unfortunately, LinkedIn has yet to bring such a feature to its platform, but many existing tools in the market will automate this task for you.
You should schedule LinkedIn posts to optimise the level of engagement you get. One credible, long-standing tool is Hootsuite. We have a guide on how you can use Hootsuite to schedule content for LinkedIn. Other similar tools you can opt for are Later or Buffer.
Conclusion
LinkedIn is an important social channel that you can leverage to drive traffic, leads and sales to your business.
The network has transformed how people interact with businesses, engage with others, and discover solutions to common problems. So how you approach this platform should be different from how you would do it for other platforms such as Facebook.
If you are serious about using LinkedIn to grow your business, try out the steps highlighted above and see how they help you get better engagement and increased visibility. If you found this article helpful, don’t forget to share it with your friends and colleagues.
