LinkedIn is home to over 830 million users and over 58 million companies. While it may not be considered the biggest and trendiest social media platform, it is still an essential part of the business world and can be a powerful tool for marketing your company. It has been discovered that 82% of B2B marketers consider LinkedIn to be the most effective social media channel for content marketing, and 97% of B2B marketers use LinkedIn as part of their content marketing efforts overall. 

LinkedIn is a great platform to use when marketing your company. In fact, LinkedIn is actually considered the most trusted social media platform, and it is important to note that 77% of content marketers say that LinkedIn is a producer of the best results in organic social media efforts. 

Are you ready to start marketing on LinkedIn? We put together these three best practices to follow when using LinkedIn as a marketing platform.

1. Optimize Your Profile

The first thing you can do when using LinkedIn as a marketing platform is to complete and optimize your company’s profile. By optimizing your profile, you are growing your reach to its fullest potential and giving your company the opportunity to engage with more users. Companies with a complete and active LinkedIn page typically see 5x more page views. 

You can customize your URL on LinkedIn to represent your company, rather than settling for the random letters and numbers that LinkedIn generates for your page. This allows users to clearly see your company’s name in the URL of your profile and makes sharing your profile easier. To continue optimizing your profile to make it stand out, you can apply a coherent and uniform design throughout your profile that allows your company to be easily recognized. Your company should already have a recognizable logo, text type, and color scheme, so you can utilize these brand designs into your profile through a custom profile picture and banner image to form a coherent appearance. 

Another way to optimize your company’s profile is including keywords. Including your most relevant keywords in your profile headline, tagline, and overview/about section optimizes your profile and allows your company to reach higher rankings within LinkedIn searches. To figure out what kind of keywords to use, ask yourself this question: What are the words and phrases that potential customers might use when they search for your product/service? Once you find your keywords, make sure to not overdo it, and use them in a way that seamlessly fits them into your profile and content.

If you are unsure of what’s working and what’s not during your optimizing journey, LinkedIn provides an analytics system that tracks metrics including page views along with number and frequency of clicks, and gives you the opportunity to compare your analytics with competitors. You can also utilize this feature to look at the demographics of your followers and use their job functions and interests when tailoring your profile and creating relevant content.

2. Use Visuals

A picture is worth a thousand words… that’s why posting visual content is so effective for marketing your company on LinkedIn. Posts with images have a 2x higher comment rate, videos get 5x more engagement, and live videos get 24x more engagement. 

When it comes to images, having a collage of three to four images is found to perform very well, but it is also important to note that including eight images in a LinkedIn post is associated with a greater number of LinkedIn views. While incorporating at least one image into your LinkedIn posts will boost your engagement, the size of your images plays a role in engagement as well. Larger images tend to perform better, as they tend to have a 38% higher click rate than other images. LinkedIn recommends images to size in at 1200 x 627 pixels. Overall, including at least one image into your LinkedIn content will boost your engagement. 

For videos, it has been discovered that linking YouTube videos in LinkedIn posts can lead to a 75% higher share rate. However, it is not the best practice to embed multimedia content such as YouTube videos. While a different social media platform, a study done on Facebook by analyzing over six million Facebook posts found that videos directly uploaded to Facebook had a 110% higher interaction rate and a 478% higher share rate in comparison to linked YouTube videos posted on Facebook. With this in mind, it is likely that LinkedIn would also prioritize videos uploaded directly through LinkedIn over links and embedded videos from external websites on the feed. 

3. Written Content Matters

While you can pick and choose which posts you would like to add images and videos to, all of your LinkedIn posts will more likely than not include written content. This makes your written content impactful and significant in your marketing goals utilizing this social media channel. 

Make sure to write your LinkedIn content neutral with easy-to-read language. While posts that are written in language that reflects a positive sentiment are shown to get the most shares and likes on LinkedIn, it has been discovered that posts written with a neutral sentiment perform significantly better than LinkedIn posts with language with positive or negative sentiment. In terms of easy-to-read language, it has been shown that an “Easy” readability level is associated with more LinkedIn post views, shares, and likes. Readability level is measured through the Flesch-Kincaid Reading Ease test, which assesses the difficulty of comprehending English text. The “Easy” readability level is considered to be equivalent to an 11-year-old’s education level, so writing your content with this level in mind will bring in more engagement and views. 

Do not utilize questions as headlines and titles for your LinkedIn posts. In comparison to all other LinkedIn posts, those that pose a question in the beginning tend to see on average 3,000 less LinkedIn views. Instead, write “How”, “How-To”, and list style headlines and titles for your posts, as these posts all perform significantly better than posts that do not include these types of titles. 

As for the length of your written content, longer is better. Long-form content performs very well on LinkedIn, with posts that have 1900 to 2000 words performing the best and receiving the most engagement in comparison to other ranges of words. However, don’t just throw 2000 words onto a post and call it a day! Dividing your post with headings, specifically five, will create a greater number of post views. Titles and headlines for your posts also have an ideal range – 40-49 characters – which will typically receive the greatest number of post views overall. 

Remember to use hashtags! They are still a powerful tool on LinkedIn when used correctly, as they can add emphasis to your posts while branching your content out to new audiences. They should be used very sparingly, and you should use two to three for best results. 

Work with Agency 102

While LinkedIn seems like it is merely a place for connecting with businesses and professionals, it can actually be a powerful tool in marketing your company in terms of engagement and reach. Our team helps clients with LinkedIn content marketing, SEO, and marketing strategy among other services while staying true to each individual brand. 

Get in touch with us now to learn more about what we can do for your LinkedIn strategy and more.