We look at five straightforward ways of priming your content to get shared and read more on LinkedIn.
In our last blog post, we looked at the four facts every marketer should know about popular content on LinkedIn.
We analysed six months’ worth of data to find out more about the nature of successful content on LinkedIn, from average word count to topics, to characteristics of niche publishers on the network.
To reach high levels of engagement seen in some of the more successful posts we’ve recorded, it helps to keep some basic principles in mind when writing. Here are NewsWhip’s top five pointers to help get your content in front of LinkedIn readers.
1) Know Your Audience
This seems like a simple one, but the relevance of the post to the audience that you want to reach is critical.
Offering direct, useful advice in LinkedIn posts is one way of really boosting popularity.
In our earlier post, we found that career advice and self-improvement tips were the two most popular topics on LinkedIn. Sub-topics of those areas are also very popular. Try brainstorming lists of practical pointers, or condense learnings from your company or own career. You can find niche audiences interested in subsections of broader ‘career development’.
To help, make sure you’re up to date with the latest trends and news in your area. Create Twitter lists, and make sure you’re reading other posts on LinkedIn regularly.
Spike users often use custom panels and email alerts to track key terms, industries, and publishers. This shows them at a glance what’s being shared, and what might be worth expanding on in a post of their own.
Whether you’re giving interview advice to someone just starting their career, or telling the story of how you set up your first business, it helps to have it clearly defined who the story is aimed at from the beginning.
2) Keep Your Titles Short and Informative
The title you choose for you piece can be among the most important thing you do when putting together a piece of content.
Our data shows the vast majority of successful titles on LinkedIn are short and snappy – generally under 10 words long.
Have a look at some of the most shared stories on LinkedIn in September:
They are also to the point, indicating to the reader what the piece is about, while simultaneously being open enough so as to create a little bit of intrigue about what’s on offer.
We covered some great examples in the last blog post. Instantaneously you can tell a title like “The Top 5 Things You Should Never Do At Work” is about self-development, self-improvement and behaviours. It has widespread interest and attracts the attention of anyone that has a workplace. The first thing that comes to browsing readers’ minds is “Okay, what are they?”, leading to a +1 on your readership stats.
Another, “9 Things Interviewers Never Tell Job Candidates, But Should”, appeals to anyone who thinks they may ever have to go to another interview, allowing you to get into the mindset of the all-important person sitting across the table.
A great title can have a massive impact on just how well your piece of content does on LinkedIn. Come up with a few potential titles for your posts, and test them out loud.
3) Set 800 Word Limit on Most Posts, and Link Carefully
As we covered in our previous post, the majority of the most shared stories published on LinkedIn (63%) come in at under 1,000 words.
This comes back to knowing your audience. LinkedIn readers like easily-digestible takeaways that get to the point quickly. Remember that much of your potential audience will be reading in their workplace.
This mean your article should be short, clear, precise and to the point. You don’t want to eat into your word count by going off topic or filling spaces with jargon. Consider breaking extra long stories into two or more posts.
Earlier this month, Dr. Travis Bradberry posted ‘Why You Need Emotional Intelligence To Succeed‘. He followed that up 9 days later with an article called ‘Why Leaders Lack Emotional Intelligence‘. Both were effectively about the same topic, but were split into a 950 and a 1,280 article respectively. Both have been read, shared, commented on and liked thousands of times. As one 2,300 word story, the potential for that level of engagement would likely be much lower.
When it comes to adding direct links or calls to action, be careful in how you present the language. According to LinkedIn, “posts that are overly promotional won’t experience broader distribution by the community.” Despite this, LinkedIn posts are a good way of attracting attention to an event, service, or landing page. Just be subtle!
4) Post to Groups, and Engage with Readers
Once you’ve identified your audience, the next step is to get your post to them as quickly and widely as possible. LinkedIn groups can be a great starting point to get traction on your post.
Pretty much every niche area is covered from groups on fashion, to social media, sports and tech. If you’ve written on how to find a job, you could do worse than post it into the 2 million member Job Openings, Job Leads and Job Connections group. For advice on startups and entrepreneurship, try putting it in front of nearly half a million people. There really is a place for every post, no matter what the topic, so use them to your advantage.
Chances are, merely posting something through the LinkedIn blog could take days or weeks to get it some widespread attention. Instead of waiting for your target audience to come to you, post it in a group specific to your topic and take it to them.
Sometimes it’s easy to forget that LinkedIn is still a social network – just one that people engage with around their career.
Encourage and reply to comments on your posts. Seek out and share good stories in your space. Endorse connections and join groups for increased visibility. Putting aside a small amount of your marketing time each week to dig into your LinkedIn world will do your content good in the long-run.
From LinkedIn: “members who aren’t in your network can follow you from your long-form posts when you begin to publish. Interactions such as likes, comments, and shares will distribute your content beyond your immediate network.”
5) Be Consistent
The best way of building a profile on LinkedIn is the same for most networks: publishing high quality output consistently. Keeping a spreadsheet of potential titles is a good way of making sure there’s always a post you can be working on. Once you establish a name as an authority in your space, it makes distribution and sharing of your work a lot easier. To help this, try cross-blogging your posts on external sites, and linking to them from Twitter and Facebook.
If you have any more ideas on how to get shared on LinkedIn, we’d love to know – let us know on Twitter.
To sum up, here are our five tips for getting shared on LinkedIn.
If you haven’t already, check out part one of this post here.
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