Speaker 1: If you're like most marketers, you've spent a lot of time creating incredible content and then posting it on social media for crickets. That was me too, until I discovered a few things that completely transformed my content reach on LinkedIn. So in this video, I'm going to break down exactly what that is. The best types of content tell a story. Customer stories, employee stories, personal stories. Anytime you can paint a picture and evoke emotions, your content is going to perform better. But what types of posts perform best and how do you actually create content that resonates with your audience? Let's start with one of my favorite types of content on LinkedIn, polls. Love them or hate them, polls work. Trends are a great place to start when it comes to posting a new poll. Global events, holidays, industry events, industry news. Anything that you can piggyback off of that is already getting traction is going to be great and increase your chances of a poll going viral. When possible, add your opinion in the content section of the poll and then ask others to share their opinions as well in the comments. I've personally leveraged this strategy to get over 100,000 views on my polls by simply leveraging global events and industry trends. You want to be posting polls at most once a week. This is only if you post frequently on LinkedIn. If you don't, try posting maybe one or two polls a month. When you are creating your poll, LinkedIn gives you two options. You can leave the poll open for seven days or 14 days. I recommend leaving it open for the entire two weeks. That way you can leverage the poll in your lead generation efforts. And I cover that strategy in another video which is linked in the description below. Another popular post type that gets great engagement and views is the PDF carousel post. So this is very simply a PDF that you upload to LinkedIn and it creates a slideshow for your viewers. And they're more of a visual type of engagement. So what you want to do there is make it aesthetically appealing, matching your brand colors, aesthetic vibe, and then also large, catchy phrases. Anything like statistics work well, customer testimonials. You can even take a lead magnet and break it down into the most key important points and then turn that into a PDF carousel post. There's lots of ways that you can do this and LinkedIn loves these carousel posts. Here's an example of a carousel post that was created from a blog post. Now these are really great opportunities to boost your thought leadership, repurpose your content, and get more exposure to your blog because you can link to the full blog in the comments. Actionable tips also work really well on carousel posts. And so what you want to do here is give people a step-by-step list of things they need to do in order to accomplish their goal with that specific topic. This not only builds goodwill with your audience because you're helping them and giving them valuable tips, but it also leaves them wanting more, which is why you need to include a call to action where they can contact you or discover more information about your products and services. You don't have to post a poll or carousel post to get incredible engagement on LinkedIn. You can do that with a text only post. The problem is most people are doing this wrong so they don't see the engagement and reach they want. The most important part of a text only post is you have to hook people in early so they want to click that see more button to read the rest of your post. How you want to treat your hook is basically like a blog title. A couple of examples for you are how to XYZ, the top three ways you can ABC, the easiest way to fill in the blank, three things you need to know about your topic, the best way to accomplish ABC. These are just a few examples that you can entice people to want to keep reading your text only posts. LinkedIn increased their character limit on posts to 3000 characters. So you can take blog posts that you have on your blog and repurpose them into longer form content on LinkedIn. Speaking of, LinkedIn has an articles feature. Historically, these have been a great place to once again repurpose blog posts. The challenge is they do not get nearly the reach and views that your posts receive. So instead of leveraging LinkedIn articles for your long form content, I highly recommend you leverage LinkedIn posts. There is no better way to build trust and authority with your audience than video. You want to make sure you are posting native videos. For example, if you have a YouTube channel, instead of posting the link to the YouTube URL, you want to take it and then upload that on LinkedIn. Shorter videos perform better on LinkedIn. So anywhere from 30 seconds to three minutes. So if you have existing video content that is longer, I would say up to 10 minutes, then it could perform well on LinkedIn. And that's just a matter of testing. So if it doesn't perform the greatest, then maybe try trimming that video and reposting it to see how it performs. A couple of quick tips to optimize your videos and get maximum engagement. Always, always add captions or subtitles. Studies show that over 80% of people watch videos without the sound on. And I am one of those individuals. You can either upload the SRT file directly to LinkedIn, or you can bake in those captions using your favorite video editing program. The goal is to entice them to watch the actual video. So give them a call to action to watch the video and spell out what is in the actual video without giving everything away. And it's helpful if you can let them know how long the video is. So watch the 30 second video or 60 second video. One of my favorite LinkedIn video features is LinkedIn Live. Now LinkedIn Live is available for most users via an application. This is a great way to build up your community, your sense of trust, your authority, but it's also great for repurposing that content. I go live once a month and I take those snippets from my LinkedIn Live and I turn those into mini video clips. Short form videos like TikTok videos also perform really well on LinkedIn. The key there is to make sure that it is related to your business. If you can provide value or also something motivational or inspirational. My video views receive significantly lower views than any other post type, but I don't want this to discourage you. My videos are what drive the most business for me. People on the phone, whether they are customers or prospects always mention my videos and how much they love them. So you really need to be consistent with your videos in order to reap the benefits of video marketing on LinkedIn. One reason I love video is because it lets people in on me as a human and my personality. You can accomplish this from other post types as well. Historically, people have thought that LinkedIn is just a business only platform. Things are changing, things have changed. You have to mix in personal content because people wanna know who they're doing business with. And this is why personal posts do so exceptionally well on LinkedIn. These can be anything from a lesson that you learned, a trip you went on, anniversary that you just celebrated. But unlike Instagram or Facebook, let people in on your life, but also turn it into something of value that they can learn from or feel inspired from. Personal posts perform best when coupled with a photo of you, your family, an event. It could also be a screenshot of a tweet or an inspirational quote. So I just told you what post types perform well on LinkedIn, but ultimately the algorithm is responsible for surfacing those posts so that maximum viewers actually see them. There are three key factors that go into the LinkedIn algorithm. The first one is personal connections. LinkedIn is going to show your posts more with people that you are connected with and people that you engage with. The second LinkedIn algorithm factor is relevance. How relevant is your content to your target audience? This could be anything from LinkedIn looking at keywords that you use in your posts, hashtags, anything in the comment section of people engaging with you. The third LinkedIn algorithm factor is probability of engagement. So what LinkedIn is doing here is they are judging how likely your post is to get engagement. So you wanna make sure that you are getting maximum views, likes, comments, all the things in the very first hour because that tells LinkedIn that this is something that people are engaging with. So I'm going to show it more in people's feeds. Here's a tip to help the algorithm work for you and not against you. You wanna make it really super easy for people to read your content. Make sure it is appropriately spaced out. I like using bullets or emojis, putting one sentence per line and then I put spaces in between every sentence. Spacing out your content is also great for encouraging people to click that see more button. And this is a micro engagement that factors into the LinkedIn algorithm. The LinkedIn algorithm also does not like third party links. So when you take people outside of LinkedIn, they are not going to reward you for doing so. So what you wanna do here is put the links in the comment section of your post. So you can have a call to action in the actual post itself and say, click the link in the comments to see more. When it comes to using hashtags on LinkedIn, ideally you wanna do less than nine because every time you go over nine hashtags, it flags the spam filters in LinkedIn, which means your post might not be seen as much. Another way to increase engagement on LinkedIn is by tagging people. If you have a post that you can list certain subject matter experts, do that within the post itself. If you want people's opinions on the post, do that in the comment section. This is going to get more eyes on your content and it's also going to encourage engagement, AKA comments, which is then going to tell the algorithm to show your post to more people. If you are someone who posts multiple times a day, make sure that you're leaving at least four hours in between posts. If you don't, then the algorithm is only going to favor one of those posts and you're not gonna get maximum views on all of your content. You also want to respond to every single comment that is left on your post. So this is not only being friendly and inviting, it also helps the algorithm because you are triggering it to show up more by responding to comments. If you want people to actually engage with your content and leave comments, then you need to engage with them. The more comments you are leaving on other people's posts, the more likely they are to leave comments on your posts. And leaving engaging comments is step one in our LinkedIn connection strategy, which I go into more detail in the next video.