Adding a LinkedIn share button to your website is a great way to increase engagement and traffic from LinkedIn. LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network with over 740 million members. By enabling visitors to easily share your content on LinkedIn, you can expand your reach and get more eyes on your website.
In this comprehensive guide, we’ll walk through everything you need to know to add a LinkedIn share button to your website, including:
- The benefits of adding a LinkedIn share button
- Where to place the LinkedIn share button on your site
- How to customize the appearance of the button
- How to add the code for the LinkedIn share button
- Optimizing your content for sharing on LinkedIn
- Analyzing the results and engagement from the share button
By the end of this guide, you’ll have a LinkedIn share button installed and ready to help increase engagement and traffic to your website.
Benefits of Adding a LinkedIn Share Button
Here are some of the key benefits of adding a LinkedIn share button to your website:
- Increased referral traffic – Every share of your content on LinkedIn can drive visitors back to your site.
- Expanded reach – Expand beyond just your own connections by accessing the networks of others.
- Build trust and credibility – Shares and recommendations on LinkedIn can showcase your expertise.
- Encourage engagement – Make it easy for visitors to share your great content.
- Gain backlinks – LinkedIn shares add backlinks pointing back to your website.
- Free promotion – Leverage your audience to organically promote your content.
Essentially, the LinkedIn share button turns your visitors into promoters of your content. This can result in increased traffic, greater reach, more backlinks, and higher authority signals.
Where to Place the LinkedIn Share Button
When adding a LinkedIn share button to your site, there are a few key places you’ll want to include it:
- Next to individual pieces of content – Add the button next to blog posts, articles, videos, etc. so visitors can easily share that specific page.
- Inside the content body – Some themes support adding share buttons in between content for greater visibility.
- Above or below content – Placing the button before or after your content is another top placement.
- In the sidebar – Share buttons in sidebars or widget areas allow sharing your entire site.
- On landing pages – Share buttons on key landing pages allow promotion of important pages.
- On social media icons – Adding a LinkedIn icon along with other social media icons is common.
- Site header or footer – Putting buttons prominently in headers/footers encourages overall sharing.
Think about what you want people to share and where their attention already is on your site. Typically putting share buttons near the main content or where they are easily noticed works best.
Customizing the Appearance
One benefit of the official LinkedIn share button is that it’s highly customizable. You can modify its appearance to match your brand and integrate seamlessly with your website design.
Here are some of the appearance options you can customize:
- Button size – Change between small, medium and large sized buttons.
- Button style – Choose between standard, solid or transparent background styles.
- Button shape – Select round or square shaped button corners.
- Button color – Pick custom background and text colors.
- Show counts – Toggle display of share count on button.
- Language – Localize button text into over 20 languages.
When inserting the button code (covered next), there are parameters you can add to customize all these options. Play around with different settings to match the button to your site.
Adding the LinkedIn Share Button Code
Adding the LinkedIn share button code to your website only takes a few minutes. Here are the steps:
1. Go to the LinkedIn share button generator.
2. Choose your button style and customization options.
3. Select the components to include in the share popup.
4. Copy the generated button code.
5. Paste the code on your web page where you want the button to appear.
The code will look something like this:
<script src="https://platform.linkedin.com/in.js"></script> <script type="IN/Share" data-url="yourpageURL"></script>
Change the “data-url“ parameter to the page you want people to share.
For further customizations, LinkedIn provides additional parameters you can add to the code like button size, color, and more.
And that’s all there is to it! The LinkedIn share button will now appear on your site and allow visitors to share your content.
Optimizing Content for Sharing
Now that you’ve added share buttons to your site, let’s talk about creating content optimized for sharing on LinkedIn.
Here are some tips:
- Provide value – Content that educates, informs, entertains or provides useful takeaways is more likely to be shared.
- Target topics that get engagement – Look at what types of posts get high interaction in your industry.
- Use relevant hashtags – Include hashtags your audience follows so content is discoverable.
- Leverage multimedia – Posts with images/video can help catch attention in feeds.
- Write compelling headlines – Use interesting language to make people want to click and read more.
- Watch timing – Try sharing during periods your audience is most active on LinkedIn.
- Length and format – Bite-sized posts tend to get more engagement than long posts.
Keep these tips in mind when creating and promoting content on LinkedIn. Monitoring what performs well can help you refine your strategy over time.
Analyzing Performance
The final step is to analyze how well your LinkedIn share button is performing. Here are some key metrics to track:
- Clicks on share button – How often is the button being clicked?
- Shared content reach – How many people are your posts reaching from shares?
- Referral traffic – Are share clicks driving an uptick in site traffic?
- Backlinks – Check if new domains are linking to your content from shares.
- Conversions – Are share visits converting into leads, signups or sales?
Most analytics platforms like Google Analytics allow you to track traffic sources and links to your content. Comparing before and after adding the button can highlight its impact.
If you aren’t seeing much sharing activity, try testing different content topics, tweaking your button placement or incentivizing shares. Analyzing and optimizing over time is key to success.
Conclusion
Adding a LinkedIn share button is an easy way to tap into the power of social sharing. With over 740 million users, LinkedIn is a valuable source of referral traffic and engagement for your website.
By following this guide, you can:
- Easily install a customized LinkedIn share button
- Optimize your content for increased sharing
- Track button analytics to improve performance
So give your visitors a new way to share your great content! Install a LinkedIn share button today and watch engagement and traffic grow.
