Eight Keys to Supercharge Your LinkedIn Posts
Your B2B HealthTech solution can find great success in cultivating potential buyers on LinkedIn.
It’s not easy to reach the people you need to reach. The healthcare technology marketplace clangs with more noise than a tailgate party. More and more companies are joining the throng and trying to push you out. Lots of people are saying lots of words. You wrestle to find the right people to have conversations with at the right time so they can embrace what you do. LinkedIn is one of the best ways to make that happen.
Forty percent of professionals access LinkedIn daily which adds up to over one billion interactions per month. How well are you leveraging this tool?
In this article, we’re going to examine eight ways to maximize your LinkedIn posts:
- Know Your Audience
- Always Use a Visual. Always.
- Brevity is Best
- First Impressions Matter Most
- Content is Still King
- Tag People and Pages in Your Industry
- Hashtag Wisely
- Encourage Engagement
A well-written and shaped post can reach more deeply into LinkedIn’s system and be repurposed for other parts of your strategy.
1. Know Your Audience
You must know to whom you’re talking, their needs, what drives them crazy, and what they’re looking for online. As a mentor used to say, “That says easy and does hard.”*
Don’t worry too much about how old they are, what cars they drive, and where they vacation. Instead, concern yourself with their motivations while at work. What problems do they need to solve? Yes, you have a solution for them but speak more about their problems than you do about your product.
*For more on understanding your target, we have a number of resources available.
- Five Tips to Writing Better Health IT Content
- How Deeply Are You Reaching Your Audience? Interview with Leela Srinivasan, CMO of Survey Monkey)
- Your Forgotten Audience
- Five Psychological Studies to Help Shape Your Buyer Personas
2. Always Use a Visual. Always.
Visuals turbocharge engagement. LinkedIn’s own data states that photos increase the comment rate on posts by 98%. That’s not a surprise since images make up 49% of posts and video an additional 12%.
Using video also increases engagement. Post your videos to YouTube then embed links into your LinkedIn posts. Links to YouTube play directly in your feed and result in a 75% higher share rate. Videos also make your audience more apt to comment.
Those in your audience take in and process information in different dominant learning styles, but we can all benefit from engaging posts. A visual learner may be more drawn in by photos but visual and auditory learners will engage with video. Kinesthetic learners might like a poll or puzzle best, but a good image still has great value.
Take the extra time to add photos or videos to your posts.
3. Brevity is Best
Keep things short.
Ted Lasso makes a good point about goldfish. Microsoft famously reported that since the turn of the millennium, human attention span has shrunk from 12 seconds to eight seconds—shorter than a goldfish’s.
While many have tried to disprove this statistic pointing to everything from Google Analytics to Netflix binges, let’s be honest with each other—we all prefer short posts.
How short you ask? Buffer found that for B2B companies, 16–25 words is the ideal length. (FYI: This section is 78 words.)
4. First Impressions Matter Most
That first line must lock your reader’s brain on your main point the way a fighter jet’s missile lock acquires a target.
Grab your reader’s attention. Don’t let your first sentence become truncated by LinkedIn’s …see more tag.
Make your point with few words but intrigue your readers so they will click and read on. Want to inform them even more? Include an outbound link. Posts with links perform twice as effectively as those without.
Do you need ideas? BuzzSumo analyzed ten million articles posted on LinkedIn and identified these line starters as the most engaging:
5. Content is Still King
This brief list of questions will help you generate hundreds of posts that accomplish your goals:
- Is your post relevant to our audience’s problems?
- Is your content valuable and important or just adding to the noise?
- Do you have a key statistic that will bring clarity?
- Would adding a quote by an authority or well-known author help communicate your message?
- What source for my position or stat could I quote to add credibility?
- What question(s) could I ask to prompt comments or shares?
6. Tag People and Pages in Your Industry
Fostering engagement takes as much intentionality as writing first lines and choosing images. For each post, who are three or four people in the industry you could tag as a tacit invitation to check out your post and, hopefully, engage with it? Spend time compiling a list of all those you want to tag over time and add a couple of names to each post.
Don’t forget to tag a couple of pages as well. Include companies on your client and target lists or tag a user group where your customers and potentials hang out.
If you quote someone or refer to a company or group in your post, make sure to tag them as well.
7. Hashtag Wisely
Include two or three hashtags. Make sure those hashtags are gaining traction with users. You can burn one hashtag in the name of being cute, sarcastic, or funny but remember: hashtags serve a purpose in both LinkedIn’s algorithm and in the way users search on LinkedIn.
We recommend one branded hashtag, and two topical hashtags for personal posts and three topical hashtags for company posts. When we build social calendars for new clients, we often find they have been using hashtags that aren’t being used by anyone else. Make sure your hashtags have relevance. For example, if there is an artificial intelligence component to your solution, #AI makes sense.
Hashtags can be an expressway for users to find you. Those you are trying to reach might be clicking on a relevant hashtag somewhere on LinkedIn and discover you. Or they might enter a hashtag into their browser to see what they find.
If you want to find the most relevant hashtags for your company, follow these steps:
- Go to your LinkedIn profile page.
- Click on “My Network” at the top of the screen.
- Click on Hashtags under “Manage My Network” on the left-hand side of the screen. Then click Hashtags. You might have to click “Show More.”
- Click on “Follow Fresh Perspectives” at the top. You can choose from those you follow or those who follow you. Click “Done.”
- Then click the blue follow button.
This process refreshes your news feed and adds hashtags to the list on your left side panel on your profile page. Look through the first 15-20 posts and click through to hashtags you believe will interest your audience. Look to this list as a handy reminder for which hashtags to use in your posts or click on the hashtags to see what others are saying about the topics you care most about.
8. Encourage Engagement
Every instruction above includes ideas for creating opportunities for engagement. Now, you need to foster it over time.
Use this simple adage for your posts: Always be the last one to act.
- When readers like a post on your page, like posts on their feeds.
- When readers comment, thank them or respond to their comments.
- When users share your post, go to their pages and like their shares.
Whatever action your audience takes, respond in kind. Over time, you will see the number of likes, comments, and shares increase because you have shown that you are responsive. Plus, LinkedIn’s algorithm will notice and reward you.
You can’t do it alone. Encourage your team—or expand beyond marketing—to keep an eye out for opportunities to respond to action on your page.
Remember: you want to have a conversation that leads to a deeper, more specific relationship.
B2B continues to look more like B2C. Your prospects want to see how you engage with others before they engage with you.
Why Don’t Some Brands Hit LinkedIn Home Runs?
Baseball aficionados will tell you that a home run isn’t just a swing of the bat. Much goes into that 1.818 seconds that a ball flies from home plate over the fence.
A childhood of learning the game is built upon by coaches and mentor players. Hours in the gym and thousands of automatically-pitched balls in the batting cage prepare the batter for the showdown with the pitcher who has put in just as much time and energy to make the ball dance from his hand to the plate.
Many brands hit LinkedIn foul tips and groundouts because they don’t spend enough time in practice. You must work out how your solution works and the challenges your product solves. You must “work out” your posting skills.
In the same way buying the best Lousiville Slugger on the market won’t necessarily help you hit home runs, getting a high-powered social scheduling and posting platform doesn’t mean you’ll hit home runs. If you don’t put in the work, the platform won’t convert any better than manual posting.
Spend time in the gym and in the batting cage understanding who your buyers are, how to craft posts that fire them up, and what type of follow-up will serve them the best.
For more discussion on maximizing LinkedIn, listen to “LinkedIn Tactics for HealthTech.”
