Through the years, LinkedIn continues to grow as a platform to generate quality leads for businesses. In fact, 80% of B2B leads come from LinkedIn, and fully 79% of B2B marketers say that LinkedIn has been an effective avenue for lead generation.
Whatever your business goals are, whether to have wider visibility, to increase product sales, to improve customer service or to grow 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 hack to amp up their LinkedIn marketing game.
Keep reading and learn from the 11 LinkedIn marketing unicorns:
Michaela Alexis, President of Grade A Digital
Never share an article.
After you’ve published your article, grab the URL and create an update about the piece and explaining who would benefit from reading it. This allows you to give more context, AND, if it’s a great article, it’ll double your chances of viral activity.
Brian Dean, Founder Backlinko
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 (164k views)
-Popups (97k views)
-Flying business class vs. coach (278k 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?”.
Dennis Yu, Founder of Blitzmetrics
I repost to LinkedIn anything that has driven high engagement on Facebook. Likewise, of my posts on LinkedIn, I use the job title targeting on Facebook to post and boost there.”
Brian Wallace, Founder of Nowsourcing
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.
Allen Gannett, CEO of TrackMaven
Make sure every post has a question. LinkedIn is a social platform and great for discussions.
The feed algorithm also seems to heavily weight comments, so you don’t just want people to passively “like.” If you are just posting a link and moving on, you’re doing it wrong. So make sure your content is set up as a the start of a conversation, not as a mere signpost to a blog post your wrote elsewhere.
Goldie Chan, Founder of Warm Robots
Use the summary section of LinkedIn to drive a CTA (call-to-action). Include a proper email, scheduler link (I use calend.ly, or link to the “learn more” or “buy now” page on your brand website. Make sure that people who are on your LinkedIn are directed to ONE easy action.”
Dr. Des Natalia Wiechowski, Personal Branding Coach of Think Natalia
“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 likely 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.
The end result? – Magic!
Josh Fechter , CEO and Co-Founder of BAMF Media
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.
Aaron Orendorff, Editor in Chief of Shopify Plus
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:
1. 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
2. I link to an original LinkedIn video, which makes engagement easy
3. I provide a pre-loaded, click to tweet button, so again, super easy for them to engage
Manu Goswami, CEO and Founder of SuperFan Inc.
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 3-step process:
1. Post lots of stuff on Twitter organically.
2. Filter the tweets with tons of engagement (comments, retweets, and hearts).
3. 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.
We thank all of these LinkedIn marketing unicorns who have taken their time from their busy schedule to respond to our LinkedIn marketing expert roundup!
Do you have a different tactic or have found success on LinkedIn marketing?
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Originally posted on Inc.com