There’s no question – LinkedIn has become a platform ripe for marketing and branding. Social media analytics platform Zavy has the expert’s guide to upping your marketing game and getting onboard the LinkedIn train.
Long gone are the days when LinkedIn was purely for corporate schmoozing. With 800 million users across 200+ countries, including 14.2 million across Australia and New Zealand, the world’s largest professional network is a massively useful tool for any marketer worth their salt – outperforming popular platforms like Facebook and Instagram in several important ways.
- LinkedIn marketing has a conversion rate of 2.74 per cent – nearly three times (277 per cent) the rate of Facebook or Twitter.
- 77 per cent of content marketers listed LinkedIn as the best-performing social media channel for organic reach.
- Active LinkedIn sessions grew by 22 per cent in Q1 of 2022, a sign that users are trending towards more engagement with the platform.
It’s clear – if LinkedIn isn’t part of your social media stack, it’s time to get started.
Here are six top tips for building your brand on LinkedIn – including how to understand the analytics and measure your success.
1. Use polls to ask your audience questions
Interested to know what followers think of your latest product ideas, the types of content they engage with most, or their biggest pain points? Boost engagement and find answers to strategy-shaping questions with a LinkedIn poll.
2. Boost engagement with PDF carousel posts
PDF slideshows are a powerful LinkedIn strategy to share engaging brand information with followers in a convenient, easy-to-swipe format. From your latest product update to your business’s take on a new industry trend, the visual nature of carousels makes this information far more interesting than plain text.
3. Tell a compelling story
To keep users reading, that first sentence or two needs to pack a punch. Try starting with a question, ‘set the scene’ or provide context for why your followers should care about your brand. It’s worth remembering that only the first 200 characters of your post will be visible before the ‘See More’ CTA kicks in.
4. Make your posts scannable and succinct
Dense, long paragraphs are tough for users to read, so stick to a max of two sentences per paragraph. If you’re struggling to communicate your thoughts in a concise way, consider whether a LinkedIn Article could be a better option.
5. Test placing links in comments to increase your reach
The LinkedIn algorithm de-prioritises posts that contain external links. Avoid placing links within the posts themselves. One common LinkedIn strategy is to drop any relevant links within a comment section; just make sure to include a CTA in your post so followers know where to look!
6. Measure your success
A social media strategy is only as good as its analytics – how else can you understand what impact your content is having over time?
The LinkedIn platform provides some limited content metrics such as number of impressions, clicks, click-through rate and engagement rate – but these don’t provide good insight into how your audience feels about your content, what is driving growth and how your brand is performing compared to the others on the platform.
What’s the solution? Analysing sentiment.
You can manually calculate sentiment by adding up all the positive comments and reactions on your posts and subtracting the negative ones to give you a ‘net sentiment’ value – a pretty time-consuming affair if you ask us!
Or, you could use a tool like Zavy, which uses AI to calculate net sentiment for each of your posts for you – so you can spend less time adding and subtracting and more time doing using those insights to engage your audience!
Alternatively, you can use a tool like Zavy, which uses AI to calculate net sentiment for each of your posts for you – so you can spend less time adding and subtracting and more time doing using those insights to engage your audience!
Zavy can help you measure success on LinkedIn in a couple of different ways.
Pinpoint what posts are driving engagement and positive sentiment
Aside from highlighting whether your content has performed well based on an engagement rate (a weighted metric that considers the number of likes, comments and shares your content has received), LinkedIn doesn’t help you understand why it might have done well.
The Zavy Map dashboard lets you see exactly how each of your posts are performing across both engagement and net sentiment dimensions.
You can also see your brand through the eyes of your audience, by viewing the net sentiment for your brand overall.
With a grasp on which posts have high engagement, plus high net sentiment, you can make better judgments about what type of content to continue with – and what type of content might be worth retiring.
Understand your brand’s health with a single metric
The Zavy Score is a weighted metric which gives you a top-level view of how strong your brand is on LinkedIn, taking into consideration how other brands are performing. It’s a score you can use to compare your own performance on LinkedIn over time and how you are performing relative to other brands.
The higher the score the better – and the more confident you can be that your brand is standing out on the platform.
You can track it daily or over any specified timeframe to uncover trends and see how your social media marketing is paying off.
LinkedIn joins Zavy’s line-up of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube insights to form a formidable social media analytics stack. Get in touch with Zavy to find out more or to book a demo.
