On This Page

• Understanding LinkedIn Content
• Benefits of Content Marketing
• Creating a LinkedIn Content Strategy
• Types of Content to Utilize
• Content Creation Best Practices
• Different Types of Content
• Using Sponsored Content To Expand Reach

How to Create Content for LinkedIn That Grows Your Audience.

LinkedIn has established itself in the social media space as the top platform for business, with the highest ROI for businesses out of any other social media platform, making it one of the most desirable platforms to grow your brand on.

In this guide, we will go over the best practices when it comes to creating content on LinkedIn and how you can optimize your results for growth on LinkedIn.

Understanding the Basics of LinkedIn Content

Before diving into the nitty-gritty of creating content for LinkedIn, it's crucial to understand the platform's fundamentals.

Knowing what type of content works best, when and how often to post, and how to leverage LinkedIn's features can significantly enhance your content's effectiveness.

The Importance of LinkedIn for Professional Networking

As opposed to other social networks that center around socializing and leisurely interaction, LinkedIn primarily focuses on career advancement, thought leadership, and business relationships.

It provides an avenue for professionals like you to demonstrate expertise, establish authority in your field, develop your brand, and expand your business or career connections.

An integral part of leveraging LinkedIn is creating meaningful content. LinkedIn’s algorithm values engagement (reactions, comments, and shares), so creating quality content that instigates engagement is crucial.

The Benefits of LinkedIn Content Marketing

Effective LinkedIn content marketing can offer numerous benefits: establishing you as a thought leader in your field, driving leads for your business, and building brand awareness through consistent engagement.

Establishing Yourself as a Thought Leader

LinkedIn is an excellent platform for positioning yourself as a thought leader within your industry.

Regularly sharing informative, insightful, and engaging content can demonstrate your knowledge and expertise, attract a loyal following, and influence discussions within your industry.

Thought leadership on LinkedIn not only boosts your professional reputation but can also open doors to new opportunities, such as speaking engagements, partnerships, or new clients.

It hinges on the high-quality content you create and share, reflecting your in-depth knowledge and unique insights.

Drive Leads for Your Business

LinkedIn's professional audience and business-focused environment make it an ideal platform for driving leads.

By sharing content that showcases your products or services and includes a clear call-to-action, you can attract the attention of prospective clients or customers.

But remember, lead generation on LinkedIn is about more than just selling. It's about establishing relationships, building trust, and offering value through your content.

Over time, this approach can convert your audience members from passive followers into active leads and customers.

If you want to learn more about converting leads from LinkedIn, consider connecting LinkedIn to your CRM.

Building Brand Awareness Through Consistent Engagement

Consistent engagement with your audience can significantly boost your brand's visibility on LinkedIn.

Engaging could mean responding promptly to comments, actively participating in discussions, or sharing user-generated content.

When you consistently interact with your followers, you build a relationship that encourages them to share your content with their own network, effectively amplifying your reach.

Ultimately, higher engagement rates lead to increased brand awareness and the potential to attract a wider audience.

Thus, LinkedIn content marketing can play a significant role in strengthening your brand's online presence, engaging potential leads, and positioning you as a thought leader in your respective field.

Defining Your Content Strategy for LinkedIn

One of the most critical steps in creating a content plan for LinkedIn is defining your content strategy. This gives you a sense of what type of content to post, and what you need to be doing to drive results.

Identifying Your Target Audience on LinkedIn

Your target audience is the specific group of people that your content is designed for - these are the individuals most likely to benefit from your product or service.

On LinkedIn, you can segment audiences by factors like industry, job role, geographical location, company size, and others.

Once you've identified who your audience is, it becomes easier to create relevant content that resonates with them.

To better understand your audience, pay attention to topics that they engage with the most on LinkedIn. What subjects compel them to comment or share? You might also run surveys or polls directly on LinkedIn to gain a deeper understanding of their expectations and preferences.

⭐ Pro Tip: To improve engagement on your content, pretend like you are writing to a single person. This will make your post feel more personal and more people will interact with it. Remember the saying “if you are talking to everyone you are talking to no one”

Defining Your Brand's Core Message

Your core message is what your content is going to be all about, it is the core idea that you are writing about, the core problem that you are solving for people.

For example, LinkedIn’s core message as a brand is that they are a social media network for professionals, all of their branding reflects this professional and serious approach.

Whereas a platform like Instagram is a casual, connect with friends & share pictures platform, and that reflects their branding.

You can see a clear difference in the two brands from how they present their platforms.

Find a core message that resonates with your target audience and make sure to center all of your branding onto it.

Authenticity In Your Content

A primary facet of a successful content strategy is authenticity.

Authenticity means staying true to who you are, what you do, and whom you serve.

LinkedIn users value genuine content that adds value—whether it's an inspirational story about overcoming challenges in business or a behind-the-scenes look at company culture. From the pictures you use and the stories you tell to the comments you post – let authenticity drive every aspect of your LinkedIn content strategy.

Transparent and trust-building content helps foster connections – connections become relationships, relationships create opportunities, and opportunities create success.

Determining Your Content Frequency

How often you post can significantly impact your visibility and engagement rates on LinkedIn.

Posting too infrequently may cause you to be forgotten by your audience while posting too often might annoy your followers.

There is no one-size-fits-all solution as everyone's audience is different, the best practice is to post 1-2 times per day, but experiment with different frequencies and different posting times and monitor the analytics to find what works best for you.

Importance of Follow-Ups with Generated Activity

After publishing your content, check the engagement levels - respond to comments, thank people for sharing your posts, and engage in discussions.

This two-way communication can help build stronger relationships with your audience, and show that you value their participation - all essential elements in maintaining a good LinkedIn presence.

If you want to make sure that you respond to everyone who comments on your post, and are interested in supercharging your engagement check out our tool Aware.

In it, you get a built-in feed that shows you any replies to your content that you may have otherwise missed

Through this menu, you can reply to the comments on LinkedIn and easily keep up with your community.

Get started with a free 7 day trial today.

Types of LinkedIn Content to Utilize

Variety is crucial when developing content for LinkedIn. Adapting different content formats such as posts, articles, videos, and newsletters can keep your page fresh and engaging.

Different Content Types on LinkedIn

LinkedIn offers several types of content you can create:

1. Posts: These are short status updates where you can share insights, news, or ask questions. They offer higher visibility but lower depth of content.
2. Articles: For in-depth insight or thought leadership pieces, write an article directly on LinkedIn utilizing their blogging feature. Articles allow you to provide richer content and solidify your reputation as an expert.
3. Videos: Videos on LinkedIn are engaging and generally have higher interaction rates than text posts. They're great for demonstrating product uses or sharing short messages.
4. Newsletters: Recently introduced by LinkedIn, newsletters are recurring periodical content sent directly to subscribers' inboxes. They're great for growing an audience around specific topical interests.

Experiment with these various forms of content and analyze which resonates most with your audience to strategize effectively.

It's best to use a mix of all 4 of these strategies, but it is up to you which content type you want to be posting, if you aren’t interested in creating video content, don’t do it just because someone tells you to.

Creating Engaging Short-Form LinkedIn Posts

When creating LinkedIn posts, here are a few tips to make your content outstanding and engaging:

1. Make It Short and Precise: Write short sentences in active voice. Remember, a clear message equals strong engagement.
2. Add a Call to Action: Encourage readers to interact with your post - leave comments, share thoughts, or click links.
3. Use Visual Content: Incorporate relevant images, infographics, or videos to enhance your message and grab attention.
4. Focus On Value: Make sure each post adds value – be it informational, insightful, or inspirational.

Think about your content as a digital billboard that people will see when swiping through their LinkedIn feed, you need to capture their attention, either through pattern breaks like visual content or through having a very good value in your post that makes people engage with your post.

You shouldn’t be adding CTAs in every post, but for the promotional posts that you put out, just putting some sort of CTA in the comments or the end of the post will significantly increase the effectiveness of getting people to engage with you.

⭐ Pro Tip: Read your content out loud before posting it, this will help you find the parts that are hard to read, and find any flaws within your content.

Creating Long-Form LinkedIn Articles

Writing longer-form content gives you a chance to share in-depth insights and establish yourself as an expert in your field. Compared to posts, since there is no word count you can cover a much bigger topic with a single article since there is no character limit.

Here are some useful tips:

1. Write a Catchy Headline: Capture attention with a compelling headline to encourage people to want to read the entire article.
2. Use Organized Content: Use sub-headers, bullet points, numbered lists, and legible fonts to break up text and enhance readability. Remember that nobody wants to read a huge block of text.
3. Quality Over Quantity: Prioritize writing a comprehensive piece that thoroughly covers a topic instead of rushing to achieve a high word count.

Utilizing Video Content for Greater Engagement

Video content is becoming increasingly popular on LinkedIn. Video posts often receive higher engagement levels than text because they're easy to consume and usually more entertaining.

Videos also have a lot more of a personal feel, since it feels like a person is directly talking to you. Although written content can feel the same if you are good enough at writing, it is way easier to achieve this through video content.

Remember to:

1. Keep videos brief (usually under 2 minutes) for optimal engagement.
2. Ensure the video has subtitles or captions since many people watch videos with sound off or might not hear exactly what you say.
3. Deliver value in the first few seconds to retain viewer attention and stop them from skipping your video, this is especially important if you have a long video (over 15 seconds) with how short people’s attention spans are in today's age.

Content Creation Best Practices on LinkedIn

Create Engaging and Genuine Content

Engagement is the currency of social media, the more engaging your content, the better your engagement rate.

LinkedIn rewards engagement with enhanced visibility, pushing your content to even more people's feeds and increasing the number of views your content gets.

Make sure your content encourages audience interaction by:

• Asking questions
• soliciting feedback
• creating polls

Here’s a great example of a post that does all three of these things well.

These tactics not only boost engagement but also provides valuable insights about your audience.

Authenticity also goes hand in hand with engagement. Genuine content allows your brand's personality to shine through, helping to build trust and credibility with your audience.

Consistency in Posting

Consistency lies at the heart of any successful content strategy, you won’t build a big brand from one post or one day of work, the real progress comes from consistently putting in the effort to create content day after day, even when you don’t see any progress.

Consistently posting content to LinkedIn allows you to compound the small gains that you get every day, and before you know it you will have grown your presence on LinkedIn substantially

To maintain consistency, consider scheduling out your content, either through a content calendar that tells you how many pieces of content you should post per day, or by pre-writing your content and uploading it throughout the week.

Although scheduling your posts helps with consistency, remember that quality should never be compromised for quantity, it's better to have fewer, high-quality posts than numerous mediocre ones.

Using Analytics

Data should inform every aspect of your LinkedIn content strategy.

Make use of LinkedIn's analytics tools to gain insights into which posts are performing well, the demographics of your audience, and how people are engaging with your content.

These insights can guide your content creation efforts and help you gain a better understanding of what works (and what doesn't) for your audience.

Producing data-driven content means providing more of what your audience loves, resulting in increased engagement, stronger relationships, and higher visibility on LinkedIn.

Our tool Aware provides a comprehensive suite of analytics with the goal of helping you engage with and grow your audience.

Check out our Creators Field Guide to LinkedIn Analytics for a more comprehensive overview of how analytics can be used in your content.

Different Types of Content for LinkedIn

Now that you have a plan for how you will post on LinkedIn, you need to figure out what you are going to post about.

Ideas for LinkedIn Page Content

Creating compelling content for your LinkedIn page requires creativity and a deep understanding of your audience. Here are some ideas for LinkedIn page content:

1. Industry Insights: Share analyses of recent trends in your industry, or comment on industry-related news events.
2. Company Achievements: Celebrate your company's accomplishments. It could be a milestone, a project success, or an award.
3. Employee Spotlights: Shine the limelight on your employees. Sharing their journeys and experiences humanizes your brand and fosters a sense of community.
4. Thought Leadership: Share valuable insights, ideas, and predictions related to your industry. This can position you as a thought leader and go-to resource in your field.

Content That Drives Engagement: Tips and Tricks

Creating content that drives engagement doesn’t have to be a guessing game. Here are some tips:

1. Create Interactive Posts: Encourage your audience to participate. Ask a question, seek advice, or run a poll.
2. Share Relevant Content: Share industry-related news, trends, or informative articles from reputed sources.
3. Welcome Discussion: Prompt a conversation. Take a stance on an industry topic and subtly invite various perspectives on it.
4. Follow Up: Push engagers on your posts to Salesforce or Hubspot CRM

Strategies for Promoting Products, Services, and Events

Promoting your products, services, or events effectively on LinkedIn is all about strategic positioning:

1. Value Proposition: Highlight your product or service's benefits or unique features, showing your audience why they need it and how it can solve their problems.
2. Demo Videos: Sharing a short demo video is an exciting way to showcase how your product or service works in action.
3. Event Promotion: Create a captivating LinkedIn Event page with all the event's details and actively promote it on your LinkedIn page.

By incorporating these techniques, you can build an engaging LinkedIn page, stimulating dialogue and fostering a community around your brand.

Expanding Your Reach with LinkedIn's Sponsored Content

LinkedIn allows you to promote a LinkedIn post and turn it into an ad that gets pushed to more people for a price that varies on how much reach you want and what type of method you want to use.

Doing so can help you kickstart your LinkedIn engagement and get people familiar with you instead of the slow process of organic growth.

However if done wrong this strategy can be very damaging to your reputation, since people are pretty negative towards ads you want to make sure to put a lot of thought in your sponsored posts.

Understanding Sponsored Content on LinkedIn

There are many types of ad formats you can use, but the ones that are the most relevant for content marketing are:

• Carousel Ads: Multiple Pictures in a slide
• Single Image Ads: Single Image Post
• Text Ads: Text Post
• Video Ads: Videos

Getting Started with Sponsored Content

Starting your journey with sponsored content on LinkedIn is quite straightforward.

First, you will need to set up a LinkedIn Campaign Manager account.

Then, choose the right ad format that aligns with your marketing goals, create your ads, and set up your targeting criteria to define who you want to reach.

Additionally, you will need to define your ad budget and choose whether you want to pay for clicks (CPC) or impressions (CPM).

Conclusion

In conclusion, creating quality content on LinkedIn can lead to numerous benefits for professionals and businesses alike.

By understanding the platform's fundamentals, defining a content strategy, and utilizing various content types, individuals can establish themselves as thought leaders, drive leads, and boost brand awareness through engagement. It's essential to prioritize authenticity, consistency, and data-driven decision-making to ensure content resonates with the target audience and achieves desired results.

Additionally, experimenting with sponsored content can help expand the reach and further increase engagement. With these best practices in mind, individuals can effectively create and promote content on LinkedIn, strengthening their online presence and achieving their professional goals.