Love it or hate it, LinkedIn is a proven platform for just about any business-related activity. So how do you improve your strike rate from this powerful platform?
1. Video
People spend almost an hour a day on YouTube (Facebook, by comparison is just over 30 minutes). But LinkedIn is different. People barely use LinkedIn in terms of time on platform compared to other social media. The majority are using less than two hours a week, with a large portion not using it at all.
People browse fast and efficiently on LinkedIn, so posting your latest blog post link and expecting 100 link clicks, and a dozen shares just aren’t realistic. It’s tough to engage. As such video content is dominating LinkedIn because it’s typically short and concise. Short, easily digestible videos are great for conveying a ton of information in less time and effort than reading a long post or clicking to a blog. Native video on LinkedIn can last anywhere from three seconds to 10 minutes, depending on what you want to share.
As with all things, the devil is in the detail. Boring, self-important videos will never achieve results, so content is, as always, King. But if you have something useful to say, and you say it well, video is your friend.
2. Don’t outsmart yourself
In a world filled with advertising noise, keeping things simple is even more important. As it turns out, basic text posts on most platforms aren’t the norm anymore. But that’s good. You don’t want to keep doing what everyone else is doing. Why do text posts work? They can break the stream of shameless content promotion and they get to the point fast. Text posts can get people to stop and read, and as a bonus, get them to engage with you in a discussion, producing more comments and expanding your reach.
3. Conversations
Don’t use LinkedIn as a megaphone and then walk away. Do whatever you can to engage readers. Ask questions, pose brain teasers, at every point look to engage in a two way conversation, rather than just beating people over the head with a sales message. People, as it turns out, like to have conversations.
4. Write Better Content
Most people use social media for one overarching reason: to drive traffic somewhere. But when it comes to LinkedIn, keeping people on the platform itself can often produce better engagement. While it’s nice to have some clicks on your latest post, it likely isn’t your cash cow tactic. So stop sharing links that 99 percent of your audience is ignoring. Take advantage of LinkedIn’s fantastic native content system and produce short stories that hook your audience in without forcing them off the platform or disrupting their session.
While this won’t drive direct traffic to your site, but you’re playing a long game (or at least you should be). Good content wins people over every single time. By using the native article feature on LinkedIn, every time you publish a piece your connections get a notification, giving you an extra chance to engage that you don’t get by organically posting on your feed. The mistake that many make with this feature is trying to link out and drive traffic away. But that won’t do much for you. People clicked because they were interested, not because they wanted to be directed back to your blog to consume a 10,000-word e-book with their morning coffee. They want a short, interesting read to break up the monotony. We’re dealing with the Twitter generation. Whether we like it or not, they tend to read headlines and snippets, whilst being scared off by long-form content. If you’d like to have a philosophical discussion about how bad this is for the human condition and society in general, I’m happy to oblige. But today we’re talking about how to succeed in business using LinkedIn as a promotional tool, and the only way to do that is to give prospects what they want.