3 Ways to Incorporate LinkedIn Into Your Content Marketing Strategy

B2B marketing strategies can no longer afford to leave out LinkedIn. In 2015, LinkedIn reported that 13% of their users did not have a Facebook account and 59% of their users were not active on Twitter, making LinkedIn an oft-overlooked opportunity for marketers to reach audiences they may be missing on other platforms. Additionally, 50% percent of LinkedIn users spent more than two hours a week on the site. If you already have a B2B-focused content marketing strategy created for 2016, consider adding LinkedIn to the mix with the following tactics.

Revamp Your Company Page

Brush off the dust and look at your company page with a new set of eyes. In addition to posting company news, determine what types of content would be relevant to your users and add that content to the mix. Initially, it may be a bit hard to gauge which content will be of the greatest interest to your audience, but a little informal competitive analysis can solve this problem. Take a look at a competitor who is getting good engagement on their page and ask the following questions:

• What are they posting? How much engagement do they get on each post?
• What ratio of content are they using (i.e. 50% blog posts from their website, 30% company news, 20% links from reputable industry sources?)
• How often are they posting?

After analyzing one or two competitors, figure out what mix of content works best for you. Most importantly, make sure you have a strategy before diving in to any content creation. As with any marketing activity, progress can only be measured after consistently efforts have been made. So, make sure to get your team on a regular posting schedule and keep the cobwebs off that page!

Repurpose Content

LinkedIn content doesn’t need to be boring. Instead of just linking to the latest company whitepaper, shake things up a bit by including an infographic. Visual components should not be underrated when using LinkedIn. In fact, image posts result in a 98% higher comment rate than posts that do not contain an image. Additionally, SlideShare posts have become an increasingly popular and engaging way to disseminating otherwise mundane information.  And the data explains way: people are five times more likely to engage with these posts than traditional presentations and documents.

When in Doubt, Measure

If you’re looking to benchmark you efforts, conduct monthly audits. Start by taking a look at the following metrics:

• Engagement rate: An engagement rate is simply the collective number of likes, comments and shares on your posts divided by the number of followers you have. According to Forrester’s study of the top 50 global brands, this number will be .05% on average.
• Most Engaged Posts: For this, we typically like to look at the posts that had the highest engagement and drove the most traffic to the website. Once you figure out which post this was, determine why those posts performed well. Was it the call-to-action? Or an different image? After forming an hypothesis, make sure to test it out and integrate it into your content for the next month.

We hope these tips are helpful. In our next blog post, we’ll discuss how to use LinkedIn to generate leads for your B2B company.