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LinkedIn turns 20 years old in 2023, and the professional social network’s impact on the business space continues to grow.
Don’t believe us? Check out these stats [1] on its margins and audience:
- There are 875 million members on the network, with 77% outside the U.S.
- Over 16% of users in the U.S. log in every day.
- Revenue grew 21% year-over-year in Q1 2023.
- The number of Black and Latino leaders grew by 35% and 3%, respectively, in 2022.
- Over 52 million people use LinkedIn to search for jobs every week, and 8 people are hired via LinkedIn every 60 seconds.
LinkedIn is a powerful tool for your business.
But with thought leadership, SEO, gamification, and other digital marketing buzzwords flooding your feed from all sides, how do you know where to start?
And how can you gauge the success of your strategy?
Here are 5 steps to build your brand on LinkedIn this year.
1) Leverage thought leadership through LinkedIn articles.
By creating engaging and original content, your company can build its reputation as a thought leader in your field. LinkedIn offers easy options for you to create newsletters [2] and standalone articles [3] on your company’s page, and by posting this content directly to LinkedIn, you will be favored by the social network’s algorithm. This is because you are keeping users on its site, and if your audience engages with the content, you’ll get pushed to wider audiences.
Build your brand recognition by writing on trending topics in your space, as well as evergreen content that will keep driving users to your company’s page. Research hot topics [4] and tap leaders at your firm to share their expertise with current and prospective clients. And pay attention to the headline and header image for a product that looks polished and professional.
*Quick tip: Keep the article length to 2,000 words or less for the best results.
2) Go beyond the written word with infographics, videos, and other multimedia.
Captivating content is king, and the inclusion of infographics, videos, polls, and more on your social posts and within your articles goes a long way toward catching a reader’s eye.
You’ve recently seen us share a poll [5] asking about remote work preferences, a quick book recommendation [6], video footage [7], and several infographics [8] and articles [9] that saw great engagement across the platform.
According to LinkedIn, posts with images see 2x higher comment rates, on average, and the network offers a lot of detailed guidance [10] on how to maximize your reach.
How can you diversify your social reach with multimedia?
*Quick tip: Aim to post at least weekly [11], as pages that post weekly have 5.6x more followers than those posting monthly. Then, move to 1-5 posts per week as possible.
3) Keep it short, snappy, and authentic.
According to social media management platform Hootsuite, the best length [12] for organic and paid updates is 25 words, and native videos should be 30-90 seconds long. Video ads can be even shorter, with the most successful video ads hovering around 15 seconds or less.
Keep longer-form content to your articles and use the short copy on your other posts as a starting point for discussion in the comment section.
*Quick tip: Use 3-5 hashtags per post that are less than 24 characters each, according to a Hootsuite experiment [13] on Instagram, which follows many of the same algorithmic preferences.
4) Reach new audiences with SEO strategies.
Making your content engaging and novel is half the battle–the other half is enhancing your copy for search engine optimization (SEO). Researching and leveraging SEO will allow your content to reach the widest audience possible by improving your ranking on search engines. If you’re writing about business strategy, for example, you can use social listening tools such as Answer The Public [14] to discover what people are asking Google about that topic and tailor your content to drive that traffic to you. Then, turn to SEO tools (many of which have free basic versions [15]) to learn what key words to highlight in your copy to improve your search ranking further.
*Quick tip: Yoast [16] and other tools offer readability scores to help ensure your audience grasps your content.
5) Encourage and monitor engagement.
Generally, an engagement rate of 2% is considered good, but you can easily see an engagement rate of 5%+ by optimizing your copy and including multimedia. Ask your audience questions in your copy or in a poll to help drive responses. And be patient – it can take a few weeks for your social strategy to start gaining traction among your audience.
Don’t know how to calculate your engagement? Here’s a quick formula [17] to get you that data.
- Engagement (Likes + ½ Comments) / Views x 100% = Rate (%)
- You should halve the comments if your responses make up half the responses. You don’t want to include your own engagement in the formula.
Even slight shifts in the engagement rate can help you shift your strategy and maximize your reach. [18]
Feeling overwhelmed or confused? Our directory of outsourced providers [19] can help expand your knowledge, capacity, and/or capabilities without overhead expenses or extensive training. We hope this information helps you navigate the murky waters of social media strategy.