Boost LinkedIn Engagement With These 9 Tips
You’re making good use of your personal page, all of your information is up to date and you have a polished professional headshot for your LinkedIn profile picture.
Now what?
After you’ve got the basics down pat how can you boost LinkedIn engagement?
LinkedIn is currently experiencing strong upwards trends in both user engagement and content engagement making this the perfect time to become more involved on the platform. This article will give you X actionable tactics you can start using today to boost your LinkedIn engagement.
Here are my favorite LinkedIn tips that I share with my clients to use on their personal LinkedIn pages.
1. Implement a Content Strategy
Content marketing has been a bit of a marketing buzzword for a while now, but a content strategy isn’t that difficult to create and follow. On LinkedIn you want your content to accomplish three goals:
- Communicate your brand story and value
- Use keywords to help your rank higher in search results
- Provide value to your audience
That’s it!
The first content that people come across on your LinkedIn page (or when they are searching) is your headline and summary. Your headline acts as your elevator pitch and should instantly hook your reader and make them curious to learn more.
Your summary should clearly state what you do and how you can help. Here are some additional tips for crafting your summary.
- Don’t use acronyms and avoid jargon
- Show off your results (people on LinkedIn love numbers)
- Tell users what makes you different
- Make it skimmable
- Include a call to action
- For the love of God include your contact information and links to your website and other social pages!
Besides your headline and summary, you should be posting relevant, helpful content that your target audience will find useful. If you are an accountant share checklists to help business owners get prepared for tax filings or lists of write-off people may not be familiar with. If you are a lawyer you can share information on what to do after a car accident or an article you wrote that answers common questions clients ask.
Just remember – this is not a sales piece! You should focus on your clients and aim to be genuinely helpful. Social media users can smell content with a lack of empathy a mile away. Overly self-promotey content will not help you boost LinkedIn engagement.
2. Create Your Vanity URL
Did you know that you can get a personalized URL address for your LinkedIn page? Well, you can and you don’t have to be a computer whiz to set it up. Follow these instructions right here.
Now before you set up your customized URL to your name, think about this in terms of what it can do for your SEO. It’s best if your URL meets what I can my URL trifecta: memorable, easy to use, and helps you rank higher.
It’s always a good idea to have a keyword in your URL. A keyword is something your target demographic would type into a search to find you.
A common strategy is to use your name and keyword, such as Matt-Thompson-Attorney or Samantha-Jones-Public-Relations.
This is a great way to help your profile become more search friendly and to be more commonly associated with your keyword, which in turn will help boost your engagement.
Read More: 9 Reasons Your Business Needs an SEO Strategy Now
3. Plan for Mobile Usage
Make sure everything and I do mean everything looks good on desktop as well as mobile. I suggest this for two reasons.
- In 2018 Google rolled out its mobile-first indexing for search results. (Read more about that here.) Why should you care? Because if your LinkedIn content isn’t optimized for mobile you can say bye-bye to having your profile pull up on the first page of a Google search.
- The second reason is 57% of LinkedIn’s traffic is mobile. If your image is cut off or your text is too long people will skip right over your content that you more than likely spent a lot of time to create and post.
It’s always a good idea to check your Linkedin profile on mobile to double-check how things appear on your page.
4. Change Your CTA Button to Follow
Users who come across your profile on LinkedIn are more likely to follow you than to connect with you. Let me break down the difference between a follower and a connection.
Connections are members who have connected via LinkedIn. If you are connected to someone you will both be able to see each other’s shares and updates on your LinkedIn homepages. You can also send messages to your connections on LinkedIn.
Now how does that differ from a follower?
Following someone on LinkedIn allows you to see the person’s posts and articles on your homepage without being connected to them. However, the person you’re following won’t see your posts.
There is a lot of evidence that shows most people are more likely to follow strangers, rather than connect with them. A connection is more personal. Therefore, you can reach a larger audience by switching your CTA button from connecting to follow and allowing others to follow your activity and read what you’re sharing on LinkedIn.
To make the switch you have to use your mobile phone. Open the LinkedIn app > tap your profile picture on the top left > tap settings > scroll down to “Visibility” > scroll down to “Followers” and hit the toggle switch to make follow your primary action when members view your page.
5. Get Recommended
LinkedIn recommendations act as a form of social proof. They tell LinkedIn users that you are who you say you are and establish you are a credible professional. If you don’t have any LinkedIn recommendations on your profile, it’s time to start asking for them.
Reach out to your professional contacts or clients you’ve worked with and ask them to recommend you. To get the most out of your recommendations ask them to highlight a specific detail you’d like to call attention to.
For example; did you save them money, help them improve their employee retention, or get the most for their settlement. Whatever the case may be, recommendations that list a specific accomplishment carry more weight than a general, “Mark was easy to work with” type recommendation.
Aim for 4 to 5 professional recommendations on your page. And don’t worry, if you receive a less than favorable recommendation or one that highlights a service you no longer offer, you can simply delete it from your page.
6. Optimize Your LinkedIn Posts
Every social platform has its own idiosyncrasies that you should be familiar with in order to boost your engagement. LinkedIn posts don’t work the same way as Facebook posts.
While other social media sites are highly visual text-only posts tend to do quite well on LinkedIn. Experiment with some text-only posts and see how they perform for your audience versus an image post. You may be surprised.
LinkedIn gives you 1300 characters for each post BUT the first 2-3 lines are crucial. Everything after these lines is hidden unless the user clicks “see more”.
Your formatting is also important. Use shorter sentences and spacing to break up your posts to make them skimmable and easier to read. No one wants to read a block of text!
One of the biggest mistakes I see people make is including the link in your post. Instead, you should put the link in the first comment below your post. Posts that include the link below in the first comment get up to 3x as many views by some estimates. Talk about a way to boost LinkedIn engagement!
7. Be Social
Hello, it’s social media! Engaging with others on the LinkedIn platform will boost your engagement in two ways:
- You will gain new connections. People outside of your network will see your engagement (unless you turned that off in your privacy settings). If you provide a powerful or thought-provoking comment on someone else’s post it could lead to more followers or connections.
- People love to reciprocate. The more you like and comment on other people’s material the more they will do the same for you.
This doesn’t have to take a lot of time. If you spend just ten minutes a day engaging meaningfully on the platform, I promise you will see a difference.
Social networking is all about being social. If people see you on LinkedIn as someone who is solely there for sales they are less likely to engage with you.
8. Be Consistent
It’s important to be consistent with your engagement and posting on LinkedIn. The LinkedIn algorithm rewards users who use the platform consistently, i.e your posts will be served to users more frequently the more you post and engage on the platform.
Everyone can agree that consistency is key but the next point is where opinions get a little divided. So how often should you post?
If you are posting on a personal profile some experts suggest posting once or twice a day. A company page typically has more posts than a personal profile. The problem I have with this advice is that when I see my clients try to post twice a day or even once a day the quality of their posts goes down. It’s difficult to create that much high-quality content on a regular basis. Trust me, I know!
What I would recommend is posting three times a week and making sure that you are sharing high quality, helpful content with your audience rather than posting for posting sake.
As a general rule of thumb, I see posts that are posted between 10 am and 11 am perform the best, and Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays are generally good days to post. Experiment with these times and days and see if that works well for your audience.
9. Use Native Video
If you’ve already implemented all the other tactics I’ve listed here, I’ve got one more tip to share. Are you using native video on LinkedIn?
Video marketing has been around for a while. 84% of buyers reported that a video helped convenience them to make a purchase. The right type of video can help increase engagement and increase sales at the same time.
Undeniably the trend is toward mobile-focused video formats. If you’re wondering what does that mean, simply put we are talking about vertical video here.
Native video on LinkedIn is relatively new. There are still only a handful of places you can use video on LinkedIn.
- You can include a video in a blog post that has been uploaded through Publisher.
- You can share a video directly in your feed.
LinkedIn allows you to record and share a video you’ve created straight from your phone so you don’t need any fancy equipment to get started. Your phone, a tripod, a light, and a microphone are all you need to create top-notch videos.
Once you post a video you can take a look at the analytics to see how your video is being recieved. You can find these audience insights in the dashboard section of your LinkedIn profile on both mobile and desktop.
All you have to do is click the drop-down that says “Me” and scroll down until you see “Posts and Activity.”
Use These Tips to Boost Your Engagement Today
So there you have it. Some of my top tips to boost LinkedIn engagement. Remember, LinkedIn its own unique and special unicorn of a platform and should be treated as such if you want to get the best results.
Which tip was your favorite? Leave a comment below and let me know. Have a question about LinkedIn or social media? Shoot me an email and let’s talk.
