Getting the Most Out of LinkedIn

HubSpot recently published a guide called “How to Use LinkedIn for Business and Marketing.” The first half of it is pretty remedial. But, for the savvier marketer, the second half offers some really useful tips for optimizing LinkedIn to support your B2B marketing and sales efforts.

To save you time, here are the most-important best practices found in this guide … along with a few of our own ??:

1. Give your company profile 110% effort.

Your LinkedIn profile is rich with opportunity — so make the most of it. Use existing keyword research to enrich your copy. Include a variety of backlinks (to your company website, other social media pages, etc.). And make sure you complete every aspect of the profile. Leave no stone unturned. Fully completed LinkedIn Company pages earn about 30% more views.

2. Start with the “4-1-1 Rule.”

LinkedIn recommends that, for every piece of original content you publish, you should syndicate one update from another source, and four shared pieces from other sources. This way, you can provide your audience with a variety of content without burning out. And by tagging the sources of your “borrowed” content, you’ll start to “make friends” with other brands (who can repay you later with shares and likes of their own).

3. Variety is the spice of B2B life.

Don’t make the mistake of posting nothing but product promotions. It’s self-serving, and you’ll quickly damage your brand and become white noise to your followers. Give them a variety of content: thought-leadership pieces; news from around the industry; industry-specific humor; philanthropic efforts your organization is involved in; and, yes, product promotions too. Think more like a publisher and less like a business. What do your “readers/subscribers” want?

4. Use what works.

Before creating a content plan, we recommend doing a deep-dive into what’s working in your industry. What kinds of content — published by your best competitors, industry journals, etc. — are earning the strongest engagement? This is a great way to determine what matters to your most-important audiences. Oh, and content type matters too. On LinkedIn, a post featuring a high-quality image tends to outperform one without. And live video earns 24x more engagement than other types of posts — so if you have people in your org who are good on camera, use them!

5. Don’t sleep on your organic opportunities.

At IMA, we incessantly scan our clients’ feeds for for High-performing Organic Posts — or, what we call a “HOPs.” These are posts that naturally perform one- or two-standard deviations above the mean. If your followers are engaging that strongly with a post, we know with statistical confidence that a targeted “lookalike” audience will do likewise. So when a post HOPs, you can safely put some media behind it — knowing you’ll get a strong return on that spend.

Any of these tips can help your organization increase reach and engagement on LinkedIn, grow your follower base, and give you a stronger return on your media spend. So give them due consideration as you start planning your brand’s 2022 social media marketing strategy.

Or, if you’d like to do a deeper strategic dive with our content and media leaders, please reach out to me directly at greg [at] ima314 [dot] com.