Through the years, LinkedIn continues to grow as a platform to generate quality leads for businesses.
In fact, 80 percent of B2B leads come from LinkedIn, and fully 79 percent of B2B marketers say that LinkedIn has been an effective avenue for lead generation.
Whatever your business goals are to grow visibility, increase product sales, improve customer service, or generate brand awareness, there is so much to gain by using LinkedIn to promote your products or services.
These goals are practically attainable by having a solid LinkedIn marketing plan.
So, I reached out to 10 LinkedIn experts, who understand the social media platform by heart, to share with us their best unusual hackto amp up their LinkedIn marketing game.
Keep reading and learn from the 11 LinkedIn marketing unicorns:
If you want to get lots of engagement on your LinkedIn posts, don’t write content that only appeals to a tiny group of experts. Instead, post stuff that your mom could comment on.
For example, my friend John Doherty had a LinkedIn post that went World War Z Viral (10 million views and 97,000 comments. Insane.).
What was it about? The day John decided to become an entrepreneur.
Whether or not you’ve started your own business, you can still relate in some way to John’s post. And because so many people could relate, they liked and commented on it in droves.
I’ve noticed the same thing: posts that appeal to a mass audience do best.
In fact, here are the topics of my 3 of my most successful LinkedIn posts:
Haters and online trolls (164,000 views)
Popups (97,000 views)
Flying business class vs. coach (278,000 views)
See? You don’t need to be an expert in anything to engage with posts about trolls and popups.
In short: on LinkedIn, don’t be afraid to go broad. If you’re not sure if your topic is broad enough, ask yourself: “Would my mom comment on this?”
LinkedIn typically shows the top trending stories of the day – many don’t realize that you can do searches on content.
If you look at the hashtags behind the top 10 trending stories, if you can write something intelligent and on topic, you’ll usually gain access to a whole new dimension of people not already seeing your content.
Don’t invest all of your time and effort in your company page.
Make your employees your brand ambassadors and the face of your company instead.
Why?
People engage 10x more with employee profiles than with company pages.
How to do that?
Invest in a “mini employee advocacy boot camp”:
Get your 5-10 most engaged and representative employees a personal branding strategist and content writer. This expert team will polish the LinkedIn profiles of your employees, make them fit for the digital age, and develop high quality, value adding and relevant content, which your employees will post from their profiles.
It’s downloading your contacts from LinkedIn, then uploading them into Facebook Business Manager as a custom audience to retarget them on Facebook and Instagram.
This helps build a strong know, like, and trust factor with your audience.
I thank people who send me work anniversary congratulations and ask them if they’ll help me by sharing a post.
It’s a three for one hack:
It takes advantage of what is essentially spam, but doesn’t make you pushy because they’re all sent in response to “Congrats on the work anniversary” messages.
I link to an original LinkedIn video, which makes engagement easy.
I provide a pre-loaded, click to tweet button, so again, super easy for them to engage.
My biggest unusual hack for LinkedIn marketing (brand building and effective storytelling) is going onto Medium or popular blogs, seeing what topics are trending that day, and then coming onto LinkedIn and sharing your perspective on those issues.
It’s one of the ways I’ve been able to create viral content because the formula for viral content (if that even exists) is a mix between context and relevance.
My Unusual LinkedIn Hack
I optimize posts for high user engagement using the following three-step process:
Post lots of stuff on Twitter organically.
Filter the tweets with tons of engagement (comments, retweets, and hearts).
Use the top posts from Twitter as a guide for your LinkedIn updates!
You can read more of my unusual LinkedIn hacks in this post.
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