LinkedIn slips in updates to the platform that you don’t know about until you’ve gone to take an action and realize it has changed. In 2021, LinkedIn added some features that help your posts get seen by the right people if you know where to find them.
Creating posts on LinkedIn should be meant to improve or increase your visibility. In my article 5 Simple Ways to Showcase Your Expertise on LinkedIn, I stress that a LinkedIn Marketing Strategy Includes two key components: first, you want to post content. Content builds your brand.
Second, engagement builds influence. If you aren’t building influence ask yourself these questions, do you have a lot of connections, but not a lot of revenue? And do you struggle with knowing who to engage with or how to get others to engage with your content?
1. Starting a post
The Home tab is where you start any post. Within start a post, you can now select to the right of your photo from a drop down the location you want your post to go. You may be in a group or have a company page and you can ‘choose’ the location for your post.
Second, to the right of your location button you choose WHO you want to see your post.
From the dropdown menu you choose from the options shown in the image below:
It is important to check these settings before you post because if you change a setting, I have noticed it stays in the previous location unless you change the location and who sees the post.
2. Choose the type of post
LinkedIn now offers many ways to post content to your network. Think quality before creating a post because quality is the most important factor in getting your content seen, read and engaged with.
Think before you post by referring to the questions I mention earlier in this article and consider these:
- What is the intent of my post
- Who do I want to influence
- Is my post written to engage the reader? Your goal is to gain comments
- Is the post interesting and/or does it add value to the reader?
You can choose from any of these post styles:
When choosing the post style keep in mind some styles are more favored by the LinkedIn algorithm
than others. As of this writing, document posts are generating more views followed by image and video posts. Worst post to get reach in the newsfeed is an article with an outbound link. LinkedIn simply doesn’t want you sending people off their site.
- Image (you have editing tools now for your images)
- Video
- Document
- Share that you’re hiring
- Celebrate an occasion (add a team member, give kudos, share a project milestone, work anniversary or new position)
- Create a poll
- Write an article
Best time of day to post is between 8:00am – 11:00am in your time zone.
3. Add hashtags
Adding hashtags identifies what the post I about. Hashtags have become important to your content being seen and found in a search.
You want to research your hashtags prior to choosing them. I suggest creating a spread sheet with the top hashtags for your content. From the search bar on the navigation bar you can enter #word
to start the research.
I recommend using hashtags with at least 100K followers. This will expand the reach of your posts.
The ideal number of hashtags is 3 per post. According to a fellow LinkedIn trainer whose research suggests if you use less than 3 hashtags in your posts, you reduce reach by 40%. If you use more than 5, reach reduces by 20%; and more than 9 hashtags reduces by 35%.
4. Check your post analytics
You can view analytics for your posts, shared posts, and published articles to gain insights on the impact of your content within your LinkedIn network.
To locate post or article analytics:
- Click the Me icon at the top of your LinkedIn homepage.
- Under MANAGE, click Posts & Activity.
- Locate the specific post or article you’d like more details on. (See image below)
- Click the Analytics icon below your post or article, you will see the number of views next to that
Notes:
- Only you can view your article or post analytics.
- Your post analytics are available for 60 days from creation.
- Your article analytics are available for two years from creation.
- At this time, you can only view analytics for individual articles. You can’t view overall analytics for all your articles.
- Your posts and articles will display a detailed breakdown of the analytics only when ten or more unique viewers have viewed them. Edits you make to an article won’t affect its stats. If you edit an article you’ve already published, the analytics from before your edit will also be included. Stats associated with an article is removed when you delete an article.
- To protect member privacy, the analytics breakdown won’t be available for content you share with only your connections or in LinkedIn Groups.
- The analytics breakdown displays non-unique views.
- Video views are defined by the number of times your video post was viewed for three seconds or more.
I also use a tool called Shield App Analytics which give me deeper analytics into my posts. If LinkedIn is your primary social media tool, I highly recommend you sign up for this tool.
FINAL TIPS FOR POSTING
Always create high quality content, focus on getting engagement within the first 3 hours of posting, this increases the reach out to your network. Test content styles and see what people start to resonate with and finally engage with other people’s content, because then they will in turn engage with yours.
-> Learn how to create a better content marketing strategy for LinkedIn
4 Responses
Thanks for confirming the ideal number of hashtags, JoAnne. I see posts with enough hashtags to make the eye hurt. My latest update had 3 hashtags and I gave my own perspective before sharing an article that I knew would be of interest to my target audience if LI showed it to them. I even got a reshare!
I’ve noticed reducing the frequency of posting per week also improves the reach of the post. Does it mean the reach of previous posts goes down when we post new updates?
Hi Vatsala, thanks for the comment. YES the reach of the current post reach will decline with a new post. I would wait to post something new until you think the previous post as ‘run its course’ with comments, likes etc.
Dear Joanne, thanks for sharing these tips. My company has been selected to participate in a a prestigious program by the World Economic Forum. Now I wonder what I should do to reach the highest number of people:
A. Create a company post with the media (image etc) provided by the WEF on my company account
B. Create a personal post with the media image provided by the WEF on my personal account
C. Reshare the WEF announcement as my company
D. Reshare the WEF announcement as myself
Lisa, I would suggest B