- If you're like most marketers, you've spent a lot of time
creating incredible content, and then posting it on
social media for crickets. That was me, too, until
I discovered a few things that completely transformed
my content reach on LinkedIn. So in this video, I'm
going to break down exactly what that is. (reflective music) The best types of content tell a story, customer stories, employee
stories, personal stories. Any time you can paint a picture and evoke emotions, your content
is going to perform better. But what types of posts perform best, and how do you actually create content that resonates with your audience? Let's start with one of my
favorite types of content on LinkedIn, polls. Love them or hate them, polls work. Trends are a great place to start, when it comes to posting a new poll. Global events, holidays, industry events, industry news, anything
that you can piggyback off of that is already getting
traction is going to be great and increase your chances
of a poll going viral. When possible, add your opinion in the content section of the poll, and then ask others to
share their opinions, as well, in the comments. I personally leverage this strategy to get over 100,000 views on my polls, by simply leveraging global
events and industry trends. You want to be posting
polls, at most, once a week. This is only if you post
frequently on LinkedIn. If you don't, try posting
maybe one or two polls a month. When you are creating your poll, LinkedIn gives you two options. You can leave the poll open
for seven days or 14 days. I recommend leaving it open
for the entire two weeks, that way you can leverage the poll in your lead generation efforts, and I cover that strategy
in another video, which is linked in the description below. Another popular post type
that gets great engagement and views is the PDF carousel post. So this is very simply
a PDF that you upload to LinkedIn and it creates a slideshow for your viewers, and they're more of a visual type of engagement. So what you wanna do there is make it aesthetically appealing,
matching your brand colors, aesthetic vibe, and then
also large, catchy phrases. Anything like statistics work
well, customer testimonials. You can even take a lead magnet and break it down into the
most key important points, and then turn that into
a PDF carousel post. There's lots of ways that you can do this, and LinkedIn loves these carousel posts. Here's an example of a carousel post that was created from a blog post. Now, these are really great opportunities to boost your thought leadership, repurpose your content,
and get more exposure to your blog, because you can link to the full blog in the comments. Actionable tips also work
really well on carousel posts. And so what you wanna do here is give people a step-by-step list of things they need to do in order to accomplish their goal
with that specific topic. This not only builds
goodwill with your audience, because you're helping them
and giving them valuable tips, but it also leaves them wanting more, which is why you need to
include a call to action, where they can contact you
or discover more information about your products and services. You don't have to post a
poll or a carousel post to get incredible engagement on LinkedIn. You can do that with a text-only post. The problem is, most people
are doing this wrong, so they don't see the
engagement and reach they want. The most important part
of a text-only post is you have to hook people in early so they wanna click that see more button to read the rest of your post. How you wanna treat your hook is basically like a blog title. A couple of examples for you are, how to, x, y, z. The top three ways you can, a, b, c. The easiest way to, fill in the blank. Three things you need to
know about, your topic. The best way to accomplish, a, b, c. These are just a few examples
that you can entice people to wanna keep reading
your text-only posts. LinkedIn increased their character limit on posts to 3,000 characters, so you can take blog posts that you have on your blog and repurpose them into longer-form content on LinkedIn. Speaking of, LinkedIn
has an Articles feature. Historically, these have
been a great place to, once again, repurpose blog posts. The challenge is they do
not get nearly the reach and views that your posts receive. So instead of leveraging LinkedIn articles for your long-form content, I highly recommend you
leverage LinkedIn posts. There is no better way to build trust and authority with your
audience than video. You wanna make sure you
are posting native videos. For example, if you
have a YouTube channel, instead of posting the
link to the YouTube URL, you wanna take it, and then
upload that on LinkedIn. Shorter videos perform better on LinkedIn, so anywhere from 30 seconds to 3 minutes. So if you have existing video content that is longer, I would
say up to ten minutes, then it could perform well on LinkedIn, and that's just a matter of testing. So if it doesn't perform the greatest, then maybe try trimming that video and reposting it to see how it performs. A couple of quick tips
to optimize your videos and get maximum engagement. Always, always add captions or subtitles. Studies show that over
80% of people watch videos without the sound on, and I
am one of those individuals. You can either upload
the SRT file directly to LinkedIn, or you can
bake in those captions using your favorite video editing program. The goal is to entice them
to watch the actual video. So give them a call to
action to watch the video and spell out what is in the actual video without giving everything away, and it's helpful if you can let them know how long the video is. So watch the 30-second
video, or 60-second video. One of my favorite LinkedIn
video features is LinkedIn Live. Now, LinkedIn Live is available for most users via an application. This is a great way to
build up your community, your sense of trust, your authority, but it's also great for
repurposing that content. I go live once a month,
and I take those snippets from my LinkedIn Live and I turn those into mini video clips. Short-form videos, like TikTok videos, also perform really well on LinkedIn. The key there is to make
sure that it is related to your business, if
you can provide value, or also something
motivational or inspirational. My video views receive
significantly lower views than any other post type, but I don't want this to discourage you. My videos are what drive
the most business for me. People on the phone,
whether they are customers or prospects, always mention my videos and how much they love them. So you really need to be consistent with your videos in order
to reap the benefits of video marketing on LinkedIn. One reason I love video is because it lets people in on me, as a human, and my personality. You can accomplish this from
other post types, as well. Historically, people have thought that LinkedIn is just a
business-only platform. Things are changing, things have changed. You have to mix in personal content because people wanna know who
they're doing business with, and this is why personal posts do so exceptionally well on LinkedIn. These can be anything from
a lesson that you learned, a trip you went on, anniversary
that you just celebrated. But unlike Instagram or Facebook, let people in on your life, but also turn it into something of value that they can learn from or feel inspired from. Personal posts perform best when coupled with a photo of you,
your family, an event. It could also be a screenshot of a tweet, or an inspirational quote. So I just told you what
post types perform well on LinkedIn, but ultimately
the algorithm is responsible for surfacing those posts
so that maximum viewers actually see them. There are three key factors that go into the LinkedIn algorithm. The first one is personal connections. LinkedIn is going to show your posts more with people that you are connected with and people that you engage with. The second LinkedIn algorithm
factor is relevance. How relevant is your content
to your target audience? This could be anything
from LinkedIn looking at keywords that you use in your posts, hashtags, anything in
the comments section, of people engaging with you. The third LinkedIn algorithm factor is probability of engagement. So what LinkedIn is doing here is they are judging how likely your post is to get engagement. So you wanna make sure that
you are getting maximum views, likes, comments, all the things, in the very first hour,
because that tells LinkedIn that this is something that
people are engaging with, so I'm going to show it
more in people's feeds. Here's a tip to help the
algorithm work for you, and not against you. You wanna make it really super easy for people to read your content. Make sure it is appropriately spaced out. I like using bullets or emojis, putting one sentence per line, and then I put spaces in
between every sentence. Spacing out your content is also great for encouraging people to
click that see more button, and this is a micro engagement that factors into the LinkedIn algorithm. The LinkedIn algorithm also
does not like third-party links. So when you take people
outside of LinkedIn, they are not going to
reward you for doing so. So what you wanna do here is put the links in the comment section of your post, so you can have a call to action
in the actual post itself, and say, click the link in
the comments to see more. When it comes to using
hashtags on LinkedIn, ideally, you wanna do less than nine, because every time you
go over nine hashtags, it flags the spam filters in LinkedIn, which means your post
might not be seen as much. Another way to increase
engagement on LinkedIn is by tagging people. If you have a post that you can list certain
subject matter experts, do that in the post itself. If you want people's opinions on the post, do that in the comment section. This is going to get more
eyes on your content, and it's also going to
encourage engagement, AKA comments, which is then
going to tell the algorithm to show your posts to more people. If you are someone who
posts multiple times a day, make sure that you're
leaving at least four hours in between posts. If you don't, then the algorithm is only going to favor one of those posts, and you're not gonna get maximum views on all of your content. You also want to respond
to every single comment that is left on your post. So this is not only being
friendly and inviting, it also helps the algorithm, because you are triggering
it to show up more by responding to comments. If you want people to actually engage with your comments and leave comments, then you need to engage with them. The more comments you are
leaving on other people's posts, the more likely they are to
leave comments on your posts. And leaving engaging comments is step one in our LinkedIn connection strategy, which I go into more
detail in the next video.
