The Social Series: How to leverage LinkedIn
Welcome back to another week of The Social Series, where we take an in depth look at social media platforms to analyze how marketers can leverage each channel. So far, we’ve covered Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and YouTube.
Next up? LinkedIn.
Up to this point, the social media platforms we’ve looked at are pretty balanced between personal and professional reasons as to why people and brands utilize them. LinkedIn is different! LinkedIn was created in 2002 for professional purposes, with the intent to help professionals connect and create career opportunities. As always, we're going to look at the audience demographics and the algorithm first, before we look at tips on how to leverage LinkedIn in our marketing strategies.
Grab your caffeine, put on your comfy clothes, and let's dive in.
#1: United States: 214 million users
#2: India: 112 million users
#3: China: 60 million users
57% of United States LinkedIn users identify as male. What’s interesting, their users identify mostly as male, however research from McKinsey shows that 42% of LinkedIn’s leadership identify as women. To put LinkedIn's percentage of women in leadership into perspective let's look at global averages. Comparitvely, women make up approximately 28% of global c-suites, and 36% of senior management positions.?LinkedIn's women in leadership percentage is much higher than the global average!
As you can see, an overwhelming amount of LinkedIn users are millennials. 60% of LinkedIn users are ages 25-34. The second highest age bracket is users ages 18-24, which make up 21.7% of users.
Key Statistics
Now that we have a better understanding of the LinkedIn audience, let’s take a look at the algorithm.
As the largest professional social platform in the world, it’s safe to say LinkedIn has a high level of quality standard to uphold. To help maintain the integrity of the platform, LinkedIn’s algorithm signals are very strategic. Not only do you have your standard social media platform signals such as engagement and relevance, but you also have a "spam filter". Not only does LinkedIn have a spam filter, it's the first signal in the algorithm!
#1: Spam Filter
Content that is determined to be “spammy” by LinkedIn is not going to be promoted in the algorithm. Some examples of “spam” content on LinkedIn include:
If your content passes the spam filters (and yes, there is a human team of moderators to help determine the legitimacy and quality of content!), the algorithm then works off similar “signals” that we’ve seen from other social media platforms. Let’s take a look at the signals of most importance.
#2: Personal Connections Signal
LinkedIn's algorithm highly priorities content from personal connections over trending/influencer content. LinkedIn users first-degree connections are of upmost importance and accounts that you have interacted with are most likely to appear in feed. LinkedIn is meant to build a professional network, and the connections signal helps ensure your personal and brand experience on the platform does just that!
#3: Interest/Relevance Signal
The next algorithm signal is meant to assess the relevance of content. This includes the standard likes, comments, and shares, but it also takes into consideration the LinkedIn Knowledge Graph. This article from Qi He,?Bee-Chung Chen,?Deepak Agarwal details how the Knowledge Graph uses “entities” like jobs, titles, skills, companies, locations, education, etc. to enhance the content quality in an algorithm.
#4: Subject Matter Expert Signal (SME)
The next LinkedIn algorithm signal ensures the platform is prioritizing high quality content from users with expertise or authority. ?This signal pushes content from people and brands who are identified as a SME through information that comes from their profile, content, and connections. Users and brands that consistently put out thoughtful, impactful, and insightful content are more likely to be boosted by this signal in the algorithm.
#5: Engagement Probability Signal
The last algorithm signal of importance scores content through a typical social media engagement probability. This signal is based on machine learning (AI) that ranks content based on:
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Overall, as we can see, the LinkedIn algorithm is heavily reliant on connections. This type of algorithm is what has kept the LinkedIn standard top tier since the platform was created. Professionals around the world come to LinkedIn first, and by analyzing the algorithm we see just how important connections and high quality content are, in order to build users network and push out posts.
?Audience + algorithm = time for marketing strategy!
Data from LinkedIn shows that 93% of B2B content marketers use LinkedIn for organic social marketing. What’s more, LinkedIn is ranked #1 in social platforms for B2B lead generation, and LinkedIn messages are 4X more likely to be opened compared to traditional emails. B2B or not, LinkedIn is a great platform to market yourself and your brand! Let’s look at some best practices to building a LinkedIn marketing strategy.
Define marketing goals
What are your strategic marketing goals? What’s the goal of creating content on LinkedIn? Is your goal to increase brand awareness? Establish yourself through thought leadership? Is your goal to generate leads? Before we create any marketing plan, it's important we haver a clear understanding of our why for being on the platform. Once you define your goals, it’s time to hone in on your audience.
Know your audience
Knowing your audience means understanding why people are on LinkedIn. Traditionally, we've seen social media used for both personal and professional reasons. However, as we can see from data from HubSpot, not a lot of users come to LinkedIn to keep up with the personal lives of their friends/family. Data from HubSpot shows these as the top reasons why people use LinkedIn:
?As you can see, LinkedIn differs from other social platforms in that it’s mainly used for more formal/professional reasons – not personal. To better understand your target audience, consider joining groups and posting engaging polls. From there, analyze your customer profile, evaluate your analytics, and consider updating your LinkedIn page to better tailor your content.
Share Strategically
These top 3 tips we've discussed apply to all social platforms, but sharing strategically is especially important on LinkedIn. My subscribers will know we discuss the ask-to-give ratio a lot when it comes to any and all content. How often are you asking your audience for something? How often are you giving your audience something? On LinkedIn, audiences typically want to give and receive thoughtful, purposeful content. When evaluating your ask-to-give ratio on LinkedIn, consider providing a balanced but still impactful mixture. Share your asks and your gives strategically. Consider giving your audience thought leadership pieces, resources, research, white papers, blog posts, podcasts, etc. Not only is this a great way to give the LinkedIn audience something of value, but it engages your audience. As always, dive deep into your analytics and see what your audience is responding to!
Creating engaging content
Engaging your audience on LinkedIn helps you/ your brand build connections, keeps your content fresh, and plays to the algorithm signals. There are several ways you engage your audience on LinkedIn including:
No matter your business or brand, there is a way to engage your audience on LinkedIn!
Play the long game
As HubSpot so perfectly said – LinkedIn is more about social selling than social commerce. ?Think about yourself as a consumer. If you see an item you like online – are you going to LinkedIn to purchase? Chances are …no. But, if you’re looking for resources on a topic, services that can help you/your company, or trying to stay up to date with events going on…you’re probably going to LinkedIn. If you can build credibility and connections through your content, over time, you will find success on LinkedIn. Play the long game with your marketing strategy!
Leverage LinkedIn Features
LinkedIn has a plethora of platform specific features that marketers should be optimizing! Some of those features include:
These are the best ways to promote your content and build brand awareness on LinkedIn! Incorporating some (or all) of these features into our marketing strategy will help us reach our strategic goals.
One of the most intriguing things about LinkedIn is that the platform is meant to market not just brands, but people. There are very few platforms/channels out there that allow us to promote our brands/companies and also allow us to promote ourselves, our accomplishments, and our expertise in a way that is appealing and enjoyable. If you are using LinkedIn to market yourself or your brand/company– what works for you? What tips do you have? Let me know in the comments!
Talk next week!