Content marketers know that feeding the content beast isn't easy, especially if you're a solo entrepreneur or part of a small team.
If you want to follow that old adage "work smarter not harder," LinkedIn recently released some data you'll want to pay heed to, which underscores the SEO value in publishing long-form content on LinkedIn.
As explained by LinkedIn:
"The major search engines crawl every post on LinkedIn. When someone searches from Google or Bing, your content on LinkedIn can appear in the results. In general, LinkedIn content has high ranking potential. It's easy to read and share natively published posts. That means more interaction with posts, which signals the search engine that the content is valuable."
Because LinkedIn is a long-standing domain, and has high domain authority, your posts on LinkedIn are likely to have higher potential to rank in search results than they would on your own site. This is further enhanced by the increased potential for comments and shares on LinkedIn. The possible downside is that this can negatively impact the rank of content on your own site - there's no Google penalty, as such, for duplicate content, but if the same content appears on both sites, and one has higher ranking signals, Google will go with the better ranked one, pushing your domain out of the results.
Because of this, you do need to take into account what your goals are with each post, but you can generate significant additional interest in, and exposure through, your content by re-posting to LinkedIn.
Here are three easy tips on how to get the best possible ROI out of publishing your posts on LinkedIn's publishing platform.
1. Reverse Engineer Your Content on LinkedIn to Generate Sales Leads
The key to content marketing that performs well is that it provides value to your target audience. Providing value is the price you have to pay in order to "purchase" a prospect's time, attention and interest.
As the world's largest social network for professionals, LinkedIn is already a place where your ideal customers are hanging out and looking for resources, so the key is to hone in on a niche of potential customers on the platform and earn their trust.
One key way to get your LinkedIn posts noticed on the platform is to understand what your audience is looking for.
As advised by LinkedIn:
"Look at posts performing well for your topic and assess what made them successful"
How do you do this? By using LinkedIn's search capacity, you can get listings of the content that's resonating amongst your target audience by searching relevant keywords and phrases.
For example, if you do a search for 'social media', you can filter the results by Posts to see what's resonating amongst those interested in the topic.
Try and reverse-engineer popular topics, trends or thoughts your ideal clients have when searching for content or help online, and plug those terms into LinkedIn Search.
You can also filter your results by Groups, enabling you to find engaged, active communities on the platform, through which you can find out what's resonating amongst them, while you can also subscribe to any LinkedIn's Pulse channels relevant to your industry to stay updated with what's trending on the platform.
Another option is to use BuzzSumo - if you search BuzzSumo for any topic, you can filter the results by platform shares. Filter your listing by LinkedIn shares, in over the last day or last year, and you'll be able to get an idea of what's resonating with the LinkedIn audience.
What's more, LinkedIn recently published a new infographic which outlines the key things users are looking for in LinkedIn posts.
Look for headline ideas, styles and formats you can emulate, based on what's trending, and tap into the topics of key interest amongst your target audience.
2. Use your Content as Context for Conversations
When people like, comment and share your posts, make sure you always take the time to engage with them, and respond as quickly as possible.
The more engagement your post gets, the more reach it gets, as LinkedIn's algorithm favors engagement.
Furthermore, the content you create can also give you context for a 1-on-1, personalized message aimed at someone who you think might find the post helpful.
You have to use such outreach judiciously, but here's a simple example script you might use to promote your next LinkedIn post via 1-on-1 messages to your connections
"Hi [INSERT FIRST NAME] - hope you are doing well!
I just published a new post here on LinkedIn I thought might be of interest to you.
It's called, "[INSERT POST TITLE]."
LINK TO POST: [POST URL]
Hope you find the post helpful and excited to hear what you think of it!"
Using a non-spammy, helpful note like this can work well on LinkedIn, provided the post you're sending to your connections is something they would genuinely be interested in reading or learning more about.
3. Details like your Headline and Images Matter
There are billions of content impressions on LinkedIn every single day - in fact, more than 100,000 posts are uploaded to LinkedIn Publisher every week. In order to "stop the scroll" of someone surfing their LinkedIn news feed, you need to ensure your have an eye-catching headline and image in place.
"Ditch the stock photos and go for something clever, stunning, or both," LinkedIn suggests.
An eye-catching image and magnetic headline are what will pull readers into your posts on LinkedIn.
Content Marketing Success
Every single day on LinkedIn, your ideal customers are finding and engaging with helpful, relevant and actionable content that helps them solve their biggest problems.
If you're able to tap into that ecosphere, you'll immediately see a surge in the quantity and quality of prospects you attract on the platform.
In addition, cross-posting and sharing your best content on LinkedIn not only gets you in front of your ideal B2B-related audiences, it can also provide a simple, easy and effective SEO boost for your content marketing efforts, dependent on your specific SEO goals..