3 Simple & Quick LinkedIn Tips to Get More Reach

If you’re a B2B brand looking to promote your content, LinkedIn is the place to be. With 414 million users, it’s chock-full of active business professionals, providing plenty of opportunity for your content to reach a wider audience. However, it also means that it can be tough to stand out in the crowded news feed.

Increasing reach and engagement on your LinkedIn Company Page content can take a lot of trial and error. If you’re looking to make an immediate impact on your performance, start with these three quick and easy LinkedIn tips.

1. Use Large Images

You’re probably already well aware that using images on social media increases the effectiveness of your social media posts.

Based on our own Uberflip data, I can conclude that this is especially true on LinkedIn — after running an analysis on our LinkedIn Company Page posts, we discovered that uploading large images to posts (as opposed to simply using a link’s thumbnail image) can substantially improve a post’s performance.

You can certainly see the difference between the example of the image in the post above and the one below. Larger images tend to draw more attention to the eye, which can be extremely beneficial when posting content on LinkedIn.

On average, our posts with uploaded images received 35% more impressions, 32% more interactions, and 54% more clicks than posts with thumbnail images.

This is probably owing to the fact large images take up a lot of real estate on LinkedIn, and any sort of color tends to stand out against the grey-blue background. If you’re ever in need of the right LinkedIn image sizes, check out Sprout’s always up-to-date social media image size guide.

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The catch: Many social media scheduling tools don’t allow for pre-scheduled posts with full-size images on LinkedIn. If you’re looking for a breakthrough on LinkedIn, or are looking to amplify your distribution using LinkedIn, I’d recommend taking the time to manually upload an image to a LinkedIn post—our data is proof that it could be worth it.

2. Leverage Group Announcements

If your B2B business has its own group (which it should), be sure to use LinkedIn group announcements. Announcements can be sent once per week to your group members. These members will receive a notification in their inbox as long as they have their email notifications turned on. The announcement will also appear as a discussion in the group so all group members can be looped into the conversation.

One brand that does this really well is Rainmaker Digital, which was formerly known as Copyblogger. Rainmaker sends relatively consistent email announcements from its group and makes sure to change the headline so it’s not overly promotional and encourages discussion.

There’s a noticeable difference in overall engagement for their group posts that haven’t been promoted via an announcement versus those that have had some sort of promotion.

• Pro tip: Beyond driving group engagement and reach on LinkedIn, you can also leverage announcements to drive traffic. Track any URLs you include in your announcements so you can properly attribute referral traffic and better measure your LinkedIn group efforts.

3. Involve Your Entire Team

Content promotion is a team effort, and LinkedIn is no exception. Sometimes a boost from your team is all your LinkedIn content needs to take off.

So, how can you easily enable your team to share your content on LinkedIn?

• Communicate when you need a social boost: Leverage your organization’s internal messaging system or send a daily/weekly email that includes easy click-to-share links so everyone can easily share the right content with the right messaging. Our team has a “please share” Slack channel dedicated to content that we’d like the team to help promote.
• Onboard your team: If social sharing is important to your company, then include an onboarding session when you bring on new hires. This is especially helpful when educating sales reps on social selling. Be sure to inform them of best practices for posting, like sharing from your Company Page directly and tagging your page name as much as possible to increase exposure. If they’re interested in automating social shares, teach them how to use social scheduling and brand advocacy tools like Bambu. You can also help your team set up an IFTTT recipe for automatic content sharing from your blog’s RSS feed.
• Gamify sharing: Admittedly, this tip is less quick and easy to implement than the others mentioned in this post, but it can still generate great results. Create a little bit of fun competition with your team to see who can generate the most engagement on LinkedIn. Provide unique tracking URLs to anyone who wants to be involved, select a prize, set a timeline, and you’re off!
• Implement Sprout Social: With Sprout’s LinkedIn management tools, you can collaborate with your social sharing so everyone is on the same page. Sprout makes it easy to manage multiple profiles and content as a team. Keep your social team together with the right management tools.

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Getting in the Groove With LinkedIn

LinkedIn can be a tough social platform to crack, and some of these tips (though relatively quick and easy to implement) might eventually lead to necessary process changes. On the bright side, big changes usually see big results. Luckily, there are LinkedIn management tools for businesses that make scheduling, publishing, collaboration and audience targeting simpler and more effective within your social strategy.

You can’t discount LinkedIn for other social networks. Simply put, if LinkedIn is where your audience is, it’s probably worth your time and effort.

Do you have any LinkedIn tips that help your business? Feel free to comment below!

This post 3 Simple & Quick LinkedIn Tips to Get More Reach originally appeared on Sprout Social.

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