While LinkedIn is a great place to connect with others in your space and share your unique perspective on industry problems, engagement isn’t always guaranteed. Because the platform boasts over 930 million members, if you aren’t being intentional about your LinkedIn strategy, your content may not even get noticed.
However, if you’re looking to seriously up your LinkedIn game and give your engagement a major boost, consider the following advice from the members of Young Entrepreneur Council. Here, they outline nine steps any professional can take to increase engagement with their content and why these methods work so well.
1. Start Engaging Back
Giving value in posts is an obvious one, but I think you have to go the extra mile and engage with others. A lot of great conversations happen in the comments on LinkedIn. So zero in on a target audience, follow their posts and jump in to reply and keep the conversation going. Over time, that will help migrate more people to your content. – Sean Ogle, Location Rebel
2. Share Thought-Provoking, Actionable Content
Make your posts engaging—whether that means asking thought-provoking questions, sharing unpopular opinions, encouraging actionable insights or utilizing multimedia content. All of these ultimately lead to getting people to do something. Your unpopular opinion triggers some emotion or your thought-provoking question helps them realize something. People are encouraged to leave a comment and answer back about whether they agree or not. – Samuel Thimothy, OneIMS
3. Promote Across Other Channels
Relying solely on engagement from within LinkedIn limits the potential of your reach. Instead, find ways to promote your content across other channels to bring more eyeballs from outside of LinkedIn. This should organically boost your content distribution within LinkedIn as well, since the outside engagement you bring increases your content’s popularity and rating within LinkedIn’s recommendation algorithm. – Firas Kittaneh, Amerisleep Mattress
4. Get To Know Your Audience’s Preferences
Knowing your audience and tailoring your content to their preferences helps boost engagement and enables you to get more traction. Before connecting with others on the platform, it’s essential that you do your homework and know what excites your target audience in order to successfully grab their attention and increase the likelihood of getting an ideal response. Since you cover topics that excite the intended audience and talk about the happenings in your respective industry that people wouldn’t want to miss out on, you’re likely to get more eyeballs as your content will stand out from the rest of the crowd. – Stephanie Wells, Formidable Forms
5. Inject Humor Or Wit
If you want to stand out from the crowd and grab people’s attention, you need to use humor or wit in your posts. Think about it: There are millions of posts on LinkedIn, all vying for attention. How many of them are actually funny or clever? Not many. By injecting some humor or wit into your content, you’ll not only make people laugh, but you’ll also create an emotional connection with your audience. When people feel connected to you, they’re more likely to engage with your content and share it with others. So go ahead, make a joke or tell a funny story—your followers will thank you for it! – Abhijeet Kaldate, Astra WordPress Theme
6. Join Relevant Industry Communities
One of the best ways to increase your engagement on LinkedIn is to join relevant groups that are centered around your industry. After joining a few active communities, start sharing your thoughts and engaging with other people’s posts. You’ll find that before long, you’ll connect with people who share your passion, interests and vision. I believe this strategy works well because people like talking with others about the things that get them excited. – Chris Christoff, MonsterInsights
7. Experiment With Various Formats And Styles
To expand your content mix, experiment and play around with different formats and styles. LinkedIn offers a variety of tools and techniques to increase your engagement—make use of it. LinkedIn is about educating, communicating and adding value to your followers’ lives. Play around with LinkedIn’s different content mix options. Make a static post, educate in a video, become relatable with GIFs, inform with text-only captions, take opinions with polls and offer suggestions or recommendations with questions and answers. Use A/B testing to compare the performance of different strategies. Play around with your content mix to reach and connect with a broader market. Remember to keep a level of consistency between cross-posted content so that your content is recognizable and valuable. – Candice Georgiadis, Digital Day
8. Incorporate User-Generated Content
User-generated content (UGC) can play a huge role in boosting engagement. UGC is original, brand-specific content that was first created by customers. It includes images, videos, reviews, testimonials and more. An unboxing video of your product a customer has shared on social media, for example, is a great piece of content for your brand. You’ve not asked for it; they decided all on their own that your product was so valuable that they wished to share it with their audience. Authenticity and consistency should be the cornerstones of any company’s content strategy. Incorporate user-generated content into your content calendar regularly, along with your own original content that answers your audience’s biggest questions and challenges, and your engagement will increase considerably over time. – Blair Thomas, eMerchantBroker
9. Stay Consistent
The key to getting more engagement on LinkedIn is consistent activity. Of course, quality counts as well, and you want to share content that is helpful and interesting to your audience. However, many LinkedIn accounts only post occasionally and seldom engage with anyone else’s posts. Liking, sharing and leaving a brief comment on someone else’s post, video or article only takes a few seconds and it helps draw attention to your own profile. Do this in an authentic way, engaging with posts you truly find valuable. Owners and managers may want to assign a qualified employee, member of the social media team or virtual assistant to LinkedIn if they are too busy to give it sufficient attention on a daily basis. – Kalin Kassabov, ProTexting
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