LinkedIn is the best social networking platform for professionals. It is the place where they can reach out to like-minded people for business opportunities.
At the same time, it is also a great place for marketers to amplify the content they have developed on their site or blog.
LinkedIn plays a role in the overall content promotion strategy that publishes your content on different channels in the hopes of increasing your audience reach.
“Believe it or not, content is king. You might drive thousands of people to your blog, but if there’s nothing to read, they will leave and most likely never return,” says Mike Wallagher when it comes to promoting his blog posts.
If you are publishing premium content on your B2B site and wish to amplify its reach to your audience, then you need to tap into the power of LinkedIn to make this happen!
Below is a short guide with tips and advice on how to use this social networking platform to get your content to your professional network.
Tag people and brands
LinkedIn has adopted the tagging feature similar to Facebook. Whenever you post updates on your news stream, you can tag people by entering the ‘@’ sign and typing the name of the individual or page in the social networking site.
By tagging people and pages, they will receive notifications on their dashboard and will encourage them to take a look at your update.
In the example above, I tagged Litmus in the status message, which you can see in blue.They are mentioned in the article I wrote for Nichehacks.
This is applicable if you mentioned a brand or an influencer in your content. Tag and inform them that you mentioned them in your content.
With this in mind, make sure that you mention famous people within your niche. Doing so will help increase the likelihood of your content being shared by these brands and influencers.
Create a page
A LinkedIn Page allows businesses to build an engaged audience so they can post their updates straight to their followers.
Creating a page on your site, whether it is a consulting firm or an online shop, allows you to attract people on LinkedIn to keep in touch with your business through this platform.The problem now is attracting your audience to follow your company on your LinkedIn page.
For this purpose, check out this comprehensive list of tips on how to get more LinkedIn page followers at Forbes.
Part of attracting your audience is to build a compelling LinkedIn page. For inspiration, refer to the best LinkedIn Company Pages of 2014 in this post. Expect the 2015 version to be released before the year’s end.
An example of a good LinkedeIn Page featured in this Hubspot article.
From here, you can build a publishing strategy that allows you to promote your content using the page in a non-disruptive manner.
One way of doing this is to curate good content from different sources related to your niche. The idea of content curation is to showcase your knowledge about a subject by sharing content on your page that answers the needs of your followers.
Integrate your content in the content curation strategy you will develop, so your content can benefit from being featured on your page in a strategic manner.
Join and participate in Groups
LinkedIn Groups are a great place to share your knowledge and expertise on a particular topic or niche.
All you need to do is a quick search on your topic to find relevant groups that you can join.
Once you enter, start engaging! Comment on existing discussions and share insights that add value to the thread.
You want to be as helpful as possible to other users with your comments. You also want to learn from more knowledgeable members of the group and engage with them as well.
The idea here is to build your reputation in the group as a trustworthy person who is more than willing to share and engage with all members of the group.
By earning the trust of others, you can then slip in your content in the group.
The trick here is not to promote your content. Rather, you want to use your content to further a discussion!
You do not want to be considered by other members as a spammer whose sole purpose is to self-promote and refuse engagement.
“Because some groups have thousands of members or more — and are therefore filled with potential readers and customers — they are ripe targets for spammers, as well as for well-meaning content creators who just want to spread their messages as far and wide as they can, without due concern for where it gets placed,” says Joshua Rodriguez in his post at Content Marketing Institute. “This results in dozens of posts with self-promoting links showing up that do not speak to the group’s purpose or its primary interests.”
For instance, you can ask other members for their thoughts about the content you posted or make suggestions to improve your content.
The latter idea will work if your posts is a list-based article so they can chime in with their thoughts.
Doing this allows you to amplify your content without disrupting the harmony of the group with content that sticks out like a sore thumb.
Repurpose content
You can get more juice to your content from LinkedIn by posting it on the LinkedIn Publishing platform.
Repurposing content is a great way of developing a communications strategy between your content and social media.
“Once you identify your target market, you need to create a good communication strategy on the appropriate social networks,” says Michael Jenkins from Shout! Social Media Company. “This starts by identifying the different types of media you can use on social media.”
For your content, you can just copy and paste it into the editor and place an attribution link to the original post.
The image above is a screen caps of a post I wrote on my blog that I repurposed on LinkedIn.
Below the post, I linked back to the original source, which is my blog, so they can visit it and read more posts related to the published one above.
You may say that this is duplicate content, which is something that search engines frown upon.
To answer your concerns, this tactic does involve the duplication of content. However, since we are not after ranking your LinkedIn post on search engines, duplicating content in this sense is fine.
Rather, we want to tap into your existing connections and show your content to them, in case they do not follow your site or blog.
Once you publish the post on the platform, it will appear on the Notifications button on their menu bars. This ensures maximum visibility to your posts that lead back to your site or blog.
By doing this, you can get more eyeballs to your content, which could lead to engagement and business opportunities in the long run.
The great thing about this tactic is that it gives you incentive to build a network of like-minded professionals as LinkedIn connections. By connecting with potential leads and business partners, you can further amplify the reach of your post to them and increase the rate of conversion.
Keep in mind that you can only post as an individual member of LinkedIn. You cannot post as a company or brand page.
Conclusion
The tips mentioned above on promoting your content using LinkedIn should help you draw more visitors to your business. There are still more tactics out there that can improve your content amplification efforts using this platform.
This is where you come in – what are the tactics you use in promoting your content on LinkedIn that are not mentioned above? Share them by commenting below!
Great article,
For me, I think maybe the most useful piece of information is repurposing content to publish it on the LinkedIn Publishing Platform. Have you tried using the same tactic on Quora Blogs?
Very useful insights and resources! Thank you,