Are you one of the people to whom opening and scrolling through LinkedIn is a part of the working week? Perhaps you, like many others, belong in the group of people silently reading the posts of others, maybe leaving a like or two every now and then, and sometimes even commenting. But why to invest more on LinkedIn than occasional likes and daily scroll through?
Image Credits: Brooke Cagle / Unsplash
Why to be active on LinkedIn?
While many people use LinkedIn mainly as a CV storage, it is a social media platform designed for engagement and content production. Being active on LinkedIn can be beneficial for entrepreneurs looking for new clients as well as to employees, investors and job seekers, but also for everyone who is interested in knowing the trends in their industry, getting interesting, work-related content and information, and having conversations with like-minded people. At its best, LinkedIn is a networking tool and much like in a networking event, you don’t want to be the one standing silently in the back.
By being active, you take most of the benefit out of the platform.
Create your own content
LinkedIn is known to prefer the so-called native content, meaning content provided by the user themselves. Sharing other people’s – or your company’s – posts may feel like an easy enough idea but often it leads to less reach and engagement than native posts. Use the notebook of your phone to write down ideas for future posts whenever they pop into your mind.
Make posting simple
Don’t stress too much about long blog posts you need to have so you can direct people somewhere, or even about visual material. Start with simple text posts instead, or use pictures from your phone. Remember a good tagline to start the post with to caption the reader’s attention – maybe even try to use the hashtag before the content itself to tell your audience what you are talking about – and leave enough white space in the text to make it easy to read. Remember that emojis are allowed!
Post at the right time
Nothing kills motivations to post like content that receives zero reactions. To tackle this, it is important to know your audience and post when they are around to engage with it. Remember that the first hour after your content is being posted is the most important. During this Golden Hour, the algorithm analyzes the engagement of your post and decides whether it is worth showing to more people.
Limit your external links
The algorithm of LinkedIn is built to keep people on the platform. This means that LinkedIn doesn’t much like links taking the user out of the platform. Keep your posts with external links in less than 20% of your content and the algorithm stays on your side.
Be real, interesting and yourself
While many want to keep LinkedIn strictly professional, it doesn’t mean that you can’t show your personality. Bring yourself into your content. Don’t settle with sharing a great company accomplishment without any kind of caption or with something flat. Instead, bring yourself into the post. Why does it matter to you? What is your connection to the achievement? How does it make you feel? Let people see you in the posts and I guarantee, your posts will engage with more people.
And most importantly, just start posting. Once you get over the terror of the first posts, posting gets more natural. Don’t get depressed or give up if some posts don’t work as well as some others – just analyze what went wrong and learn for the future!
