LinkedIN – Simple Next Steps For Reaching Your Target Audience

Is LinkedIn part of your 2016 growth plan – I hope so…!!

When LinkedIn announced they’d be opening up their publishing platform, Pulse, to the public in February 2014, the professional network suddenly turned into a more interesting destination for marketers to explore.

Well, while many were quick to see results from the new platform, others felt hesitant about whether or not they should give it a go. And without a clear formula for how to approach the unfamiliar territory, many continue to remain sidelined today.

For this reason, I believe today’s message will be highly valuable for those of you who are stuck on the fence and do not know how to proceed.

Just know, new concepts can be challenging or even overwhelming. If you have questions, reach our to one of our trusted advisors – We would be happy to answer questions and simplify your journey.

So, here you go…

How to Post on LinkedIn Pulse

Step 1) Explore the platform first.

Before you dive into a post, it’s important to note that LinkedIn’s publishing platform is a little different than your company blog. The audience, the tone, and the overall lay of the land are unique to LinkedIn.

What does the lay of the land look like, then? In a SlideShare announcing the publishing platform’s launch, LinkedIn described themselves as “the working world in one place.” They wrote, “LinkedIn has millions of executives, entrepreneurs, entry-level, workers, and people about to retire.” While this sounds like a valuable audience to tap into, you’ll want to be sure that it aligns with your company’s buyer persona — otherwise, it’s not worth publishing there.

Once you figure out if you should be publishing on LinkedIn, it’s time to learn how to post on LinkedIn Pulse successfully. Here are a few, according to LinkedIn:

• Write about areas in which you have an expertise.
• Keep your writing focused. Avoid covering too many topics in the same post.
• Keep your voice authentic.
• Don’t shy away from expressing your opinion. However, keep your long-form posts appropriate for the LinkedIn audience. Don’t post anything obscene, shocking, hateful, intimidating, or otherwise unprofessional.
• Publish whenever you have something valuable to share with LinkedIn members. In general, the more long-form posts you publish, the more credibility you will build, and the stronger your professional profile will become.
• There are no limits on word count, but the long-form posts that are best received are more than three paragraphs.
• Upload pictures, videos, presentations, and documents to add to your content. It helps bring your insights to life and is a good way to showcase concrete examples of your experience.
• Use the share box on your homepage to share short-form thoughts, questions, and other media such as articles and images.
• Have colleagues, friends, or family members review and edit your long-form posts.

Step 2) Hone in on a specific topic.

A LinkedIn post shouldn’t take readers here, there, and everywhere. And in terms of cutting through content saturation, your best bet is to cover one topic — and cover it better than anyone else.

To shed some light on the power of specificity, let’s turn to a series of tests that Marketing Experiments conducted for an online dental company to determine if minor changes could significantly impact response rates. In these tests, they explored six headlines representing non-specific, semi-specific, and super specific topics:

1. (The Control)
2. “Dental Plans for $8.33 a Month. Acceptance Guaranteed.”
3. “Over 55,000 Dental Care Providers. Acceptance Guaranteed.”
4. “Dental Care Coverage. Best Price Guaranteed.”
5. “Low Cost Dental Care for the Uninsured”
6. “Best Price Dental Care – Without Insurance.”

The results?

Landing Page Headline: Impact on Conversion Rate
Headline	Impact on Overall Conversion
Headline 1	-5.68%
Headline 2	72.76%
Headline 3	26.41%
Headline 4	-68.43%
Headline 5	-20.44%
Headline 6	-5.11%

Interestingly enough, the only two headlines that contributed to a positive impact on overall conversions were the ones that included specific numbers: “Dental Plans for $8.33 a Month. Acceptance Guaranteed.” and “Over 55,000 Dental Care Providers. Acceptance Guaranteed.”

The takeaway? People like specificity.

While it’s clear that specificity contributes to the attractiveness of a headline, getting comfortable with this concept of “Zooming In” on ultra-specific topics can take some getting used to. To help you get started, take a look at how this initial idea was transformed into something specific enough to stand out in a sea of sameness:

• Start here: The Top 10 Business Blogging Best Practices
• Take it to here: How to Write Blog Titles That Actually Get Clicked
• Then try this: How Using Verbs in Blog Titles Helped Us Generate X% More Clicks

Sure, it’s not the easiest route to take, but after seeing the results of the Marketing Experiments study, it’s clear that the potential payoff is much greater.

Step 3) Choose your title wisely.

Aside from specificity, the structure of your title has a lot to due with the success of your post.

The beauty of LinkedIn publishing is that every time you publish a post, your connections receive a notification in real time. This notification contains the title of your post, and the title of your post only. In other words, if the title you employ doesn’t dazzle them, the notification will go unnoticed.

To fully maximize the potential of this notification, we dug into some data from Noah Kagan and Search Wilderness. The data, based on an analysis of over 3,00 of the most successful blog posts on the platform, was conducted in an effort to generate some insights regarding what makes a post successful.

In terms of titles, here’s what Kagan found:

Titles That Work Best on LinkedIn Pulse

1) How-To Posts

How-to posts perform best for post views, likes, comments, and shares than any other post type. On average, these posts had 22,368 LinkedIn views.

2) Listicles

List posts perform well, getting slightly more post views, likes, comments, and shares than non-list posts. On average, these posts had 16,364 LinkedIn views.

Titles That Don’t Work As Well on LinkedIn Pulse

Question Posts

Posts where the headline poses a question (like “Why Publish on LinkedIn?”) perform poorly across the board in terms of LinkedIn publishing metrics. On average, these posts had 13,832 LinkedIn views.

Step 4) Add visuals.

Just because LinkedIn is a professional network doesn’t mean everything has to be buttoned up and text-only. People like pictures and visual examples. Including them your posts will not only help you to reinforce your points, but it’ll also help to break up long blocks of text.

But before you go sprinkling visuals through out your posts, it’s important to be mindful of how you’re using them.

According to Kagan, you should aim to have at least one image in your post — but if you can include eight images in your post, even better. Kagan found that including eight images in one blog post is associated with a greater number of LinkedIn shares, likes, comments, and views.

What about multimedia assets like SlideShares and videos? Kagan’s data revealed that the inclusion of multimedia assets is actually associated with fewer post views. If you’re going to include them anyway, be selective. While posts with one multimedia embedded generated just under 15K views, posts with three multimedia embeds dropped down to just under 8K views.

Step 5) Pay attention to when you publish.

Being aware that LinkedIn is geared towards business professionals, you want to be sure that your schedule aligns with business professionals’ LinkedIn usage patterns.

Take a moment to put yourself in the shoes of these business professionals — your potential readers. You probably wouldn’t want to publish a post on Monday morning, as many of them are just making their way back into the office to catch up on emails and work from the weekend. You also probably wouldn’t want to publish a post on Friday afternoon, as people are busy winding down on projects and prepping for the weekend.

The takeaway here? To increase the visibility of your posts, you’ll need to identify the times in which people are most active on the platform. According to Kagan’s research, posts published on Thursdays saw the highest average total views (19,164), followed by Sundays (18,219).

While you’ll want to experiment with different publish times and days to gauge the way your audience responds, this data should serve as a baseline to get you started.

Ready to Get Started?

If you’re looking for a little inspiration before you start whipping up your first LinkedIn Pulse post, we’d recommend checking out the “Top Posts” section of Pulse. To get there, click on “Top Posts” from the main Pulse menu in the upper left-hand corner.

Just remember – It is all the little “things” which truly make you and your business successful.

If you have questions regarding your 2016 marketing initiatives, JUST ASK..!!

We would be happy to help!

Contact us today to receive your FREE Digital Footprint Analysis Report – 800-234-1522 or support@m2dmg.com

Until next time…