Now that you have your “wow” worthy profile its time to get active and reach the 600+ million LinkedIn users worldwide. Fortunately for you, with only 1% of LinkedIn’s user post content monthly you have the perfect opportunity to stand out from your peers. Like many LinkedIn users, you might struggle with figuring out how to start brainstorming and creating fresh and consistent content. Here are a few tips to get started.
Determine Your Purpose and Audience
Does it feel like you have read that before? Just like when you set up your profile, you must first determine the purpose and desired audience of your content. Are you wanting to reach potential customers or potential employers? Are you hoping to connect with industry peers or internship seeking college students? Knowing this will help brainstorm the goals and messaging of your posts. Look at the table below for ideas to get started:
| Targeted Audience | Post Topics |
| Potential Employers | Branding Yourself – accomplishments, certifications, personal stories |
| Potential Employees / Students | Branding Your Company – job postings, employee success stories, company culture |
| Potential Customers | Branding Your Product – benefits, new features, open-ended questions, market research |
| Industry Peers | Industry Expert – relevant articles, solutions, new developments |
Tell Personal Stories
Most LinkedIn users hit “writer’s block” when it comes time to actually create content. Many cannot figure where to find inspiration or what advice to give. A great place to start is yourself! Telling personal stories is an easy way to connect with your audience over relatable experiences. These stories do not have to be limited to purely business experiences either, write about your recent encounter with a coffee shop barista, last time shopping at the department store, or a childhood story. The key is to set the situation so it is relatable to the audience, tell a compelling plot that keeps the reader engaged, and then finish with a helpful takeaway.
The Comeback of Text
If you have read any advice on social media marketing over the past decade you have probably heard that a long-standing “best practice” is to always include photos and videos in every post. This strategy achieves the goal of capturing more screen space, but its overuse has caused oversaturation and readers to become numb to these style posts. One way to counter this strategy is by doing just the opposite and creating text-based only posts. A recent report found text-based posts received more likes, comments, and views than other traditional forms of LinkedIn content. Worried about these posts getting lost in the clutter? Get creative by using spaced out lines, emoji bullets, and bold letters to help your post stand out from others while still capturing lots of screen space. Look below for a great example.
Finish with a Question
The best way to end a post is to let the reader finish it for you. By finishing posts with an open-ended question, it achieves two things. First, it creates an opportunity for the audience to engage with the post and drive conversations. This should be a goal of any post and will help you build deeper connections with your audience over the long run. Secondly, this method takes advantage of LinkedIn’s points system. To determine which posts to show on a feed, one algorithm that LinkedIn uses is a points system that awards 1 point for every like, two points for every comment, and 3 points for every share. By asking questions and encouraging readers to comment, LinkedIn will award your post a very high score that will help your post appear on more feeds and reach a larger audience. Remember, that this is only one part of the algorithm and many more aspects are considered such as post consistency, user popularity, time of post, etc.
Now get out there this week and start posting. It might be challenging at first but don’t let that discourage you. Remember, everyone has to start somewhere!