4 Ways to Drive Engagement on Your LinkedIn Posts

Many content creators and marketing managers see LinkedIn as just another social media platform and, as a result, often create the same content for their blog and social media platforms. This isn’t always the most effective way to go.

For both B2C and B2B businesses, LinkedIn is already the most effective social network at generating leads, but tailoring your posts specifically for LinkedIn will maximize your marketing efforts even further. Making sure the content you post on LinkedIn contains these 4 elements will leave you amazed at how much engagement LinkedIn is capable of.

1.    Use Long-form Content

It’s no secret that readers are increasingly demanding more from their content. It’s no longer enough to just scratch the surface of a topic, especially if that’s what ‘the other guys’ are doing. Besides having a huge impact on search engine ranking, longer content also performs best on LinkedIn.

On LinkedIn, posts with over 1900 words get over 3 times as many views as posts with 900 words. This increased view count also comes with increased engagement, helping your metrics across the board. Sharing the data and knowledge you already collect day-to-day and drilling down on pain points you know well will help drive your word count up and simultaneously create value for your readers.

2.    How-to’s and Lists Are King

This is a trend that can be applied to most written content online, but is often forgotten when writing for LinkedIn. How-to posts are the best performing across all engagement metrics, receiving almost 1.5 times as many views as other post types. Lists also performed better than other post types; however, the effects aren’t nearly as pronounced. Directly addressing the problems you know your readers experience (and explaining how to help) is an easy way to boost engagement.

3.    Include Images (But No Videos!)

Posts that include images do significantly better than posts without any at all. Including 1 lead image results in a post that does 3 times better. Including more images doesn’t hurt either and higher performing posts often have as many as 8 images. However, embedding videos doesn’t result in the same kinds of gains. In fact, posts without any videos at all received higher levels of engagement.

You can also leverage some basic aspects of human psychology in order to drive engagement. Including faces in the header image of your posts is, everything else equal, a very easy way to increase the performance of your posts and get people clicking on your article. Chief Economic Advisor for Allianz and LinkedIn influencer, Mohamed El-Erian, often uses this tactic to great success on many of his LinkedIn posts.

4.    Make it relevant

Making it easy for your following to engage with your content is key, and one way to do this is by making your content conversational. However, your followers aren’t willing to engage with just anything; the most important aspect of a conversational post should always be its relevance to your readers. The likelihood of your readers engaging with your content skyrockets if the content you are creating is truly related to the problems they face.

Ryan Holmes, CEO of Hootsuite, is a great example of a LinkedIn influencer who delivers engaging content that really connects with his readers. He doesn’t hold back in his posts and isn’t afraid of detailing his experiences. This intimacy and ‘insider’ knowledge creates a lot of value for his readers. As a result, he has great engagement and his posts start insightful conversations in the comments.

Combine Form and Function

Incorporating each of these 4 elements will go a long way towards making the most of LinkedIn as a content publishing platform. A relevant lead image will catch eyes, a title that directly addresses a problem your readers are having will cause them to read more, and in-depth writing that delivers true value will naturally start discussions and grow engagement. Stick with it and there’s no doubt that LinkedIn can be a platform that delivers results.

 This week’s blog is written by our Marketing Assistant Greg Goulanian, who is currently pursuing an Economics degree
at the University of Victoria.