You need to get noticed.
There’s no other way to do it.
Increasing your LinkedIn engagement does a lot of things for you, for posts it allows momentum to flow to get them viral, you can use it to connect with people, and it turns your articles into viral pieces.
If you’re looking at boosting engagement or if you’re suffering from the lack of it, you’ve come to the right place.
Today, we take a look at how you can easily drive growth to your LinkedIn engagements.
So, let’s get you some engagement!
Write the Right Way
Most of the engagement that you’re going to get is based on your content itself.
On LinkedIn, there are many types of content.
However, there are only two types of content that matter:
- Story-driven
- Value-driven
And, if you look at them both, they both provide value to the reader.
Story-driven content is content that elicits an emotional response from the reader. These are personal stories of growth and achievement that are written with the purpose of showcasing who you are on a personal level.
They provide value because they allow a reader to emotionally connect with you. It’s an avenue to be relatable with stories that resonate with your connections.
There are different types of stories that you can use:
- Professional achievements
- Failure (remember it’s the best teacher)
- Personal stories
- Appreciation
- Change
On the other hand, value-driven posts are content that delivers professional value to your connections. These could be resource giveaways, professional tips, links to whitepapers, and other stuff that you can give out.
The reason they work well in driving engagement is that they help people in their professional careers. Of course, this is provided that they are helpful and that they are relevant to the current connections that you have.
Also, they establish you as a thought leader.
If someone can give something of value away, it makes them generous and an expert in their field. Someone that they can rely on to help them grow.
A lot of growth hackers leverage the resource giveaway value-driven content approach by employing a lead magnet strategy.
For example, you can ask them to comment before you provide them with access to content, add a gateway to the link itself for their email, or ask them to request access on a Google document.
Also, don’t forget the normal status update!
Engage to Increase LinkedIn Engagement
Do you want people to talk to you?
Then, talk to them.
Engagement plays a pivotal role in keeping a conversation going and nurturing potential leads on your posts.
As soon as someone comments on your post, you want to reply to them and maybe even keep the conversation going in their inbox.
But, more than that, engagement makes people feel special. It tells people that you care about their thoughts and that you’re a person who’s approachable.
Make sure you tag the person you’re replying to on your post.
Also, make sure you connect with some of the people that have shown an interest in your post. You don’t necessarily have to message them right away, but you want them to be some of the first people who see your next posts.
At least when you do message them for the first time, you would have long been their connection.
A lot of growth hackers expect engagement when they’re not doing engagement of their own.
Optimize for Mobile
Where do most people consume digital content?
On their phones.
This is why it is critical that the stuff that you write on your LinkedIn profile, posts, etc. has be optimized for mobile devices.
And, optimizing for mobile is fairly simple.
Ever get annoyed at large chunks of text on your smartphone?
We all get annoyed.
So, stop doing it.
The best tip that we have to optimize for mobile is to write your posts – or optimize your profile – in smaller blocks of text. This means no paragraphs that are more than four lines long.
This might be a daunting feat for most of us who are comfortable with expressing ourselves, but it soon becomes an easier exercise of breaking down your thoughts into parts.
While we’re at it. Stop writing novellas on your posts. People don’t like it and sometimes you can achieve your goals in 600 words or less.
No matter if you break up your text into chunks, if people find your posts to be too lengthy, they might get turned off reading the first couple of paragraphs.
You also want to make use of one-liners. These are great devices to create a break in between the paragraphs.
Like this.
This break creates an interesting flow that is also visually appealing for the readers, and it also allows them to pause to think about what you said.
Think of writing words like painting a visual picture.
Include a Call-to-Action
Whether it’s your profile or your on posts, CTAs are a great way to boost your LinkedIn engagement.
The reason they work is that they allow your prospects a quick way to contact you or avail of your services after they’re done with your content on LinkedIn.
CTAs make it convenient for all your passive and active leads.
This is why they’re highly A/B tested on landing pages and websites.
On your profile, you want to make sure that you have a CTA at the end of your summary or on your header image.
Check out our detailed guide on header image optimization here.
Now, you don’t always have to put in a sales-y CTA at the end of your posts, but you can end each post with something that the reader can do in their own life.
It could be a question, a bold statement, or even your contact information.
For example, you could simply end your post with, “tell me what you think in the comments down below”.
These little suggestions to your prospects get them to act on the information that they have.
A/B Test Your Posts!
To be a growth hacker, you need to test, test, and test some more.
And, this works not only with your other online real estate but also with your posts as well!
If you find that you’re not getting enough initial engagement, then you must be doing something wrong.
This is why it helps to A/B test what you release to make sure that it’s good enough for the bulk of your connections.
Common problems associated with the lack of engagement are:
- bad or poorly written content
- content or profiles with no add-value factor to prospects
- posting at the wrong time
- content that is not designed for the platform
- bad formatting
- lack of proofreading
Beyond checking every piece that comes out of your profile, you’ve got to test it out on the platform to see if it works.
So here’s what you do, prepare two sets of identical posts and have a look at which could gain more traction. If one post doesn’t work, we kill it and move on to the next one.
Remember, we’ve studied viral posts before and we know that if you’re not getting traction with one post within 24 hours, you’ve got to be able to have something ready to pick up the slack.
What we usually do at BAMF is to get more sets of eyes on what we post or optimize to check for initial reactions.
Oh, while you’re at it, you can even set up a UTM on Analytics if you want to send links coming in from individual posts or articles. This way you get proper tracking set up so that you can see the performance of your links.
Post Regularly
If you want to keep driving engagement to your posts and passive leads coming in through your profile, you’ve got to be active.
Here’s what.
People won’t engage with you if you’re an inactive member that’s just lurking around on the platform.
You’ve got to make sure that you post regularly, release articles, and update your profile to show people – and LinkedIn – that you’re active.
The more active you are the more engagements you’ll get.
So, what do you do if you run out of stuff to post?
That shouldn’t be a question.
You can post videos, infographics, tell your connections about your day, have great status updates that are intriguing, give out a daily fact, etc., it doesn’t matter.
There are plenty of ideas that you can play around with and there is no shortage of stuff to post.
Use LinkedIn Pods
A LinkedIn pod is basically a group of people that will actively share, engage and interact with the stuff that you post as soon as it’s posted.
It can be designed as a messaging group where you can post the URL of what you just put on LinkedIn for members to interact with, provided that you return the favor.
It can be a Skype group, a Slack channel, you name it.
However, what’s important is that you’re in a pod with like-minded individuals. At BAMF, we make sure that we read each post before we even engage with it.
You still want the traffic to be natural.
Choose pods that are applicable to your interests. You don’t want to return the favor by promoting posts that are not relevant to your industry. It’s ingenuine and people will notice.
There are plenty of ways to start a pod, if you’re already with a group of professionals, you can start one of your own.
If you want something more powerful, you can use lempod.
Lempod is a paid pod tool that helps users create and join large pods to post and share their content.
All you have to do is download their Chrome extension. You can find it in the Chrome store or on their website.
Once the extension is installed you can click on it and you’ll find this cool welcome message.
Click on the third icon from the lefthand side and you now have access to a lot of pods that you can join. There’s a catch though, each pod has a 4-digit code to limit its access.
If you know it, then an admin can approve your request to join the pod.
The reasoning behind this is simple, they want to minimize the number of people spamming the pods.
Pods are a great way to get the initial momentum going for your post or article. It allows people of like-minded interests to get to help you out.
However, they do come with their own limitations, since these are “manual” pods – not bots – sometimes the stuff that you share won’t get the engagement it needs immediately. There’s some lag time.
So should you do pods – not of the Tide variety?
Yes, every little piece of effort counts.
You may already be in a pod already if you tell your friends to like and share your posts.
Promote Your Posts and Articles on Other Platforms
Don’t just limit your marketing to LinkedIn, you can also promote the articles that you have and the posts that you’ve uploaded on other platforms as well.
You want to bring in traffic from everywhere.
If you’ve got a Facebook group then throw the link there!
(Although you could also repurpose the post on another network in order to start buzz there, too)
Tweet your new article, or share a great status update on Facebook. In this way, you take advantage of all the markets that you have exposure to.
Cross-promotion is a vital strategy in digital marketing because it allows your customers to see you everywhere.
Build Your LinkedIn Network
The bigger the network the more people get to see your stuff.
It’s that simple.
Think about it.
The first people that LinkedIn allows to see your post are the people that you are already connected with.
Now, depending on how much momentum was built up with engagements, the algorithm will then decide if your post is worth showing to other people.
Now if you want more people to see your post, you’ve got to be connected to other people.
There are plenty of ways of increasing your own connections.
You could start adding people, join LinkedIn groups and get engagement there,
Check out our article on optimizing your LinkedIn Groups for success.
In any case, growth hackers have to make sure that they’re growing their networks on a regular basis anyway. So it’s a win-win either way.
Takeaways
I get it.
In the beginning, getting the engagement that you want is difficult.
I went through the process myself.
However, amassing likes and going viral isn’t impossible.
In fact, we’ve done it for so many of our clients and for my own profile as well.
The key to engagement is being personal, intentional, and relational. Throw in some persistence, and you’ve got yourself a recipe for success.
Your engagements are a product of constant effort.
You won’t get them overnight.
Now we’ve already laid down the groundwork and given you a guide on what to do.
Are you going to get the engagements that you deserve?
