LinkedIn can be a great channel to build your personal brand, and even establish yourself as an influential thought leader within your niche. But in order to maximize the benefits of the platform, you need to understand how it works, what generates the best response, and how you can utilize its various tools to optimal effect.
To help with this, in this post, we’ll go over 10 things that you can do to
become more influential on LinkedIn, including how much you should be posting, when to post, what to post, as well as how to take advantage of some of LinkedIn’s cool features such as LinkedIn Live, discovering hashtags by popularity, and post analytics.
Follow these tips and you’ll be well on your way to building a stronger LinkedIn presence in 2021.
1. Post regularly but not too much
Maintaining a consistent posting process is important on LinkedIn – but posting too much can hurt your presence.
Through my research, at Onalytica we’ve found that influencers who post more than 50 times a month on LinkedIn see an average of 26 engagements per post, while those who post between 30-50 times a month see an average of 56 engagements, and those who post less than 30 times see even more engagement, on average.
Based on this, we recommend posting at least 2-3 times a week – but no more than 30 times a month for optimal engagement.
When your post is also significant – try to post in the mornings, perhaps on your way into work. Then you can revisit those posts later in the day/evening, to reply to any comments you’ve had and boost your engagement.
2. Avoid using lots of automation
Automation can be a great time-saver – but it can also be damaging to your visibility.
It’s easy, for example, to set up a rule saying, “if there’s a blog mentioning ‘X’ keywords, post it on my LinkedIn feed.” However, we’ve seen this used to the extreme, with some people posting hundreds of times per month.
As noted in the previous point, posting too much on LinkedIn can actually reduce your engagement, while LinkedIn’s systems can spot when people are using automation, and can hide your posts so no one will see them. If you are going to use automation tools on LinkedIn, you should still look to limit the number of posts to no more than 30 times a month.
3. Share Video and Visual Content
Research shows that articles with images get 94% more total views. It’s not just including images though, you can also add videos, slides, or podcasts to a post – or even documents, which LinkedIn added back in 2019.
Documents can actually be turned into carousel posts on LinkedIn – if you upload a series of visuals as a document, LinkedIn will display that as a carousel which users can side-swipe through.
When adding content, it is worth noting that LinkedIn prefers users to upload their content directly to their platform, rather than posting a link to another site that hosts it. For example, if you’re posting a video, it’s better to upload it to LinkedIn, rather than posting a YouTube link.