The Three Pillars of Content Marketing on LinkedIn

When you consider building relationships through Content Marketing on the LinkedIn social platform, it is useful to think about three pillars.

1.  Company Updates

These are the short updates that are posted on your Company Page and also go out into the feeds of your Followers.

a.  Frequency of Posting

I am often asked how often companies should post.

My answer is always: quality trumps quantity.

Having said that, posting content more frequently is good, up to a point.

Here is some guidance

• Post as many updates as your content supports.
• When you are starting out, aim to post 2-3 times per week. If you have been posting no content or very infrequently, you will see strong benefits from this cadence.  Compared to companies who do not post, companies who post at least one status update per week on LinkedIn, get 40% more views to their LinkedIn job postings and 25% more apply clicks.  Pretty compelling!
• Build towards once per day, averaging 20-30 organic updates per month. On LinkedIn, 20 posts per month will allow you, on average, to reach 60% of your audience.

According to a recent study by LinkedIn regarding the top performing brands on LinkedIn, we found that they publish an average of 112 status updates per month - about 4 per day!.  These brands are continuing to increase their frequency of posting based on several factors, including:

• Regional targeting
• Relevant content for sub groups

Remember that some of your audience may have smaller networks and as such your message will form a larger part of their content feed.  Strike the balance between informative and annoying.

As always, predict, measure and learn.

b.  When to Post

People have more control than ever over which information they consume and when they consume it.  At LinkedIn, we see usage shifting from one device to the other throughout the day, depending on where members are and what we’re doing.

If you want to reach the largest number of users with your content, it makes sense to publish when people are around.

LinkedIn has found our busiest times to be morning through to midday, Monday through Friday.  Business hours, in general, have the largest maximum reach, so you don’t have to be too particular about specific times.

Having said that, the counter argument, is that content may stand out in non-peak times when there is less in people’s feeds.

Test what performs best for you.

c.  Target for Relevance

As you build momentum with your content marketing on LinkedIn and build a sizable base of Followers, it is important to target each post for relevancy.

Too often I see companies posting content to the default 'All Followers' even though the post has low relevance for many of their Followers.

Examples of where posting for relevancy is important:

• Companies who operate in more than one country - If you are writing about the summer season in Europe, do not post this to your Asian Followers where it will be winter.  Use Targeted Updates to let colleagues in regional offices contribute content that speaks directly to your candidates, customers and prospects in their region.
• Companies with more than one service line - I work with an up and coming Recruitment Agency who services Medical Devices, Construction and Sales and Marketing.  They were initially posting content to all of their Followers but have found much greater success since they started segmenting.  Clearly, someone working in Construction is not very interested in the medical devices industry!
• Seniority - A message for senior execs is unlikely to hold much relevancy for a student about to launch their career, and vice-versa.

What resonates most with Followers? Content that’s customized to their specific professional interests.  Use language, imagery and content that speaks directly to each audience.  This will help them to think of you as relevant to their next career decision.

Tailor your content to specific audiences very easily when you create the post.  With LinkedIn’s Targeted Updates, you can easily match your message to your audience.  When you create an update, you can decide whether to share it with “all followers” or a â€œtargeted audience.”  Choose the second option to send your update to a subset of Followers based on geography, job function, industry, company size, or seniority.

Remember that audience size matters.  Limit yourself to one or two targeting criteria per update to ensure that your content receives many high-value impressions.  Targeting too narrowly will limit your reach.

2.  Employee Shares

The prize for companies, large and small, is to 'activate' their employees to develop their personal brands and to dovetail these efforts with the greater needs of the corporate brand.

Get employees to share company updates to their personal networks.

Your employees are an extension of your brand and your best advocates. You should account for that and regularly ask them to share important company updates and high-quality content.  This way their networks will be exposed to your message.

Employees are 70 percent more likely to click, share, and comment on an update than a typical LinkedIn user.

Nothing impacts people’s perceptions and behavior like the recommendation of a trusted friend, colleague, or family member.  When your employees like, share, or comment on your updates, they amplify your messages to reach their first-degree
connections.  Each amplification acts as an endorsement of your content and brand.  Each additional impression is a chance for your company to nurture relationships with LinkedIn members.

Activating your employees is particularly important in the Recruitment industry where your consultants typically have very large and highly relevant personal networks on LinkedIn.

I would recommend the following steps to activate your Employees:

• Inform them about your content marketing efforts and how they play a key role as ‘brand ambassadors’.
• Encourage them to like, share and comment on the content you post. Make it easy for your employees to engage with the content. Send them pre-scripted status updates so it’s easy for them to share.
• Encourage them to add a link to your Company Page to their email signatures. 
• Get leadership buy-in and get executives to promote your content. Make sure they lead by example.

Asking for engagement is sometimes all it takes to get your colleagues involved.

3.  Employee Long-Form Posts

The infrastructure that was developed for the Influencer program has now been opened to everyone.  The opportunity is for companies is to encourage their employees to post long-form and then to promote good content via their Company Page, thus creating a virtuous circle.

In particular, encourage your Executives to create original content.  This is a great way for your leadership to promote their leading agendas.  For example, is your company going through a digital transformation and thus competing for talent in new industries?  Get your leaders to create posts that give real insight into why this is so important, all of the exciting projects in the digital domain and all of the great initiatives that your company is undertaking to make your workplace attractive for top digital talent.  Then push these posts out to your company's Followers and encourage other employees to push out to their personal networks too.

Sean Garvey, Managing Director of 'Ocean’s Group', is running a series of interviews with business leaders and writing them up using LinkedIn’s long-form posting infrastructure.  The interviews establish Ocean Group’s credentials in the Executive Search space.  Each post is then pushed out to the Company’s Followers and further afield via sponsoring.

There are so many things you could do with this model.  One agency that specialises in Mining has been keen to entrench their credentials as diversity experts. Their research told them that Diversity is a hot topic in the boardrooms of leading mining companies. Their leaders and thought leaders have posted a series of long form posts on diversity issues in mining which they then target to senior execs in the mining industry. Brilliant!

This is also a great way to create transparency and build credibility for your leaders (click to read a detailed example of James Gorman, CEO of Morgan Stanley).

Companies who consider all three pillars of content marketing on LinkedIn are able to push their messages further and faster.  Involving employees in the process creates a virtuous circle that builds digital relationships at greater scale.

I'm a "Talent Brand Consultant" with LinkedIn, based in Sydney, Australia.  I post articles about LinkedIn Strategies, Content Marketing and Social Media. Follow me by clicking on the 'Follow' button at the top of this post if you would like to receive my articles right in your news feed as they are published.