9 BILLION REASONS TO START POSTING ON LINKEDIN

LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network with over 600 million users, including 2 million New Zealanders. Two new members join LinkedIn every second.

All these numbers can be overwhelming but here are a few stats that should convince you to read on:

• An impressive 80% of B2B leads generated on social media come from LinkedIn (Source: Forbes)

• More than half of all social traffic to B2B sites comes from LinkedIn (Source: LinkedIn)

• Content sharing is actually rare. Roughly only 3 million of its over 600 million users share content every week, that’s less than 2% of monthly users (Source: Business of Apps)

With 3 million people attracting close to 9 billion weekly impressions, the opportunity and upside of sharing content to attract attention, followers and leads is enormous. (Source: LinkedIn)

Use your personal profile

Don’t sit back and expect your company profile to do the work for you. Personal profiles get more views, and greater engagement for the following reasons:

• You can’t send connection requests or personal messages from a business page

• People are more likely to follow a personal profile than a brand

• People want to engage with other people, not companies

• Employees typically have 10x the social reach of their company

Content is king

Here are some tips to gain more engagement, followers, and most importantly leads. First tip, post content that informs and educates rather than purely promotes yourself or what you’re selling. People on LinkedIn are there to find useful and interesting professional content. Try to be consistent and share or post content on a regular basis.  

Video
According to LinkedIn, video posts earn three times the engagement of text-only posts. Don’t forget to add subtitles as most people will view your video on mute. Keeping your videos between 30 seconds and two minutes is a good guide.

Images
Following on from video content, posts with images get twice as many comments. Make sure you add an image with your next post. We all like pretty pictures.

Give old content new life
LinkedIn is another channel to use content that you or your team have created. From PowerPoint presentations to PDFs to case studies and infographics, sharing this kind of content is a great way to engage your followers and potential clients. It’s also readily available so all you have to do is literally upload and post it.

Third party content
No one likes to hang out with the person at the party who’s talking about themselves the whole time. So, mix up your posts by including some content from people you follow or other relevant and interesting news. Respond to commenters and engage with others’ posts with a comment or share to drive conversation.

Hashtags
Hashtags are not just for Instagram models. Add hashtags to your content so it can be found with other relevant trending topics on LinkedIn. You can also invite people to participate in your conversations by @mentioning them in your post. This helps your post get shared and seen by people you want to hear from.

Find some more content tips and ideas HERE

In CONTENTclusion

LinkedIn presents a massive opportunity for you to engage with your potential and current customers. LinkedIn has more tools it can offer you through analytics, groups and InMail but that’s for another blog/LinkedIn post. Follow the tips above and you will be on your way to becoming the next Sir Richard Branson or Melinda Gates or New Zealand’s own Robett Hollis on LinkedIn.