Best LinkedIn Tips and Tricks for Marketing Agencies
To all digital marketing agencies, you must know that we're all in this together. We all have the same goal, which is to serve local businesses and make more money.
And there's no better time to help local businesses thrive than right now.
So, what do you think is your biggest challenge when it comes to achieving that goal of taking your agency to the next level? Is it generating leads or is it not being able to reach people?
I know for certain that it can be challenging for agencies to connect with potential customers on social media platforms. Going online and posting content is great. But, if the stuff you post doesn’t reach the desired audience, then you’re just wasting your time and effort.
Furthermore, you can ask your customers to post something online as well; however, if you don’t offer them substantial strategies to get the best results out of those posts, then you’re far away from succeeding and building brand awareness.
So, what do you as a marketing agency owner do to overcome such challenges?
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The power of LinkedIn over other platforms
Firstly, when it comes to choosing one social media platform over the others, choose LinkedIn. Then, in order to convince your customers that you have the right strategies under your belt, show them that you are implementing those same set of strategies for your own business.
By setting such examples, you would be able to drive more sales, grow your business, and ultimately increase your brand equity. The more successful you get, the more you would be able to help other businesses be successful because that is how social amplification works.
When it comes to being better and creating more recurring income streams, LinkedIn is your money-making tool that can get your marketing agency the attention it deserves.
Don’t get me wrong, Facebook is a great social tool as well, but right now LinkedIn is more powerful for increasing your reach, generating more leads, and earning quality referrals.
The reason for that is that there is less competition and the cost of traffic has gone down by about 40-50%, since more people are online and there is less advertising.
It’s a classic scenario of supply and demand. Due to this scarcity of engagement, the LinkedIn algorithm is designed in such a way that anything you do will show up as a notification for someone else. One of the major contributors for such a functionality is that most people still see LinkedIn as a place to share resumes and look for a job; however, it’s so much more than that.
Lastly, the newsfeed on LinkedIn is different as content on the platform lasts for four to five days, as opposed to four to five hours on Facebook, and just 15 minutes on Twitter.
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How to identify a good LinkedIn post
While on LinkedIn, a good practice is to get a sense of what people are talking about. You can do so by engaging with the content already out there and therefore gain relevant knowledge.
Maybe one of your friends said something interesting about marketing, in which case you go ahead and like that post. Or, there might be an interesting fact about the ongoing COVID-19 outbreak, which tempts you to comment on it.
Sometimes you might want to ask clarifying questions on certain topics. But ensure that none of those replies are ever sales-driven because that defeats the whole purpose of engagement.
The key behind a great post on LinkedIn is empathy. Posts that are genuine and are more empathetic, create more appreciation and ultimately draw more people towards it.
I generally get a pulse of what’s hot on LinkedIn by engaging with the posts that show up on my notifications. The reason why I look there is to see which of my posts is resonating the most.
The idea of social amplification is to take something that’s good and make it even better.
It’s about throwing fuel on fire and that’s how I identify my unicorn posts (the one with the most likes) and understand the type of content that will get the most engagement and drive up my sales.
Not only does this strategy help you create a good post that would reach more people, but it also helps you to become more relevant when it comes to connecting with other people.
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The secret behind LinkedIn analytics
Spoiler alert. There isn’t much effort needed to weather the LinkedIn analytics storm!
As an example, let me talk about one of my posts on LinkedIn that received 40 reactions and 10 comments in two days. Do you think that this post was one of the better ones?
The answer to that question is no.
The reason for that is the ratio between the comments and the reactions. The comments are probably about six times more valuable when compared to the reactions and, therefore, if we look at the balance between the two on my post, it’s not that impressive.
On the other hand, taking a look at another LinkedIn post that received 618 reactions and 213 comments, the reason why I consider that post to be a good one is because the number of comments are more than one-third of the number of reactions.
Anytime you see the number of comments on your post exceeding one-third or better of the number of reactions, it means that the post will keep growing on LinkedIn. In the example above, the number of comments (213) is more than one-third (206) of the total reactions (618).
If your post has an engagement rate that is less than that, it will just fall out of the newsfeed.
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Frequency of posting on LinkedIn
A lot of people ask me what the ideal frequency for posts on LinkedIn is. I generally post once or twice a day and quite frankly don’t worry about the frequency.
What matters for me is the content and that it’s good. There are days when I might post five times a day and then there might be times when I don’t post anything for a week. It all depends on whether I have quality content at my disposal and I never post just for the heck of it.
There are some people who believe that people must only post once a day on LinkedIn or they must post on a Thursday morning at 10 o'clock or something similar, but that is not true.
While it does make sense to have a proper posting schedule for a podcast or having a robust cadence for emails, when it comes to posting on LinkedIn, there is no set formula.
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The LinkedIn storytelling formula
Have you ever wondered about the best way to structure your posts on LinkedIn? Should it be long form content, which has big paragraphs, or do short sentences make more sense?
Take a look at one of my posts below and notice what is going on with the way it is structured.
Irrespective of the platform on which you’re writing a post, you must always strive to write it using one-sentence paragraphs. Whether it’s an email, a Facebook post, or a LinkedIn article, one-sentence paragraphs improve the readability aspect of all your content pieces.
The biggest reason for following such a practice is the consumption of content on cell phones. Every day more and more people are transitioning towards accessing social media on their phones and, therefore, the user experience there becomes utterly important.
When people consume content on their cell phones, they generally hold their screens vertically, which doesn’t leave them with much room to read the content on the posts.
So, in such scenarios, if your post showcases itself as one sentence on desktops, it would now wrap itself up into three or four lines and give the impression of being a paragraph on a phone.
Such type of structuring is called broetry, which is a dynamic form of storytelling that is igniting LinkedIn and is helping people get much more traction on their posts as opposed to before.
The ultimate goal of broetry is to write one line at a time as a paragraph and feed little pieces of information to people. When I write my posts, I write them in such a way that the sentences that depict emotions get their own separate space.
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Social amplification of LinkedIn posts
Now once you’ve identified a post that did really well for you on LinkedIn, the key is to throw fuel on fire and amplify that post further. It’s about backing a working formula to get the best out of it.
A great way to do so is to go back and comment on those posts that rocked the analytics boat. Doing so would lead to your new comment getting more engagements and newer replies on it, which would ultimately bring the original post back to being visible on the newsfeed.
In the example shared above, my original post received 1,124 engagements and 184 comments. I went ahead and amplified it by commenting on it, and was able to get more out of the post because my new comment then generated 40 likes and nine replies on its own.
This process is endless since I can keep the conversation going by commenting more or asking questions, thereby disproportionately spending more time on posts that have performed well.
Watch the full Conquer Local Think Tank episode on LinkedIn tips to learn more!
Quick ways to increase LinkedIn reach
There are many methods through which you can generate quick and easy wins when it comes to increasing your reach on LinkedIn. One thing that I do, each time I open LinkedIn, is to check my connection requests, messages, and notifications and clear them down to zero.
It’s a good practice to always accept new connection requests from people even if you don’t know them. The more requests you accept, the more your reach increases on LinkedIn.
But, does that mean that you accept all connection requests blindly? Definitely not!
The key to keeping a check on the right set of people is to check whether the person you’re connecting with has a decent job title and at least 10 connections in common with you.
Another great filter to accept new connections is to see if the person sent you a welcome message. If I see that they’ve sent a personalized message, I always accept their requests.
The aim here is to not accept connections just to get more likes and shares on your posts. It’s to activate a ‘weak connection’, which is basically connecting to a friend of a friend. Who knows, it might be a friend of a friend who owns a business and becomes your next paying customer!
Therefore, if you have around 500 connections on LinkedIn and you connect with an average person, who has around 400, then that gives you a potential reach of around 20,000 people.
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Conclusion
While all social media platforms are valuable for marketing agencies when it comes to telling their stories and building relationships, the most impactful one without a doubt is LinkedIn.
As I mentioned before, it’s a classic case of supply and demand. There are a lot of people present online, with very little content for them to consume. As a result, almost everything that someone posts, comes across as a notification for someone else to see.
And with the life of a post on LinkedIn being drastically longer, when compared to its counterparts, it’s up to businesses to capitalize on the opportunity and get ahead in the game.
