The “secret” to marketing your startup on LinkedIn

For businesses wanting to know how to best market themselves on LinkedIn, now you can get advice straight from the horse’s mouth.

LinkedIn has released an ebook about marketing on the platform, called “The Secret Sauce”, and LinkedIn expert John Nemo has sat down and dissected the ebook to uncover some helpful tips.

“Long story short: LinkedIn wants you doing more business on the platform,” Nemo writes on his LinkedIn Riches blog.

Content is (still) king

Nemo says LinkedIn’s ebook highlights the growing prominence of content from businesses on LinkedIn, which has become much more than a place to only post a personal resume of a company’s description.

“LinkedIn encourages users to post and share content, and it’s working – there are 9 billion content impressions per week on the network’s news feed,” Nemo writes.

LinkedIn a numbers game, but word choice matters

If your business has any juicy statistics to share, LinkedIn may well be the place to share them; according to LinkedIn, content posts that contain statistics received 162% more impressions, and a click-through rate that was 37% higher than other posts.

And when it comes to the words you use in your LinkedIn posts, there are some that are more effective at getting someone to click. For example, LinkedIn says using the word “guide” instead of “ebook” improved the click-through rate of posts by 100%.

Alongside this, Nemo says businesses should use the platform’s in-depth targeting methods to find specific groups of users and then craft posts with words just for them.

“Make sure the headline of your content uses their job title or industry name along with a benefit [the users] want,” writes Nemo.

“For example, if you were targeting business coaches, you could write a headline like this: ‘3 Ways Business Coaches Can Get New Clients Using LinkedIn.'” 

Short and sweet

Finally, both LinkedIn and Nemo recommend keeping posts short so users aren’t turned off.

“The plethora of content being shared on LinkedIn right now also means that the busy professional simply cannot digest all the information available to them each day,” Nemo says.

Posts that are “short, sweet and intriguing” will perform the best, Nemo says, drawing on LinkedIn’s finding that status updates with 150 characters or fewer have an 18% higher engagement rate. 

“As you craft a LinkedIn status update, think about it similarly to a Tweet on Twitter,” says Nemo.

“Keep it short, concise, punchy and then link to more.”

This article was originally published on SmartCompany. 

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