LinkedIn is a professional social networking site with over 240 million users. Social media network members can establish thought leadership, network professionally, post and discover employment, and ask and answer questions. LinkedIn is one of the most successful platforms online for marketers to communicate with decision-makers in their target market, which may require your products or services. The idea is to be visible and valuable all of the time. It's not about making money. LinkedIn should be seen as a platform where a company has an excellent opportunity to create brand awareness and educate its target audience, which indirectly leads to conversions.
You must educate people and offer them important information.
Want to make the most of LinkedIn to help you develop your business?
Are you stumped as to what to post for maximum impact?
We are here to give you some tips and tricks, and if you want to talk to us in more detail, you can always reach out to us here. Let's dive in and learn how to develop a LinkedIn content strategy for your business in seven easy steps in this post.
Before you look into your content strategy, ensure that the following points are on your to-do list.
Establish Your Profile
Ensure that your profile looks good and well put together by adding all the relevant info you can, such as career, skills, organizations you follow, volunteer work, etc. Once you feel that the profile is your personal or your company, start adding connections.
When you send out connection requests, it is always professional to add a personalized message if you have the time.
Next, you should start joining and creating groups. You can choose groups within your sector or other groups that will allow you to learn more about a topic. Any type of networking on LinkedIn is suitable. Find and follow other company pages and start observing what kind of ads you are seeing. This will help you get ideas if you ever want to run your ads.
Now let's look at your content strategy so you can start on your path to becoming a thought leader in your area of expertise.
Step One: Mind the Introduction
Your introduction sets the tone for the whole thing! LinkedIn displays the first couple of lines of your post and links readers to more content if they want to read more. Therefore, your objective is to write an exciting and engaging introduction to convince your audience to continue reading.
In the same way that you want the subject line of your email to be in line with the body of the message, you want the introduction to your post to be in line with the remainder of the post.
You may be thinking, "Okay, that's fantastic, but how am I supposed to produce an interesting introduction?" I feel your pain; there are moments when it can feel as difficult as pulling teeth.
When writing the introduction to your post, you should keep the post's purpose in mind. Which is more important: the updates you wish to tell or the value you deliver to other people?
You are welcome to make mention of this in your introduction! The most effective approach to accomplish this is first to draft your piece or at least all of the primary concepts and then return to it at a later time to write the introduction.
One other piece of advice is to model it after a preview. Therefore, you should preserve the basic idea of your post. Still, you shouldn't provide all the material in the first two sentences. If you do that, your readers won't have any reason to continue reading.
Step Two: Use Storytelling Techniques
The first thing you should do is structure your post as a short tale. When you are writing an article, you should make an effort to consider it from the perspective of someone else. To be more particular, the audience that you have in mind.
On LinkedIn, many of your posts will be about something you have mastered, something you are still studying, a situation that motivated you, or one of your recent accomplishments.
Your piece should revolve around the tale that each of these things has to tell, as it is the backbone of the whole thing. The art of storytelling is something that can only be honed by experience; there is no foolproof formula for it. Be sure to ask your friends and coworkers for comments regularly to identify the strategies that work best to improve the quality of your posts.
If you need professional help with longer posts or stories to share, you can always reach out to us.
Step Three: Some Posts Should Be Kept Short
You may already know this, but LinkedIn favors posts that contain brief phrases.
Similarly, engaging content like this is attractive to readers. Even though it has the same amount of information, a post comprised of one-line sentences or brief phrases is simpler to read. It appears to be less daunting than a post that includes lengthy paragraphs.
When combined with storytelling, this style offers a magic formula that allows you to flow through the article without recognizing that you've already concluded it. This formula helps you feel like you've been there for much longer than you have.
Keep in mind that each new thought constitutes a new phrase to put this into words. You might also try to reduce your phrases to make them shorter and improve the readability of your writing.
Step Four: Some Posts Should Be Kept Long
I am aware you are now thinking: "okay, make up your mind! What is it? Long or short?"
The secret to successful storytelling is to use brief phrases to describe lengthy content (and this also goes for B2B content marketing.) Long posts are an excellent method to share original content, which the LinkedIn algorithm values highly. The platform rewards users who do so.
Additionally, by combining long and short postings, you can produce content that is easy on the eyes and enjoyable to read. Keep a good variety and keep it interesting for your connections!
Step Five: Understand Your Audience
Please start thinking about the subject/content topics of your posts now that you are familiar with how to format them. Even if you understand all the little details about long-form or short-form content, at the end of the day, it is all about the value you add.
So, what constitutes excellent content on LinkedIn?
Messages that are geared specifically toward the audience you have.
Take a look at your network to see who is following you since this will give you a better sense of what content you should be posting. The next step is to consider the kinds of postings that will be beneficial to them or that they would be interested in reading.
For instance, if the majority of your network is comprised of people working in the Sales industry, you should discuss the most effective ways to make cold calls or send out emails, as well as any lessons you've picked up in this line of work, any particularly interesting calls you've received, and so on. And this holds for all other types of businesses as well!
You can add one more step to this process to reach the content holy grail, and that step is to produce content about topics that you find enjoyable to write about.
Final Thoughts
Ensure that you periodically share attractive graphics or even pictures and that you use hashtags to maximize the reach of your posts. Post often and create a lot of activity, answer people's comments and observe which posts get the most attention. This way, you can share more of that.
Like everything in content, it can take a little time to start seeing the results, but the sooner you start, the sooner you will get there.
For professional help, don't hesitate to reach out.