Social media marketing best practices from other platforms like Instagram, Facebook and Twitter can be applied to LinkedIn’s growing audience and content rich newsfeed. Brands and individuals are taking advantage by upping their content game on LinkedIn, and seeing results in the form of audience growth and new customer leads.
Apply these LinkedIn social media marketing best practices below to grow your own brand following on the platform:
Just like with Instagram, TikTok and Twitter, LinkedIn uses hashtags to bookmark posts about similar topics and to help bring conversations together. You can take advantage of LinkedIn hashtags to increase exposure for your posts, and to help reach your target audience. A LinkedIn hashtag study by Agorapulse found that including hashtags in both company page posts, and LinkedIn profile posts boosts post impressions, with LinkedIn page posts containing hashtags delivering 38.08% more engagement in their post samples.
Select LinkedIn Hashtags for Your Brand Niche
When including hashtags in your posts, the first step is determining the best hashtags to use based on your industry. You want to use hashtags that are relevant to your company and its products or services in order to reach people who will be interested in them.
LinkedIn’s follow page offers suggestions for pages, profiles, and hashtags to follow. Use this page as a tool for checking the usage volume for particular hashtags, and use that as a factor when determining your LinkedIn hashtag strategy. Finding hashtags that are both relevant, and possessing a high usage volume will deliver the best combination of reach and audience targeting.
Determine How Many Hashtags to Include in Your Posts
Once you have a list of relevant hashtags determined for your brand, it’s time to include them in your LinkedIn posts. LinkedIn posts can contain an unlimited number of hashtags as long as the number of characters does not exceed the post character limit. However, stuffing your posts full of hashtags will make them look spammy and lead to poor engagement.
Try setting a rule for your brand’s post strategy when it comes to hashtag volume. For example, always including 2-3 hashtags in your posts is a good baseline to follow. You can include hashtags naturally for key terms within the actual copy of your post, as well as creating a list of hashtags at the bottom of your posts as is common in Instagram captions. The bottom of the post is where you can add additional hashtags and go beyond the baseline of 2-3 if you choose to.
Check out our blog post on LinkedIn post examples for an analysis of posts from top brands.
Another feature to take advantage of in LinkedIn posts is the ability to tag individual LinkedIn profiles and company pages. When drafting a post, using the “@” symbol will enable you to tag people and pages just like you would on another social platform like Instagram or Twitter.
Including tags for relevant company pages and individual user accounts will increase post exposure by sharing your post within the news feeds of those pages and people. When someone tags your profile or company page on LinkedIn, your followers see the post in their newsfeed with a label stating that you were mentioned in the post. Taking advantage of this by tagging your own network will gain your posts this extra exposure.
Tag LinkedIn Company Pages
An example of a relevant opportunity to tag another LinkedIn company page is sharing an article by a 3rd party and tagging their LinkedIn page to give them credit for the content. For example, if you share a Forbes article on your LinkedIn page as a part of your thought leadership content marketing strategy, mention that the article was from Forbes in your post copy and tag their company page.
Tag LinkedIn Profiles
This same technique can be applied to tags for individual LinkedIn profiles, but be sure you aren’t spammy, and only tag relevant profiles that have something to do with your post. For example, if you post a video interview that you conducted with an industry peer, you should tag their profile in the post copy when you share the video interview.
Tagging LinkedIn company pages and profiles in your posts also has the benefit of increasing the likelihood that the profile or page you tag will engage with your post. At a minimum, it’s common for company pages and tagged individuals to like your post, which boosts engagement. There is also the chance that the person you tag shares your post with their own network, which will multiply impressions and exposure for your brand’s post.
Get more tips for using your LinkedIn profile for brand growth here.
LinkedIn posts have a comments section that is similar to that of a Facebook post. Individual profiles and company pages can comment on a LinkedIn post, and the post author (both individual profiles and company pages) have the ability to like post comments and respond to them.
LinkedIn Post Comments Increase Impressions
The more engagement a LinkedIn post receives, the longer the LinkedIn algorithm will promote the post in people’s newsfeeds, leading to more impressions and engagement. Comments are a big factor in keeping the post relevant and maintaining its position in people’s newsfeed.
In order to maximize any comments your posts receive, be sure to respond to every comment that a user leaves on your post. The goal should be to make the comments section of your LinkedIn posts a place for conversation, with the best case scenario being that you are able to spark a back and forth conversation with commenters and maximize the number of comments the post receives, and in turn, adding to its impressions and exposure.
Comments Are a Community Building Opportunity
Comments are one of the most organic and direct methods of engaging with your audience, and represent a big opportunity for building brand awareness and trust with people. While scalability and efficiency are always a consideration for marketing strategies, sometimes the best strategy is the least scalable, but delivers the highest ROI. Responding to people’s comments and showing them appreciation and acknowledgement is one such strategy.
Get more more marketing tips for growing LinkedIn company pages here.
Establishing a consistent publishing cadence is a pillar of social media marketing strategies across platforms, including LinkedIn. Publishing a slew of posts one day, and then disappearing for weeks will lead to inconsistent engagement, and limited growth for your personal profile or company page.
Aside from inconsistency, over-posting on a given day will come across as spammy, and could lead to you losing valuable audience members. This is why it’s important to find a publishing schedule that is both realistic given your time constraints, and still achieves your goals for growth on the platform.
Find a LinkedIn Posting Schedule that Works for You
Establish a consistent post schedule that you have the time and resources to stick to. Examples of tiered approaches to LinkedIn posting schedules include posting one update per week as a starter, advancing to 2-3 posts per week once you have the platform down and have enough content, and then posting daily updates as your page starts to hit its stride.
Use Social Media Automation Platforms to Schedule Posts in Advance
Use social media automation platforms to help structure your LinkedIn content calendar. Popular platforms like Sprout Social, Buffer, and Hootsuite allow you to draft and schedule posts in advance so you can ensure they publish at the same time and proper cadence. This also has the added benefit of enabling you to write your posts for the week, or even weeks in advance in one sitting so you don’t risk forgetting, or end up not having time in your schedule.
These social media automation platforms have other beneficial features besides post publishing, such as analytics (see more below), social listening to track your audience engagement and relevant conversations happening in your industry, and suggested content tools to provide you with future content ideas.
Learn more about the best social media automation platforms from Brand Credential’s Marketing Resources.
Doing research and uncovering stats and trends about LinkedIn post performance like those shared in this blog post is a good starting point to guide your approach to social media marketing on the platform. Once you have your accounts up and running and have gone through a few cycles of posting, comparing different post types that you’ve published (i.e. image post vs. video post, or image post vs. text-only post) will uncover insights specific to your brand and audience that you can leverage to determine what content works best for your LinkedIn marketing strategy.
Use LinkedIn Analytics to Measure Post Performance
To uncover post metrics, you can leverage LinkedIn’s built-in analytics portal, or one of the 3rd party social media marketing automation platforms mentioned above.
LinkedIn’s analytics portal allows you to track standard social media metrics like page follower growth, post engagement over various periods of time, and engagement metrics for specific posts like total comments, shares, and engagement rate.
LinkedIn analytics on platforms like Sprout Social or Buffer are more robust, featuring the standard metrics above, as well as additional features. These include the ability to compare metrics (i.e. Post engagement or follower growth) between two different periods of time, competitor comparisons, including most used hashtags, and follower demographics to better understand your audience.
Key LinkedIn metrics to track for posts:
A/B Test Different LinkedIn Posting Strategies
Conducting A/B tests using the analytics tools above will uncover what post types are driving the most engagement from your audience. For example, you could run an A/B test by posting 5 image posts and 5 preview link posts (a posted article with an auto generated preview link) and compare the averages and totals across the two categories of posts.
Comparing which post type drove the most comments, likes, shares and clicks will indicate which post type your audience engages with most. The key here is to then invest more resources in creating content that drives the results you are looking for. For example, if your goal is purely page and audience growth, engagement metrics for comments, likes, and shares matter more to you because they lead to more post impressions, and in turn, a higher likelihood of attracting new followers. If you are set on driving website traffic, link clicks are your biggest priority, and posting the content type that is driving the most clicks should guide your content strategy.
As your LinkedIn page or profile becomes more mature and you have posted a larger number of posts, compare post performance with larger sample sizes, like batches of 25 or 50 posts to get more accurate A/B test data.
LinkedIn has become a powerful social media marketing channel for increasing brand awareness, and driving customer lead generation for both ecommerce and B2B selling. Apply these social media marketing best practices that have been proven on other platforms to your LinkedIn marketing strategy to turn your LinkedIn company page and profile into a core pillar of your marketing efforts.
Hi, I'm Justin and I write Brand Credential.
I started Brand Credential as a resource to help share expertise from my 10-year brand building journey.
I currently serve as the VP of Marketing for a tech company where I oversee all go-to-market functions. Throughout my career I've helped companies scale revenue to millions of dollars, helped executives build personal brands, and created hundreds of pieces of content since starting to write online in 2012.
As always, thank you so much for reading. If you’d like more personal branding and marketing tips, here are more ways I can help in the meantime:
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