Quick Guide to LinkedIn B2B Posting Best Practices
Is your business on LinkedIn? As Hootsuite notes, “more than 30 million companies use LinkedIn for business.” It’s a promising channel to drive traffic, generate quality leads, and build your thought leadership.
A clear LinkedIn strategy for B2B marketing allows you to develop a network around your service or product, giving credibility to your business as you gain traction in your industry. But it’s important to use it to its fullest potential to improve your brand awareness, boost leads and conversions, increase your revenue, and more.
What You Need For a Great B2B LinkedIn Posting Strategy
You’ll want to take these key details into account when creating your best practices LinkedIn strategy:
- Does my business need a Company Page and/or Showcase Page?
- What is my target audience and what is my organic targeting strategy?
- What type of informative and educational content will I share?
- Are there company photos, slideshows, or PDFs I can utilize for posts?
- What content and hashtags are my audience engaging with that I can target?
- Should I add sponsored posts to my content calendar?
- What about engagement?
Getting clear on these questions up front will allow for a LinkedIn presence that is ready to build and engage with its audience.
In this blog post, we’ll take you through LinkedIn B2B posting best practices so that you can begin seeing traction on your Page(s) and establishing your company as an expert in your industry.
LinkedIn Company & Showcase Pages
You likely have a personal professional profile on LinkedIn, but for building your business’s brand you’ll want to create a LinkedIn Company Page. “LinkedIn Company Pages are Pages dedicated to individual companies, organizations, and institutions. They allow LinkedIn members to discover and connect with individual companies and learn more about each organization’s brand, products or services, career opportunities, and more” (Hootsuite).
You can take it a step further and develop LinkedIn Showcase Pages for your business too. While Company Pages are dedicated to companies, Showcase Pages “are extensions of your LinkedIn Page, designed to spotlight individual brands, business units and initiatives. Once created, they’ll be listed under ‘Affiliated Pages’ on your main LinkedIn Page.” (LinkedIn).
LivePlan, a business software company, caters to their customers with their Showcase Page, sharing news that’s only pertinent to current users of the software.
These pages are a great way to hone in on a specific audience of yours or put extra focus on a product or offering.
What Kind of Posts to Share
Like any social network, it’s great to customize your messaging for your specific audience, better tailoring your LinkedIn thought leadership. Rather than posting about your company and products, the content that performs best on LinkedIn is actually educational in nature. Think about answering common questions that arise in your industry, addressing problems and concerns your audience may face on a regular basis.
BuzzSumo analyzed the headlines of ten million articles shared on LinkedIn to find out the topics that resonate most with people. They looked at the top phrases used in the headlines of the most shared articles, and two types of content stood out:
- Industry trends: “the future of”, “in the world”, and “of the year”
- How-to articles: “X ways to”, “how to get”, and “how to make”
Hubspot does a great job of this. They’ve gained popularity in the field of inbound marketing by increasingly sharing content that’s educational.
Here, they’ve also made what would otherwise be a really long post super digestible by making it a slideshow format.
Tip: If you’re feeling stuck on what to share, you can discover trending topics and articles by selecting your target audience and finding out what topics and articles they’re already engaging with, sharing the ones that make sense for your LinkedIn B2B marketing directly on your page.
It’s important when you’re thinking of what to post, that you also think of when to post. If you post more frequently, your followers are more likely to increase in relation. To kick your new business page off the ground, invite people to follow you (like your employees), so that you already have a pool of people to engage with the posts you share.
For B2B brands, the best day to post is Wednesday, and Hootsuite’s research found that the best times to post are 7:45 a.m., 10:45 a.m., 12:45 p.m., and 5:45 p.m. EST. Because all audiences are different, testing various posting times is important. You can find out what’s ideal for your business by using your page’s LinkedIn analytics.
The Nitty-Gritty LinkedIn Posting Details
Photos and Videos
Before we get started, jot this down:
- Post images are 1200 x 1200
- Video size is 256 x 144 (minimum) to 4096 x 2304 (maximum)
Posts with photos and videos typically perform better on social networks like Facebook and Twitter, and the same holds true for LinkedIn B2B best practices. According to LinkedIn, posts with images receive 98% more comments than those without. They also found that custom collages that include three to four images in one post perform well for business pages.
A good rule of thumb when sourcing imagery is to try and avoid stock imagery, and if you can, create custom images, upload PDFs, PowerPoint, or SlideShare presentations to increase your post’s engagement.
Video has been trending upwards in engagement for a few years now, and it’s still going strong. Videos on LinkedIn see five times more engagement than any other content type, which could be because they auto-play when you scroll past them. Hootsuite dug into the LinkedIn algorithm, noting it also prioritizes videos hosted on the platform.
Later, a social media scheduling app, does a great job of incorporating in-house created video content to drive more engagement with their posts.
Tagging and Hashtags
It’s important to think about gaining additional eyes on your post updates. A good LinkedIn strategy for B2B is to add up to three hashtags to your posts, that are relevant to that post or your industry, in order to garner exposure.
You can also enter hashtag feeds and engage, react, and comment on posts from the perspective of your brand to expose your name to a wider, relevant audience.
When it comes to ‘@’’ ing others, you simply have to place that symbol in front of their name and they will be notified about your post and your content will be placed in their news feed. This is important to do, especially if you mention someone influential, as they may repost your content, which means more exposure for you!
You can see in this post that Buffer uses the ‘@’ mention and relevant hashtags to increase the visibility of their post.
How To Organically Target Your LinkedIn Posts
One of the more noteworthy LinkedIn B2B marketing tools is its organic targeting option for posts. When posting, you’re able to target your post based on your follower profile data, including:
- Company size
- Industry
- Job
- Seniority
- Geography
- Language preference
- University
Note: You need a minimum of 300 followers to be able to target your organic posts.
These targeted updates will appear on your page — or Showcase Page — as well as on LinkedIn for the targeted users.
What Sponsored Content Can Do For You
Like any social media ad, sponsored content should be something you do alongside your organic content. LinkedIn sponsored posts appear directly in the feed like organic content does, but unlike a platform like Facebook, you’re targeting based on profession rather than personal interests.
As LinkedIn notes, sponsored content allows you to:
- Advertise to professionals
- Exceed your objectives
- Target the professionals you want
Be specific with your sponsored content targeting. You want to start by choosing the location and no more than two other criteria to start, A/B testing your ads to see which audience targets deliver the best results.
Some things to remember when building out sponsored content are to write concise headlines (under 150 characters) and keep the descriptive copy in and around 70 characters. Quick readability leads to more engagement. Don’t forget to include a clear call-to-action so you can direct your audience with your ad.
Remember to follow LinkedIn’s ad targeting best practices, and check out Hootsuite’s guide if you need a walk-through on creating your ads.
Now that you have some of the best practices down, sign up for our LinkedIn Posting for B2B Business Growth online course to learn how to establish thought leadership and generate leads using targeted LinkedIn content marketing.
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