7 Tips to Supercharge Your Content on LinkedIn Pulse

7 Tips to Supercharge Your Content on LinkedIn Pulse

LinkedIn Pulse is an excellent way to promote and share your content, potentially with a well-targeted audience. Discover 7 tips for success.
Article Outline

B2B marketers are charged with creating massive amounts of content, primarily to fuel inbound marketing, social media, lead nurturing, and pipeline acceleration. It’s probably no surprise that 76 percent say they are creating more content than they were a year ago. But even the most stellar content will fall short of your goals for it if you’re not promoting it well – in the right places, at the right time.

It’s also probably no surprise that a huge majority of marketers (about 94 percent) are using LinkedIn for content marketing and promotion … but not all of them are doing it effectively. Check out our podcast episode “The Essential Organic B2B Marketing Strategies for LinkedIn in 2018” to learn more!

Content marketing superstars such as Jay Baer, Joe Pulizzi, and Lee Odden all leveraged LinkedIn to build their multimillion-dollar companies. So: how can you harness the power of LinkedIn as a potent, efficient strategy to reach your company’s goals?

Master LinkedIn Pulse: 7 Tips for Success

Publishing on LinkedIn’s platform started out as an exclusive, invitation-only club reserved for a handful of influencers. But a couple of years ago, this changed, as the site opened up the Pulse platform to everyone.

Some marketers have gotten fabulous results; others have dabbled with this tool with very few results. So what’s missing? Here are a few tactics to supercharge your efforts:

  1. Write longer posts. Remember the days of 300-word blog posts? These days, the most-read/linked/shared blog posts have an optimal length of 1,600 words, but your LinkedIn posts need to be even longer. Posts that receive the greatest number of views, likes, comments, and shares through LinkedIn have on average 2,000–2,500 words.
  2. Write a stronger headline. Most B2B marketers know that headlines make or break the performance of content. Pay attention to the impact of the headline but also to the length. The optimal length for LinkedIn post headlines is 80–120 characters. Test your headlines on CoSchedule or the Advanced Marketing Institute’s Emotional Marketing Value Headline Analyzer. Both are free.
  3. Select a structure for greater impact. Analysis of top performing long-form content across the LinkedIn Pulse network found that the highest performing content contained the words: Who, What, When, Where and How in the titles. The list format also captures excellent results. In the analysis, 20 percent of the best performing content were  list style articles. Industry trends also perform well, with six out of every 10 LinkedIn users reporting interest in industry insights.
  4. Make content easy to skim. The majority of readers skim content, so focus on making your content easy to read with bulleted lists and short paragraphs (especially since LinkedIn posts are longer than traditional posts). Use subheads that set the correct expectations for the paragraphs that follow them. Just as with headlines, short and clear trumps long or clever.
  5. Use visuals to boost engagement. How many visuals should your LinkedIn post contain? According to Paul Shapiro, writing on OkDork, eight. He says this number of images captures the greatest number of shares, likes and views on LinkedIn. Geoff Livingston of Tenacity5 Media recommends a new image every three to five paragraphs. (If you like photography, do check out the way he uses images on his blog.)
  6. Republish your existing posts. Marketers worry about duplicate content – and rightfully so. Some marketers report there aren’t consequences for using your corporate blog content on LinkedIn Pulse (read a discussion on Search Engine Journal), but only Google knows for sure, and Google isn’t telling. You could do this as a calculated risk. One strategy, since LinkedIn posts are generally longer than traditional blog posts, is to repurpose and expand your original posts.
  7. Pay attention to timing. LinkedIn reports that their highest traffic occurs morning and midday, Monday through Friday. Act-On and some other companies have found that Tuesdays and Thursdays (morning to midday) seem to get the most traction. Do test different times during these hours to determine the sweet spot for your own target audience. (Read CoSchedule’s meta-analysis of 16 studies on timing.)

Promote Your Content: 3 Simple and Effective Strategies

Once you write a new post, whether it’s created for LinkedIn Pulse or elsewhere, use LinkedIn as a promotional tool. Here are a few strategies for reaching your target audience more effectively:

  1. Personal profile (update it!). On your home page, you can “share an update.” This is a great place to promote your content. You can also join industry-related groups, which are highly targeted places to share your content. More on this a little later.
  2. Leverage your business page with sponsored updates. Unlike your personal page, on a business LinkedIn page you can post sponsored updates. These sponsored updates allow you greater reach when promoting your content. You can also target premium and highly segmented professionals.
  3. Post to LinkedIn Groups. After you’ve joined some highly targeted groups, these are great places to share your content. But with two caveats:
  • The group must allow such postings.
  • The content must be genuinely helpful from the reader’s point of view, and can’t ooze self-promotion.

Try this: Post a question that relates to a pain point of your target audience. Get the conversation started, then somewhere in your comments share your content link as a resource.

How Big Brands Are Using LinkedIn for Content Marketing

Not sure where to get started? Here are a few examples of large brands using LinkedIn to drive engagement and build stronger connections with their target audiences.

TEKsystems: Driving engagement

TEKsystems is a provider of staffing solutions. The company actively uses the Pulse platform to publish articles focused on its audience’s pain points, such as “Become the Employer of Choice for IT Professionals.”

The TEKsystems strategy is to first post the content to LinkedIn Pulse, and then actively respond to every comment written. Contributors who write the company’s content also actively respond via their own LinkedIn accounts in order to engage readers.

GE: Connecting with target audiences

If you view GE’s company page, you’ll find it full of graphics, inspiring quotes, interesting studies, and engaging questions. The company also frequently posts updates on what it’s doing in the industry.

For example, GE recently shared “What if we could explore Mars as holograms? Innovative tech is expanding our scope of vision to the far reaches of our solar system.”

That simple question received 464 likes and 46 comments. The audience was engaged.

Microsoft: Leveraging “Showcase Pages”

Finally, there is Microsoft, with close to 3 million followers. Not surprisingly, founder Bill Gates was one of the first influencers hand-picked to share insights with LinkedIn followers through the Pulse platform. He’s a self-described “active blogger,” writing articles such as “Opening Minds on Ed Tech,” which received over 18,589 views, 4,901 likes, and 224 comments within three weeks after its publication. His first-ever post on LinkedIn, “Three Things I’ve Learned From Warren Buffett” ran on June 12, 2013, and has garnered almost 2 million views and 4,000 comments (as of May 2016).

Microsoft also created Showcase Pages, which are subpages of the main company profile. These pages help establish niche communities and conversations about various products; they’re perfect for content marketing.

A Few Last Words

Many marketers are forgetting something very important when publishing content through LinkedIn – the call to action. In fact, updates with links get double the engagement than those without. It doesn’t have to be a hard sell or promotion of products (in fact, in most cases it shouldn’t be). But your audience needs to know where to learn more about what you do.

And finally, post regularly. Companies that post 20 times per month through LinkedIn reach 60 percent more followers through at least one update. So integrate LinkedIn into your content marketing strategy, stick with it, and work it regularly – and you should achieve exceptional results.

Are you using LinkedIn as part of your marketing strategy? If so, please share what’s working and what isn’t.

Photo Credit: Pulse – LinkedIn

LinkedIn has evolved into a powerful lead generation tool for many businesses. Its features, like Publisher and Groups, lend themselves well to connecting businesses with prospects. With so many great features, it can be quite challenging to figure out how to use the ones that best fit your needs. Download Act-On’s eBook, 10 Things B2B Companies Should Be Doing on LinkedIn, to get tips on tricks that will help you navigate your way through LinkedIn.

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