October's Most Engaging Content On LinkedIn

This is a recap of some of the best content we've discovered on LinkedIn over the last 30 days.

Poet Content

Poet content is content demonstrates a brand's values, beliefs, emotions and challenges consumers to think differently around their brand. The most successful Poet content are human stories produced by brands.

Corporate Social Responsibility - BHP

Why it's great: The mining company BHP doesn't have the best reputation when it comes to environmental issues. However, they do have a great reputation of being a great employer with flexible working benefits. The brand is micro-blogging on LinkedIn using paid Sponsored Content to promote personal employee stories. The second post below was one of BHP’s best performing posts for 2018 with an engagement rate of over 14.5% and a 9.5% CTR (nearly 1 in 10 people who saw it on LinkedIn clicked the post).

Brand Awareness - Lenovo

Why it's great: Lenovo is demonstrating that they are more human than they appear with this rebrand. They are forward looking at how they can give back to the community and posts such as these help tie the brand to their CSR mission.

Professor Content

Professor content is thought leadership content. It is content that leverages the brand's ambassadors and leaders to share their expertise, mentorship and values. Professor content is also about data. Leveraging internal research and insights and making them so valuable that the industry would be worse off with this data.

Use of Industry Thought Leaders - Shell CEO, Ben van Beurden

Why it's great: There are a couple of reasons why this is great. Firstly, it's great content built for social media. It is also fairly unique in its delivery. Essentially the CEO is delivering an important brand announcement over Facetime, rather than the usual press release from the brand. Not the type of content you'd expect from an oil company. Secondly, the CEO is embodying the message about the importance of energy, specifically in regions in Africa. The post generated robust back-and-forth conversations about Shell, the region and energy from LinkedIn members.

Long Form influencer posts on LinkedIn Publishing - Patagonia CEO, Rose Marcario

Why it's great: LinkedIn Publishing is still an incredibly powerful megaphone for corporate leaders to get their message out. Patagonia had their CEO, Rose Marcario, publish a statement on the brand's stance regarding voting. The Patagonia stores will be closed during the US mid-term elections in order encourage people to vote. Again, this is a CEO leading from the front on the brand's purpose, values and mission. The response from LinkedIn's members to Rose' post were overwhelmingly positive.

Political messaging - Australian Prime Minister, Scott Morrison

Why it's great: The Australian Prime Minister is at master at leveraging the media. He is the former MD of the Tourism Australia which launched the infamous "where the bloody hell are you" campaign a few years ago. In this post on his personal LinkedIn profile, he delivers a direct and personal message to the Australian public. No longer are politicians needing to hold carefully scripted press conferences, the PM does it himself to his audience on LinkedIn. He has done this a couple of times, via mobile phone, just before entering Parliament. In those post, he strategically tells the LinkedIn audience what he is proposing before he tells the Australian Opposition. A new era of demagoguery is here...

Using Data - Think With Google

Why it's great: Leveraging owned data and insights is the second element to great thought leadership content and Think With Google are brilliant at this on LinkedIn. Their posts are a great example of social media best practice when it comes to promoting data and insights. Their posts are clean, simple and lead with one large statistic. This is important on social as the member only has the capacity to take in a single stat in their feed before they scroll past. If you want them to notice your whitepaper or thought leadership, make the snippet simple, bold and clear - just like the Think With Google posts below.

Preacher Content

Preacher content is the 'social' content you expect to see on a social media platform. It is news and trends, it is PR and comms, it is 'how to' instructions blogs and videos. It is content that is designed to deliver information quickly at a regular cadence. It can be evergreen or topical but ideally always shareable and valuable.

Employee Advocacy - HP

Why it's great: If you are unfamiliar with HP Studio's "The Wolf", you've been living under a rock. With over 2.2 million views, it blends perfectly Hollywood star power and storytelling with HP's branded agenda to raise awareness about printer security. The company this month dropped its long awaited short film "The Wolf- True Alpha" and its employees on LinkedIn have been getting behind it, promoting the film to their networks. Leveraging your employees is the secret sauce on LinkedIn - each worker has a highly relevant network for your brand and it costs you nothing to amply your content via your employees. Forget organic posting. Employees are the new organic...

Trivia / History - IBM

Why it's great: LinkedIn may have reputation for hosting boring content, but that is largely untrue. Trivia posts like the one from IBM below are extremely popular on the platform and should be part of any LinkedIn content strategy involving Preacher content. With over 3,000 likes, LinkedIn's members love it when a brand peels back the curtain and shares a little of their history and milestones. IBM has a long pedigree and they use it to their advantage on the platform.

News - LinkedIn Learning

Why it's great: Ok, so this is a post that I did. But it still counts! Last week, YouTube was down for a couple of hours. We at LinkedIn noticed the commentary around the event. Thinking quickly, I decided to promote a product of LinkedIn's that is similar to YouTube - LinkedIn Learning. Brands should be thinking dynamically on social media... remember Oreo's 'Dunkin in the dark' Superbowl ad?

Trends & Opinions - Gartner L2 and Prof. Scott Galloway

Why it's great: When it comes to content that discusses industry trends, few can beat the weekly monologues of Prof. Scott Galloway for Gartner L2. These short 5 minute videos give Galloway's opinions on the week that was in tech and business. He doesn't pull any punches. Vanilla is not his game. And this is why he has a huge following on LinkedIn and Twitter. We come to see him be bitchy, not boring. Real opinions need to be statements you are willing to fall on your sword for and Prof. Galloway has many scars....

How To's / Instructional - GSuite

Why it's great: G Suite's Showcase Page on LinkedIn is a library of great insights and how to videos. The videos themselves are more hacks on little known features of Google's cloud suite of products. They are again simple and clean in their presentation, a hallmark of Google branded content on the LinkedIn platform. And they are valuable to anyone who is wanting to up skill themselves with Google's products. And a new one is up every couple of days...

Conversation starters - Home Depot

Why it's great: Prof Mark Ritson once told me of a comment ratio he tries to achieve with his posts on LinkedIn: "30% positive comments, 30% negative, 40% neutral". And this post by Home Depot does a pretty good job at hitting this ratio sweet spot. The post sparked a number of different sentiments from LinkedIn's audience who felt they had to engage around the statement of surround yourself with people smarter than you. Probably not the response Home Depot was going for, but generated some very strong engagement for the brand.

Conversation Starter - Starbucks opens in Italy

Why it's great: Like the Home Depot post, this post from Starbucks drew several back and forth conversations from the LinkedIn community resulting in strong brand engagement. The idea of the American coffee chain taking on the Italians on their home turf was a call to arms for the Roman Legions! The conversations were good spirited (as they tend to be on LinkedIn) with the community debating on which country is the biggest coffee drinker.

Promoter Content

Promoter content is all about your brand and products. It is content that is designed to help customers take that last step of the decision making process. This content naturally fits well in demand generation campaigns, but that is not the rule. Strong case studies, demonstrated partnerships and product demonstrations are types of Promoter content.

Partnerships - Rolls Royce + Faberge Eggs

Why it's great: This short video of the Rolls Royce Spirit of Ecstasy crowned in a purple Faberge Egg brilliantly aligns both brands together as the epitome of luxury, prestige and excellent craftsmanship. It is a great example of two luxury brands fitting well in a co-branding partnership.

Product Demonstration - G Suite and Game Of Thrones Mashup for Chrome Books

Why it's great: This video post by G Suite is probably my favourite post of the month. It is very funny mashup of the WhiteWalkers from Game Of Thrones working together to create a Google Slides presentation in a Chromebook. As a product demonstration, it is a great example of how to inject humor without compromising on the message.

Bonus Content:

So this wasn't promoted on LinkedIn, but is still a great video that demonstrates Boston Dynamics' expertise. Such videos are build by the brand to go viral. It brings awareness to the brand (Poet), demonstrates their feat of engineering (Professor), whilst showing off the product (Promoter). It is a rare example of a piece of content that contains a number of archetypes without diminishing the quality of the message.

And that is all for October.

If you have found any more great examples of awesome content on LinkedIn, please include a link to them in the comments section below...