7 Tips To Help You Market Better With LinkedIn

What I Learned from 30 Days of Linkedin’ing

Over the last month or so I ran a series of posts, articles, videos called 20 for 20, 20 ideas to help you in this new year. I use LinkedIn as one of my main marketing channels and I wanted to learn how I can use LinkedIn more effectively to engage followers.

My Top 7 Tips

These are based on an analysis of 30 days of posting, tagging, creating videos, writing articles, etc.

1. Quality beats quantity – The conventional wisdom is that you should post 1-2 times per day. This may still be true BUT posting higher quality content is more important. Focus on writing posts well and using some proven tricks to increase exposure. This article gives some EXCELLENT advice in how to do it well. (Note: Maybe don't do series. Your followers may tune the series out).
2. Tagging other people or organizations works but don't abuse it. My personal rule is that I only do it if it's acknowledge someone or if I truly have a relationship with them. Tagging influencers can extend your reach and help you develop a relationship with these individuals but put yourselves in their shoes. When you have become a successful influencer on LinkedIn thanks to the stunning insights in this article (kidding), how will you feel when a stranger is trying to piggyback on your network?
3. Only use three hashtags and pick them carefully. Adam Franklin sent me this post that explains how LinkedIn works. It was a face palm moment for me.
4. Be generous– Many of my posts with highest views celebrated or acknowledged someone else. Being nice works
5. Video works but do it natively on LinkedIn. LinkedIn does not like it when you link out to YouTube. The post that goes with the video is critical. See #1 and read this before you post.
6. Articles are engaging but probably not worth the effort. LinkedIn seems to favor shorter posts. If you put the effort into creating something much more substantial than you can get into a 1300 character post, think about how you can break this up into shorter post. A tip from Adam Franklin is to look for opportunities to repurpose content into text, image, video, documents and articles. If you are focused a particular topic and have you developed a compelling POV on it, play it out in differerent forms. Note: I am writing this long blathering article because I am going to turn this into a blog post, probably a medium post and maybe a document on LinkedIn. See #7. I will probably create a bunch of shorter posts too.
7. Try the document feature. I have not tried it yet. As it is a lesser used feature on LinkedIn you may find that it gets more exposure. Let me know what you find.

Bonus Tip: Put links in your comments not in your posts. And boy, do I wish I had known that earlier. This article explains.At the bottom of the post are seven tips that came out the analysis.

How I Reached These Conclusions

I analyzed all my posts, articles and videos on LinkedIn for the last 30 days. Over that period I posted 32 times. I also liked and commented on a ton of other people’s stuff but I have excluded from this analysis.

In total, these posts were viewed 12,151 times (392 views per post on average). Over that period the number of people viewing my profile increased 3-5X compared to prior month when I was less active. I don’t have any data on how this changed my number of followers and if I appeared in more searches as a result.

What are Views and Reach?

According to LinkedIn

“When you share an update, a "view" is counted when the update is loaded on the viewer's screen. Viewers do not necessarily need to click or read the update to count as a view, but rather have the update loaded on their Homepage.”

I have 2,852 followers (as of writing this) so my average reach per post was 14%. Reach is % of followers who viewed posts (that's according to me). Basically 1/8th of my followers view anything I post on average. The average is not that useful as the reach of different types of post ranges wildly. 

Views By Post Types

I wrote six types of posts

• Regular posts – Plain text maybe with hashtags at the bottom.
• Regular posts with tags – This a regular text post but where I have tagged someone or an organization
• Shares – This is where I have shared someone else’s post or article
• Shares with tags – I have shared someone else’s content and tagged the author or a relevant organization
• Video and Audio – A video or audio piece that I have loaded natively into LinkedIn, i.e not embedded YouTube or Vimeo, etc
• Articles – a long form article

So here are views by post type:

But when you look at average views per post type it tells the real story

In rank order

1. Regular posts with tags
2. Shares with tags
3. Video and audio
4. Posts with no tags
5. Shares with no tags
6. Articles

Personally, I was surprised at how much tagging increased views. I knew it would do it a bit but as you can see it was by far the highest reaching type of article and more than half my reach came from posts where I had tagged someone or an organization.

Top Posts

My top 5 posts accounted from 49% of my reach in a single month

And my top 10 posts accounted for 69% of my reach. Most of these included a tag of someone I know or an organization I follow.

This was the top post in 30 days. In this post I celebrated spending the day at the Capital Factory working with a firm I am mentoring. As you can see I tagged the Capital Factory. It was also Jan 2nd so maybe a quiet news day.

Tagging is King

Tagging someone or an organization seems to be the fastest way to build reach of your post, especially if you tag an organization or someone with a lot of followers. All of my posts included hashtags. I am not sure that they made much difference.

The fact that tagging others boosts your reach may not be surprising to some readers but I gather that this is abused by many using LinkedIn to grow their following.

I try to tag judiciously. I won’t tag someone or an organization unless I have relationship with them and the tag is relevant.

I won't @ you bro!

The second highest viewed post was the kick-off the 20 for 20 series and included a promotion for a LinkedIn Profile guide. I tagged my friend and LinkedIn guru, Adam Franklin who authored this.

Adam Franklin has 10s of thousands of followers so my reach was extended by his network.

Video Is Queen

My video and audio posts were the next highest performing batch after tagged posts. I didn’t tag anyone or any organization in my video posts. I expect that if I had done this would have extended the reach much more.

One of the things I noticed about videos is that viewership seems to builds over a longer period. It feels like a text posts stop getting views after a day, whereas video posts stay in the feed longer. LinkedIn likes it when you upload video natively into your feed and seems to reward you accordingly.

Sharing Works but Writing Works Betterer

Simply sharing other people’s content reached 10% of my audience but writing my own post was twice as effective and was viewed by 20% of my followers on average. I like this. It means that LinkedIn embraces the value of sharing but values you creating your own content even more.

Articles Are Good For Increasing Engagement But You Have To Get Them Read

The most surprising thing to me was that articles (ironically as this is an article) got the lowest reach. This was annoying as they are a lot of work, second only to videos in terms of investment in time.

In the last six months I have written 10 articles. The highest readership was an article on Selling to Healthcare that had 239 views. My lowest was in the 20 for 20 series on Client Commitment with 7 views. People seem a lot more interested in selling to new clients than keeping their current ones.

I am not giving up on articles as I get a lot of engagement with them. My top article had 34 likes and 3 comments. An article I wrote several months ago, on how Sailing taught me all I know about Social Media had 17 comments and got some discussions going offline.

What About Engagement

As for engagement, this chart is interesting. I indexed the different types of posts for both views and engagement. They are each indexed against the average of all views/post or all interactions/post. Engagements includes likes and comments.

I find it really interesting that I got disproportionately more engagement from videos and articles relative to views. It’s encouraging as it validates that it’s worth putting the time into creating more engaging content. I need to figure out how to extend the reach of these videos and articles.

It was a little disappointing that the 20 for 20 series did not do too well. Over time, the views declined. I think that this was a case where quantity does not do as well as quality. I also think I created my own noise and people tuned it out. Good lesson for the future.

Note: One thing I don’t do and will not ever do is take part in engagement pods. I wholeheartedly agree with Adam Franklin on this.

I would love to hear what you think. What works for you? What tricks am I missing?