LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network with over 722 million users worldwide. It is a platform used by professionals to connect, share content, and build their personal brand. With so many users actively engaging on LinkedIn daily, it has become a powerful tool for networking, thought leadership, and lead generation.
Sharing content on LinkedIn serves many important purposes for users looking to establish themselves as an authority, gain more visibility, drive traffic, and connect with the right people. In this comprehensive guide, we will explore the key reasons why sharing content should be an essential part of your LinkedIn strategy.
Driving More Traffic to Your Website or Blog
One of the main goals of content marketing is to drive qualified traffic to your website, blog, or landing pages. LinkedIn provides the perfect platform to share your newly published content in front of a highly engaged professional audience.
With over 117 million monthly active users on LinkedIn, sharing your content to your connections and LinkedIn groups exposes your content to a vast new audience beyond just your current email list or social media following.
Whether you are posting an article, white paper, ebook, video, or other media – adding a link back to your website amplifies the reach of your content and positions you as a thought leader.
This incoming traffic from LinkedIn to your owned properties helps increase potential leads and conversions for your business. Make it easy for your audience by sharing links they can click through directly from LinkedIn.
Tips for driving more website traffic from LinkedIn
– Share content consistently – don’t just post once and disappear. Post 1-2 times per week to stay top of mind.
– Leverage your employee advocacy program – mobilize your entire company to share content to their unique audiences.
– Join LinkedIn Groups related to your industry and engage with those communities. Groups allow you to reach people outside of your 1st-degree network.
– Promote your best performing pieces of content periodically – LinkedIn lets you reshare posts and revive engagement.
– Turn on content notifications to prompt your network to follow you and never miss your latest updates.
– Use catchy custom headlines and visuals tailored to LinkedIn vs reposting the same title from your blog.
– Include a clear strong CTA in your posts – such as “Read more”, “Download ebook”, “Register for webinar” etc.
Establishing Thought Leadership & Credibility
Consistently sharing valuable and insightful content on LinkedIn is a powerful way to build your reputation as an industry expert and thought leader.
LinkedIn provides a big stage for you to showcase your subject matter expertise in front of peers, prospects, and connections working at companies you want to target.
When you post content that educates and inspires – whether articles, videos, slides, or media – you organically build credibility through generosity.
This authority makes you attractive as an influencer and advisor that people want to engage with and learn from.
Humanizing your brand on LinkedIn using content makes you memorable and approachable compared to cold outreach alone.
Tips for building thought leadership on LinkedIn
– Share advice, industry insights, data and perspectives that your audience cares about. Avoid too much self-promotion.
– Comment on industry discussions and post thoughts on trending news/topics to display your experience.
– Post content different than just blog articles – like speaker sessions, podcast interviews, videos and webinars.
– Ask for feedback and opinions from your network to foster engagement.
– Give credit and recognition to others by tagging them or sharing their content through your account.
– Join high-visibility LinkedIn Groups where you can position yourself as an expert.
– Use thought leadership content in your profile summary to highlight your expertise.
Growing Your Audience and Increasing Followers
Content sharing on LinkedIn provides tremendous opportunities to significantly grow your audience and followers. This expands your reach and visibility.
When you post engaging content to your feed, it will appear in the feeds of your existing connections. This exposes your content to new eyes beyond just your current follower base.
Valuable content can then be liked, commented on and shared by others to spread organically across LinkedIn.
This viral content sharing allows you to gain new followers who appreciate the quality content you produce.
These new followers become part of your expanding audience that will continue discovering your future updates.
It’s a snowball effect – more followers gives you a bigger potential audience for each piece of content you share on LinkedIn.
Tips for growing your LinkedIn audience
– Customize connection requests with a message specific to the recipient instead of sending generic invites.
– Engage with your new followers by liking their posts and commenting. Avoid automatically following back.
– Give people a reason to follow you by teasing your latest content or mentioning your upcoming projects.
– Make your profile “follow worthy” by showcasing your expertise in your summary and adding rich media.
– Monitor your page analytics to optimize when you share content based on your follower activity.
– Join LinkedIn groups and build connections through contributing valuable perspectives.
– Leverage employees at your company to expand reach by sharing with their distinct networks.
Sparking Meaningful Interactions & Engagement
While amassing an audience is important, the quality of your engagement and interactions matter more.
Sharing your latest and greatest content on LinkedIn is pointless if no one interacts with it.
Quality content should spark comments, likes, shares, and clicks. Monitoring post engagement shows content resonating with your audience.
These social interactions on LinkedIn make your content lifecycle full circle by influencing, educating, entertaining or inspiring others.
Comments create conversations allowing you to further connect. You can also identify new opportunities for collaboration through these discussions.
This engagement reflects your content’s ability to cut through the noise and generate buzz.
Tips for driving engagement on LinkedIn
– Ask open-ended questions to prompt discussions vs making statements.
– Respond to anyone who comments or likes your posts – have a dialogue.
– Share content focused on solving problems vs just promoting yourself.
– Request feedback through polls or surveys to actively engage your audience.
– Monitor comments and participate in conversations early to keep momentum going.
– Give a strong opinion or share an unpopular viewpoint to stir debate.
– Use visuals like images, infographics and slideshares to make content more engaging.
Connecting With Influencers & Decision Makers
LinkedIn provides access to engage with key decision makers and industry influencers that you want to target.
Sharing your content with these highly valuable individuals helps position you as a peer versus a random salesperson.
When influencers begin engaging with your content through likes, shares and comments – it sparks viral interest from others who follow them.
This gets your content in front of a qualified audience that follows influencers you target – expanding your reach immensely.
Nurturing connections by sharing helpful content establishes relationships with decision makers that drive referrals, collaborations and opportunities.
Tips for connecting with industry influencers & decision makers on LinkedIn
– Identify key voices in your space and engage with their content before asking them to share yours.
– Comment on their posts and share influencer content before you expect them to do the same.
– Personalize connection requests to explain why you want to connect and how you admire their expertise.
– Share content specifically relevant to an influencer’s interests or company to organically attract their attention.
– Tag influencers when appropriate to notify them and invite them into your conversations.
– Congratulate influencers on promotions, new jobs, or big company news by mentioning them in your posts.
– Leverage common connections to get introductions to those hard to reach senior executives.
Promoting Your Brand, Products & Services
While educational content is ideal, LinkedIn does enable some self-promotion and direct marketing.
Sharing valuable content builds your brand awareness and reputation. But you also want to periodically promote your product and service offerings.
This keeps your solutions top of mind with your LinkedIn connections and audience.
Direct promotion of whitepapers, demos, trials and new offerings is acceptable on LinkedIn but should not be excessive.
A general rule of thumb is 80/20 – Share 80% educational content and 20% promotional.
Find the right balance relevant to your audience and goals.
Tips for tactfully promoting on LinkedIn
– Promote new offerings by framing updates as exciting news vs a sales pitch.
– Offer exclusive LinkedIn-only specials or discounts to incentivize downloads, sign-ups, etc.
– Share customer success stories showcasing how you helped vs boasting your capabilities.
– Post updates from corporate events, trade shows and conferences to create FOMO.
– Soft promotion – mention your product being used or featured rather than an ad.
– Cross promote content by linking to a blog post or video that features your products or services.
– Spotlight user generated content like customers reviews, testimonials and case studies.
Nurturing Existing Customer Relationships
LinkedIn is not just a platform for generating new leads. It also provides a valuable channel for nurturing your current customer relationships.
Sharing useful content keeps you engaged and top of mind with existing customers and clients on LinkedIn.
This content showcases continuous value long after the initial purchase, which can even spark expansion revenue.
Beyond content, you can directly interact by commenting on customer posts, liking their updates, and sharing their content.
Proactively congratulating customers on job changes, promotions or company news nurtures relationships in an authentic way.
Selling is not a one-time transaction. Nurturing customers helps lay the foundation for retention and loyalty.
Tips for nurturing existing customers on LinkedIn
– Share valuable content relevant to customers’ interests, issues & pain points. Avoid all promotion.
– Spotlight customer wins and successes that you enabled through partnerships.
– Facilitate introductions between your customers and other influential connections.
– Congratulate customers on work anniversaries, new jobs, promotions, etc.
– Use LinkedIn to continue the conversation from live events or meetings.
– Send personalized messages checking in and asking how you can continue helping.
– Showcase customers in your content and digital marketing – with permission.
Monitoring Competitive Intelligence
While sharing your own content is critical, LinkedIn also provides a wealth of competitive intelligence.
Paying attention to content from competitors, partners and industry disruptors keeps you up-to-date with trends.
This gives you ideas for new content topics, identifing threats, and understanding competitor messaging.
Following thought leaders across your industry ensures you are continually learning.
Regular monitoring helps you identify opportunities to engage and position yourself as well.
Tips for monitoring competitive intelligence on LinkedIn
– Follow competitors, partners, and disruptive startups to monitor their content and activity.
– Set alerts for key influencers and competitors so you never miss an update.
– Check competitor company pages for new initiatives, products, messaging, and personnel changes.
– Look for gaps where competitors are not talking about a topic and own the conversation.
– See which updates and topics resonate most with their audience based on reactions.
– Jump into conversations where competitors have commented to establish your presence.
– Save posts that inspire ideas for you to produce better and differentiated content.
Educating Your Community
A core value of LinkedIn is providing a forum for professionals to educate one another. Users are thirsty for information that helps them do their jobs better.
That is why informative content focused on educating your peers performs so well on LinkedIn.
Valuable insights, best practices, tips and thought leadership content establishes you as a helpful resource vs self-promoter.
Think like a teacher – content that enlightens your audience, shares new ideas and teaches skills earns engagement.
LinkedIn is built on reciprocity – share your wisdom generously and your community will reciprocate.
Tips for educating your audience on LinkedIn
– Curate and share the most useful content from other sources – not just your blog. Act as a filter.
– Give advice and how-to based on experience vs merely commentary on news.
– Share perspectives on trends but focus more on implications and what professionals should do.
– Simplify complex topics into easy-to-understand lessons. Use visuals like charts and graphs to clarify concepts.
– Outline methodologies, frameworks and models that provide tactical takeaways.
– Pose questions to spark thinking and discussion rather than give definitive answers.
– Align content topics to target audience pain points and knowledge gaps. Educate – don’t preach.
Final Summary & Conclusions
Posting and sharing high-quality content on LinkedIn has so many advantages when incorporated consistently into your strategy.
The most successful brands and thought leaders recognize how vital LinkedIn is for reaching massive audiences of professionals.
It all comes down to sharing insightful and helpful educational content that provides value for your connections.
This establishes trust and authority that pays long-term dividends across all your business needs – from driving traffic to nurturing customers.
I hope this comprehensive guide provided you tips and inspiration to realize the full power of LinkedIn for your content marketing and business growth. Let me know if you have any other questions!
Benefit | Summary |
---|---|
Driving Website Traffic | Share content consistently with a strong call-to-action to drive qualified visitors to your website from LinkedIn’s engaged professional audience. |
Establishing Thought Leadership | Position yourself as an industry expert by posting valuable insights, perspectives, and advice to build your reputation and credibility. |
Growing Your Audience | Quality content exposure leads to expanding your follower base and overall reach through organic amplification. |
Sparking Engagement | Inspire your audience to interact through likes, shares, and comments by providing value and prompting discussion. |
Connecting with Influencers | Authentically engage with key voices and decision makers by sharing relevant content and nurturing relationships. |
Promoting Your Brand | Occasionally posting new offerings, events, news updates, and customer stories boosts brand awareness. |
Nurturing Customers | Continue providing helpful content to existing customers and proactively interact to strengthen loyalty. |
Monitoring Competitors | Stay up to date on competitors, influencers and industry trends by following and analyzing their activity. |
Educating Your Community | Establish your reputation as an educator by sharing advice, best practices, tips, and insights with your network. |
Conclusion
Sharing valuable, engaging content on LinkedIn should be a core pillar of your content strategy due to the many benefits it provides for personal branding, lead generation, and thought leadership.
Prioritizing educational content that resonates with your professional audience will organically expand your reach and establish credibility.
Consistent posting keeps you top of mind while monitoring competitor activity identifies new opportunities.
The connections and visibility gained from content sharing on LinkedIn are extremely valuable for achieving a variety of marketing, sales, and business development goals.
By providing ongoing value, you foster authentic relationships with customers, influencers and decision makers that drive real business impact.
Commit to frequently sharing helpful and insightful updates, while carefully balancing some promotional content when warranted.
The right mix and cadence tailored to your audience will yield excellent returns from the world’s most powerful professional networking platform.
I wish you the best of luck with implementing all of the tips in this guide for mastering content sharing on LinkedIn. Please don’t hesitate to reach out with any other questions!