Visibility
(Article has been edited)
2 million posts go up on LinkedIn per day. Crazy number, right? It may seem a monumental task to carve out your own little place amongst that cool 2 mil, but I promise you, it’s easier than it looks. Here are three easy things you can do to improve your posts on LinkedIn.
Images
First things first, you want to have some sort of image in your post. Photos and videos without links are actually prioritized over posts with links- but that shouldn’t discourage you from sharing links to great content. Make sure every link has a great image to accompany if though. If you blog or website is setup correctly, any link you share should also pull in the accompanying image. This happens through the ‘opengraph’ data, there is a pretty good description here if you want to know how it works.
LinkedIn will scan the link you have in your post and pull the featured image from the website. For instance, if you shared this post on social media, LinkedIn will automatically pull the photo with the red smoke from the top of the page.
Photos grab the attention of users when they are scrolling through the LinkedIn feed, so the better the photo, the more people are going to see it, not to mention the fact that the LinkedIn algorithm boosts posts with photos, anyway.
If you want to learn more about the LinkedIn algorithm specifically, check out this article.
Comments
Next up, you want to add a good comment. The whole point of social media is to start a conversation that will make your expertise more visible for others to see. If you can get other people responding with a provocative comment, even better.
The trick with a good comment is to leave it open-ended. For instance, if you were sharing this article, you would say something like:
In addition to Adrian’s idea’s here, I’ve also found that tagging other people will dramatically increase the views I get. Anybody else have additional tricks the could share?
I started with a little bit of lead-in, some of my own thoughts, but then transitioned into asking my connections what their experience with it was or asking them a question.
The trick of the comment is to encourage a conversation, and encouraging a conversation is what dramatically increases the chances that a post will go viral.
Hashtags
Finally, let’s look at hashtags. The is a keyword or tag that can be used to organize conversations around a concept. For example in the last Presidential election cycle, some people posted #MAGA2020 with shares, while others posted #nevertrump. This effectively helped people find discussions they were likely to agree with our disagree with. Do you need to use them?
Yes you do.
The whole point of a hashtag is to increase the visibility of your posts by allowing others to find them in searches. When you put a hashtag on your post, people searching the internet for that topic will be led to you, thus increasing the eyeballs on your post.
And coming up with a hashtag isn’t as difficult as you’d think. There are a myriad of tools on the internet, such as Hashtagify, there to help. Try this out by adding some topics of interest to you and it will provide you with the current hot hashtags.
These three things will add maybe a moment to your whole posting routine, but the impact has the potential to be dramatic. I’d love to hear how these tricks help you out; feel free to tweet me @adriandayton or LinkedIn.com/in/adriandayton and use the hashtag #linkedintricks.
