Tom D’s Linkedin CheatSheet
I have created this for some of my clients, as you can see from my profile, I do not always practice what I preach:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/web3cmo/
I will keep this as a living document, feel free to comment with ideas/improvements.
Most people find it hard to post on LinkedIn with value and authenticity and originality.
Unique ideas and content rarely exist unless you are able to document your startup journey, challenges, successes, setbacks etc – but it is harder and harder to stand out with this narrative.
As people increasingly struggle to create content that breaks through we are seeing more innovative/polarising approaches, incl posting memes, tik toks, and inciting debate with batshit opinions.
Assuming you do not have the network and responsiveness to break news about what is happening in the market, the only way to be original about this kind of content is to share your unique, personal opinion on significant developments in the industry.
The content that tends to performs best is personal, involves storytelling and quite often needs to include failures, vulnerability (no crying selfies please).
POSTING
- If you are starting out and testing the value of posting, I recommend posting twice a week (try to schedule it to reinforce it).
- Take advantage of the highest engagement time = Wednesday at 9–10 a.m. and around 12. And avoid posting after 12 on Friday, until Monday 10 (Diagram) – this is an average, yours will be different based on your own audience.[a][b][c]
- Keep an eye on new feature rollout, any new feature will have boosted reach to educate their userbase and maximise feature adoption, this was the case for PDFs, native video and image carousels.
- Beyond new feature adoption, LinkedIn will reward content that helps it to increase engagement time, ie text posts where users linger, click the see more button, image carousels where people have to click through many files or videos that most users finish.
- @tag (not hashtag) relevant people or companies.
- Don’t post external links in the body of your post (LinkedIn don’t want you diverting traffic off their platform)… if you need to post a link add it as the first comment.[d]
- Also, use your company profile, some people will be searching with a company filter on and not people or content, so you should be active here. If you can’t be bothered just repost the best thing that one of the team did that week on the platform.
ENGAGEMENT
- Once you have posted the content, encourage people to like and make a relevant comment using Calls to action in the post and via any other means you have. (F2F, WhatsApp, Slack).
- Immediately Before & After posting, engage with other people’s content from the hashtags, people and companies who you are trying to get to engage with your content – to draw their attention to your post.
- Engage & @reply to all comments on your post, if you can wait for higher engagement times – when more people are on the platform to see your actions.
- As well as posting, use the article function to have some longer-form evergreen content that lives on your profile – see how this performs for you, it doesn’t need to be a big investment of time, perhaps just repurposing or updating something you have already done. Articles will not garner as much organic reach over a short period, so the content should be evergreen and not become easily outdated. This format should also be suitable for Medium.
- It looks and feels a bit weird, but according to this fella (https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-liking-your-own-posts-embarrassing-valuable-frank-aziz/) you should like your own posts. Wait until engagement has died down and use it to signpost people back to your post.
PLANNING CONTENT
- Setup a google alerts with relevant keywords that sources content ideas and delivers to you by email, RSS feed or directly into a slack channel.
- Set a calendar reminder to post twice a workweek around high engagement times, in the calendar invite have a link to a google doc.
- Use the google doc to keep a living list of thoughts, concepts, images, links that may be engaging for the audience you are trying to attract or grow your credibility with.
- Which hashtags, companies, topics are you targeting?
FORMATTING
- Divide your text by paragraphs every 1-2 sentences – to optimise it for mobile.
- The first 2 lines are above the fold, make them intriguing – to encourage people to click “see more” which works like a like, comment, share – so LinkedIn boost reach (it signals to LinkedIn that you are creating long-form content that people are interested in and will keep people on their platform longer).
- Emojis are good as bullet points that grab attention if it is in keeping with the tone of the post/audience.
HASHTAGS
- Optimal is 3 hashtags per post.
- See what makes sense (and what LinkedIn recommends) after you have written the copy, you can either embed them in the copy or put them at the end. (it seems it is best to put them at the end now)
- Define what you want to be the expert on and do some research to find the most relevant hashtag for that, ensure your posts make reference to it, and then use that tag religiously so that you start owning it and seeding it (You should also be following those hashtags to see what other people are saying about it)
- Tags can target your reach, if it is #London or industry specific – do that (check the popularity of the hashtag first to identify whether it is too broad or too narrow)….
- DON’T add spaces, punctuation, symbols
- DO Titlecase to increase readability
After doing this for 4 weeks let’s have a look at what happened.
Linkedin Global Engagement
