Best practices for sharing content on LinkedIn

If you’re in B2B marketing, you’ll naturally understand the importance of creating great content. But great content will only be seen and shared if you distribute it effectively. Here are some best practices for sharing content on LinkedIn.

Social media allows you to share your website content, whitepapers and blog posts with your followers, followers, and millions of more individuals across their platform.

While Facebook and Twitter have a casual, social networking approach, don’t forget that LinkedIn is a professional social media platform. It’s okay to be conversational, but the content on your company page should align with your brand and company values.

Think about LinkedIn as more of a thought leadership platform. The content on your LinkedIn page should be about your organization or industry.

Try not to over-promote

“The Content Marketing Institute promotes the 80/20 rule: 80 per cent of your content should be about your customers, and promotional material should be limited to 20 per cent. Most posts should provide your customers with useful information to help them solve problems and address pain points. Blogs, videos and case studies are great ways your business can distribute useful content,” advises Jackie Fedeli in a SharpSpring article.

You are demonstrating thought leadership and stopping propaganda by providing high-quality content about your organization or sharing industry knowledge.

Some examples of promotional posts could be:

• Awards and recognitions
• New business acquisitions or partnerships
• Upcoming or recent speaking engagements
• Trade shows or events that your business will be attending
• Press releases

Post a mix of content related to your company’s unique service or product offering and limit the overly promotional content.

LinkedIn is a unique space for networking and sharing high-quality content. It doesn’t necessarily need to be your content, either. If you come across content from a credible source that relates to the industry you serve or your customers, share it!

Such content is also fitting for personal LinkedIn profiles. You can use a service like Sociabble or Bambu to encourage your employees to share the articles, videos and blog posts on their personal profiles.

Using hashtags on LinkedIn

Fedeli shares her expertise on hashtags: “Hashtags are like your keywords. You want to include the relevant terms in your post, but you don’t want to go overboard. Think of it like SEO; keyword stuffing causes posts to look spammy and unprofessional. The same may be said about hashtags.”

“The social media management platform, Hootsuite, suggests a maximum of five per post. Try to work one or two hashtags into the copy of your post and put the rest at the end. If you can’t fit them, putting them all, in the end, is okay. Don’t cram in a hashtag if it doesn’t fit. Remember: Avoid keyword stuffing,” shares Fedeli. It’s common knowledge that overdoing it is penalized by the algorithm.

“Once you have hashtags in mind, search those hashtags on LinkedIn and confirm they are existing hashtags that hold your intended meaning. An acronym in your business or industry could also be used by another type of organization with a completely different meaning. Pay attention to the type of content that is trending with that hashtag. If it doesn’t match your type of content, choose something more relevant.

“The goal is to use a hashtag that is popular or has an established following to increase the visibility of your post, but there is no rule against creating your own if you want to start a trend.

“If you are holding a large event, such as a conference, and you’re expecting several posts regarding the event, consider a tag with the conference name and year and include it in posts regarding the event. If other businesses participate in the event, ask them to use the hashtag in their posts. Keep an eye on this hashtag to see what followers and attendees have to say.”

When do I post on LinkedIn?

Let’s imagine that you want to promote an upcoming webinar. It’s okay to promote your webinar with multiple different posts. Craft a series of posts with relevant hashtags and custom images to promote the webinar (remember to include the registration link!).

It is a good idea to post each of these on different days of the week and at different times of the day to reach different audiences. Spreading posts out also allows you to mix in other content so visitors to your page will not see a string of posts promoting the same event.

There are a lot of articles online that claim to have researched the best times to post to LinkedIn. One school of thought is that because it was a business-related platform, posted during business hours. But there’s no hard and fast rule on timing that applies to every campaign and every piece of content. Using a one-size-fits-all approach hasn’t ever helped anyone, really.

You’ll find hundreds of articles that suggest the best times to post, but if all marketers follow those, your posts will only get lost in an ocean of posts, competing with each other for attention.

A curated and measured approach is most effective, and you can achieve this by looking a little closer at your analytics.

Targeting your audience

There are a staggering 630 million profiles on LinkedIn, so targeting your audience makes a lot of sense if you use LinkedIn ads. Considering the number of senior-level decision-makers on LinkedIn (currently about 180 million), it can be a great space to market your B2B products and/or services.

LinkedIn targeting allows you to reach specific audiences and filter out those you don’t. For example, if you produce content in English and Spanish, you can target each piece separately to users based on their preferred language.

There are many more targeting options if you want to reach organizations based on size, industry or an individual based on job function. If you are a B2B food ingredients company, targeting your posts in the food production industry may be worthwhile.

“One caveat to targeting is that it is a filter and applying too many can narrow your audience more than intended. It may be a good idea to choose between industry and job function rather than selecting categories in both – unless your content is very specific,” warns Fedeli.

Showcase pages

Fedeli adds, “If your organization is large and works with a variety of different types of businesses, has multiple lines of business, or a separately branded division, you may want to consider creating LinkedIn Showcase pages for those segments. This allows users to follow the pages and content most relevant to them.

“If you decide to set up Showcase pages for product lines or business segments, you won’t necessarily need to target these pages because they already have a specialized audience.”

Employees as social media marketers

Having employees linked to your profile establishes credibility for your business. Encourage your employees to join LinkedIn and list your company as their current employer if they have not already done so. Help your employees get started by hosting a LinkedIn lunch and learn. Make sure they know the basics of LinkedIn and how important they are to your LinkedIn marketing strategy by encouraging them to engage with your posts.

“A recent LinkedIn blog post says that only 3 per cent of employees share company content, but they generate 30 per cent of all content engagement for a typical business. When employees share your content, it is visible to their network, and if their network engages with the content, it can potentially reach their connection’s networks,” says Fedeli. That’s the point of networking, right?

Human experiences perform well

Fedeli says, “In my experience, posts showcasing pictures of the organisation’s people get more likes than articles. If you host a company-wide team building or charitable event, share pictures with your followers. Your employees are likelier to share images they can relate to.”

Some things to remember

LinkedIn is fast becoming THE online business tool for B2B marketers.

To make the most out of this social platform, remember to:

• Utilize LinkedIn best practices
• Develop connections with your profile and share and target content via your company’s page.
• Connect with employees and let them be your advocates.

And don’t forget, just like SEO, social media best practices change over time, so be sure to stay up to date with the latest trends to keep your LinkedIn marketing strategy relevant.

If you need any help with content creation, marketing or social media management, the team at BBN can help!