My 13 Secret Tips to Improve LinkedIn Content Performance

An increasing number of people are interested in how to improve LinkedIn content performance.

Why?

Your marketing strategy needs to include LinkedIn, especially if you’re in the B2B space.

LinkedIn leads the social media crowd when it comes to lead generation and social selling opportunities. In fact, 80% of B2B social media leads come from LinkedIn. You can also achieve great things on the platform when it comes to personal branding to accelerate your career or find jobs.

Plus so many of the issues that have become commonplace on other platforms, a focus on negative news and frequent troll attacks, just aren’t as pervasive on LinkedIn. Not to say they don’t exist, but the platform has been successful at maintaining a focus on professionalism. Over 90% of B2B marketing executives give LinkedIn kudos for featuring the most high-quality content on social media.

If you’re just getting started or if you want to improve your LinkedIn company or personal branding, it can be tough to navigate the channel.

So I’ve got some ⚠️ insider information for you that I’ve picked up over the past few months of daily LinkedIn content creation.

Here are some of the things I’ve learned about how to improve your LinkedIn content performance by becoming a power user myself in 2020:

The time of day you post matters a lot. ⏰ I find that posting first thing in the morning for my time zone results in better post performance. That could be different for you, but I recommend trying to post either 7 – 9am, 11am – 1pm, or 7 – 9pm. The time zone should be the one that aligns with your primary audience.
Text-based posts perform best as organic content. 📝 Nothing fancy needed. If you want to include an image or video, it usually helps when the multimedia includes your own face.
When it comes to paid content, a simple image, image carousel, or video can all be effective. The main idea is to stand out and catch attention quickly without seeming too promotional. 🔑 You should create multiple variations of each ad to run against each other to test out what works best for your target audience.
If you want to share a link with organic content, add the link as a comment. Don’t include any hyperlinks in the body of your post. ❌ Content that doesn’t encourage users to leave the platform tends to fare better.
Tag other users and company pages in your content or in the comments. 👥 Use caution with this, though. Don’t tag people you don’t have a decent relationship with. If they don’t react to your tag, it ultimately hurts the performance of your content because LinkedIn may view your post as spam.
Make sure to engage with other people’s content after posting. 🗣 You especially want to leave comments on others’ posts. It’s funny how this works, but by showing love to others, you receive a lot more love in return.
Respond to comments on your own posts quickly. 🏃🏾‍♀️ I try to set a goal of responding within 2 hours. Just make sure to respond to as many comments as you can (I have a harder time with this when I get over 100 comments 🤷‍♀️).
Avoid automating your content. ❌ I know it’s tempting to schedule posts and not have to jump on LinkedIn every time you want to post, but you’ll get much a better engagement rate by avoiding that. The content I scheduled to post via an automation tool performed far worse than any other for me.
Make good use of white space and text formatting. 👀 I ran a test to see how many people actually read a text post that used the full 1300 character limit. A large number of people just skim what you post. To make it easier for them to read and retain your full content, format text using lots of line breaks and white space. I also sometimes use emojis, bullet points, or add headings/subheadings to summarize blocks of text.
Use 3 hashtags. 3️⃣ You can use any number of hashtags you prefer, but 1 – 3 is the unspoken rule of thumb. In my own testing, 3 is the perfect number.
The number of connections and followers you have impacts your reach. 👩🧑👴👳‍♀️👱‍♀️ This feels like a given, but people who consistently get impressively high engagement numbers on their posts usually have thousands upon thousands of followers. That’s not to say people with lower numbers of followers can’t go viral if they have great content or that everyone with a large network can go viral. It does help, though.
Consistency is key. 📈 The more regularly you post, the better engagement rates your content will secure. I try to post every day, give or take a few “vacation” days. Other people find that posting 3 or 5x a week works for them. Figure out what you want to commit to, and then stick to that.
Figure out what your connections care about most. The number one rule to improve your LinkedIn content performance is to offer value to those who follow you. Don’t post about general marketing topics if your network is largely composed of people in accounting roles who are more interested in content about their own needs and interests. The content you post will direct how your network grows. 📶 So think about who you want to reach with your LinkedIn content and create content that best speaks to that persona.

Want more tips and recommendations on how to improve your LinkedIn strategy? Follow me on LinkedIn to see my daily content. Or sign up for my newsletter and get marketing insight delivered to you weekly.