Tips to Improve Your LinkedIn Posts

LinkedIn has a tendency to be overshadowed by social media giants Facebook and Twitter however, for B2B marketers, LinkedIn's long-form publishing platform is a powerful tool. When it comes to thought leadership, LinkedIn is second to none - there are now more than one million posts published on the platform. Publishing articles on LinkedIn is easy, but getting your content read and driving traffic to your website is another thing. To find out what words or topics perform best on LinkedIn, Percolate, a web and mobile marketing software company, recently published a analysis of some of the top performing LinkedIn content. So, before you sit down and write your first post, take a look at what has been successful in the past.

• Career management is one of the most popular LinkedIn post categories – nearly 20 percent of the top posts focus on career tips and paths – with articles such as “When it is the Best Time to Change Careers.”
• Workplace psychology articles focused on empathy, personal productivity and conflict resolution in the office, on average, see close to 240,000 views.
• Talent management and leadership were also top performing categories garnering 16 percent and 14 percent respectively.

Tips for your headlines:

• Articles with headlines containing the words, “Who,” “What,” “Where,” “When,” “Why,” or “How” made up 28 percent of the top long-form posts.
• Not surprising, listicle-style headlines and content, made popular by BuzzFeed, continue to draw readers as 20 percent of the top posts explained “8 Ways to__________” [be creative and fill in the blank!]
• Personalized headline with either “You” or “Your” get more eyeballs.

(For more headlines tips, you can read one of my previous blog posts)

One other tip from InkHouse: before you hit publish, you need to select three tags for your post. To increase the odds of your post being pulled into LinkedIn Pulse, its news curation site/app, select the highest-level tags that apply to your content, rather than niche ones. These should automatically pop up as you type. Also, once your post is live, be sure to link to it from your company's LinkedIn page.
Wondering if you are influential enough to get read? Note that, though LinkedIn runs a program of elite “Influencers” (roughly 500 thought leader participants), over half of the top posts analyzed in Percolate's report were written by "non-influencers". So it is possible to get eyeballs on your content without the "official" influencer status.

You can download the entire report here.