How to win on LinkedIn.
Filling your posts with tags or hashtags. Posting as often as possible for extra visibility. Sharing your company’s posts as much as possible. LinkedIn can be a really great channel for your business, as long as you approach it the right way. But what’s the right way?
7 steps to a winning LinkedIn strategy
LinkedIn strategies seem to be popping up left and right, and everyone says something different. Many so-called ‘experts’ seem to constantly contradict each other. But which strategy is really going to increase your reach? We followed the following 7 steps for a while and are now happy to share our findings and experiences.
Step 1: Focus on quality
Always put the focus on quality. Whatever kind of post you write, make sure it’s visually appealing and that the content of the post holds value for the reader. Share knowledge, experiences, answers to important questions or impressive achievements.
Our experience
Positive. As a business, you always try to add value for the customer. When you share relevant knowledge, engagement on a post will shoot up. We’re increasingly trying to share relevant things in the form of blogs like this one or another type of post.
Step 2: Follow the 6 ingredients
All well and good, such a quality post, but how do you actually write it?
1. Grab attention in the first three sentences. The first three sentences need to be a trigger for the reader to click ‘see more’.
2. Use a striking font or fitting emojis. But stay professional.
3. Include at least eight lines of text. Between 1200 and 2000 characters is ideal.
4. Tag people and companies, but no more than 5. Also make sure the tagged people interact with your post.
5. Use three to five relevant hashtags. Posts with more or fewer hashtags sometimes get up to 40% less reach.
6. Think about your Call To Action (CTA). What do you want readers to do after reading your post?
Our experience
Since we started using these six ‘ingredients’, we’ve seen certain increases. With a post where a relevant tag is used, we see an increase in reach (when the tagged person interacts with the post.) Additionally, a striking font and a strong first three sentences result in a higher interaction rate.
Step 3: Which format do you use and why?
The best performing formats:
– Polls (4.5× more reach)
– Document, PDF etc. (2.5× more reach)
– Text with multiple photos (1.5× more reach)
The worst performing:
– Posts with external links (0.5× reach)
– Posts with ‘gated content’ (0.3× reach)
– Shared posts (0.1× reach)
Always make sure the format of your post is relevant to the content. A poll, for example, does need to add to the value and shouldn’t just be used to create more reach.
Our experience
A relevant PDF scores well. We regularly put out a post with a number of tips. We process these tips into a PDF in slide form. This means the interaction rate sometimes lies around 50%. That’s much more than the average of the other posts. We’ve also noticed that sharing posts works better for some accounts than for others, but a comment always scores better.
Step 4: Timing is crucial on LinkedIn
The best days to post are: Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. Saturday? Yes, you read that correctly. On Saturday, 60% of users are active and only 20% post content. In other words: Saturday is a day with a lot of visitors and little competition.
The best time to post is between 8:00 and 10:00 in the morning. The first hours are namely crucial for the reach of your post. Your post is first shown to a select group of followers. This so-called test panel determines whether your post shoots off to a large reach or drowns in the noise without any success.
Our experience
We mainly post in the morning to make sure the post is at least seen by as many people as possible in our test panel. If you place the post too late, fewer people will see the post in the first three hours, meaning there’s less chance of a large reach.
Step 5: Comments are even more crucial
LinkedIn’s algorithm has a rating of certain actions and their value. At number 1 is “comments”. Comments are the most effective when it comes to growing the reach of your post. Want to increase the reach of your company page’s post? Then leave a comment underneath it instead of sharing it. The full ranking is as follows:
1. Comments
2. Clicks on ‘See more’
3. Likes
4. Share
So sharing a post isn’t the way to promote your company page.
Our experience
Sharing indeed doesn’t work as well as you’d want. For us, the combination of comments and tags works best. When a tagged person responds to the post, the reach will shoot up. We do see that some companies do create reach by sharing. But then you have to wonder how big the reach would be if all these people had left a comment instead of sharing.
Step 6: Respond to all engagement
Especially in the first 24 hours, it’s important to respond to all comments under your post. Positive or negative, let people know you appreciate the feedback or join the discussion with your own opinion. Always respond.
Our experience
Whether this does anything for the reach isn’t clear to us, but it’s at least a great way to stay in touch with your followers. It’s always wise to join in on a discussion under your post. Let people know what your opinion is and mix in among the comments.
Step 7: Maintain a diverse content strategy on LinkedIn
The ideal content strategy for LinkedIn consists of 5 pillars. These 5 pillars are:
1. Personal content
Many people think personal content doesn’t belong on LinkedIn. But a well-written personal story can actually create a whole lot of engagement. Personal content lowers the threshold for forming a connection with someone.
2. Thought leadership content
Show that you have knowledge and share this knowledge too. Don’t be afraid to give knowledge away to readers.
3. Event content
Are you organising an event, or attending one? Let people know on LinkedIn. Let people know they can find you there. Who knows, you might run into a number of your connections.
4. USP content
Be careful not to throw sales-oriented posts out the door. Instead, share nice customer cases, reviews or other achieved results. Show that you’re the one the consumer can turn to, without turning it into an over-the-top sales pitch.
5. Current events/news from third parties
Come across a nice blog on an (independent) site? You can share this on your own LinkedIn page with your own opinion attached. Show what you think about it and ask your connections for their opinion. The ideal way to start a positive discussion.
Our experience
“The ideal content strategy”, that’s quite something to just claim. This will be different for everyone. The personal content that supposedly doesn’t belong on LinkedIn works especially well for your personal page. Company pages benefit less from this. The other four pillars are great topics to work with. Above all, think about what your followers want to see and keep posting regularly.
Conclusion
After following these steps, we now at least have a tighter content plan for LinkedIn. We picked a goal and are fully committing to it with a fitting strategy. Our results are slowly getting better and the number of followers keeps growing.
Is this THE strategy to grow on LinkedIn? So far it still is for us, but we don’t dare say whether this is the case for everyone. Our advice: try it for a few months and see what changes in the results. Does your reach shoot up? Then definitely keep going. Doing nothing for your page? Then maybe we can take a look with you and together arrive at a winning strategy.