How You Successfully Create a LinkedIn Post

1. What is LinkedIn and who is it interesting for?
2. Creating LinkedIn posts – only for companies and B2B influencers?
3. Preparation: What you should consider before creating your first LinkedIn post!
4. Posting the right content in the right way – a guide

LinkedIn – an underappreciated social media network that has enjoyed a significant lift during the Corona pandemic. You have been posting Facebook updates for years (or not anymore) and sharing your life in your Instagram stories, but you have never posted a LinkedIn post? Then you should pay close attention now!

In this post, our guest author Lisa Zöfgen explains who LinkedIn is actually interesting for, which opportunities the platform offers, and what you should consider if you want to become active there, creating your first LinkedIn post.

What is LinkedIn and who is it interesting for?

LinkedIn is a B2B social media network which has experienced incredible growth over the past years and has gained relevance. While the platform was primarily known as a job platform before the Corona pandemic, it has become an important information and networking media for many people in the B2B cosmos during the period in which trade fairs and networking events in real life have largely been called off.

So, apart from job hunting, the platform is interesting for you if you want to exchange information with other experts from your profession (no matter if it is marketing, medical technology or real estate – almost every sector is represented), if you want to be informed about current affairs and trends or if you want to sell a service.

Creating LinkedIn posts – only for companies and B2B influencers?

Just like on every other social media platform, LinkedIn posts can also be shared. However, the thresholds for this appear to be comparatively high. Most LinkedIn users are "silent spectators" while only a very small proportion actively shares content.

But this is your opportunity! No matter whether you want to position yourself as an entrepreneur to get in touch with potential investors, you are an employee and want to position yourself as a thought leader to increase your chances of promotion or a job change, or you are a self-employed person who uses the platform to network with like-minded people and find sparring partners – the possibilities here are enormous!

Fundamentally, the channels of communication on LinkedIn can be divided into two categories: company pages and personal profiles.

LinkedIn is also an interesting channel for a company to, for example, run employer branding or address (potential) customers. However, communication via personal profiles has proven to be particularly successful (which can also be used by companies, by the way – keyword corporate influencing!), which is why we are focusing on the creation of LinkedIn content for personal profiles in this article.

As you can see, sharing LinkedIn posts is probably interesting for all of you. But how do I get started if I have so far been one of the more consuming users on the platform or if I am completely new to the platform? We want to take a step-by-step look at that.

Preparation: What you should consider before creating your first LinkedIn post!

1. Optimize profile

As soon as you start posting, people will notice your profile. It is advisable to make sure that it looks professional and is completely filled in:

Cover picture: Use this very prominent space to show personality, advertise your podcast or create consistency and recognizability with your company logo. You can really get creative here!

Profile picture: This should be a portrait of you and should ideally be noticeable so that it is also clearly recognizable in mobile view or in the feed. How professional you appear here depends somewhat on your target group. The only important thing is that you use the same profile picture everywhere and do not change it too often to ensure recognition.

Profile slogan: This line under your name can do much more than just display your job position. Here you can provide a meaningful value proposition or keywords to be found optimally in the LinkedIn search.

Info box: Show the visitors on your profile who you are, what you do and how to reach you! Important: In order for people to want to read this text, try to structure it well with paragraphs or a few suitable emojis!

"In Focus": In this section, you can prominently link your website, articles outside of LinkedIn or even LinkedIn-internal articles and posts. Here, I would definitely place at least two to three important resources!

Recommendations: This section is not used by too many users on LinkedIn, but it is worth its weight in gold for self-employed people to include recommendations from customers directly in the profile and then to reuse it, for example, on your own website.

2. Connect with the right audience

So that your content is seen by the right people, you should actively use the LinkedIn search to connect with your target audience in parallel to your first LinkedIn posts. Otherwise, you will put a lot of work and effort into your posts and they will only be seen by a small number or an outdated network that no longer corresponds to your current target audience.

This active networking with your target audience makes sense until you have a few hundred or 1,000 contacts or followers. On the way there, you will notice that with every LinkedIn post, you automatically gather more followers who are interested in your topic.

3. Engage in discussions

If the first post feels like a huge mountain and you just don't know where to start, start with smaller steps. For example, with meaningful comments. Because that is a big advantage of LinkedIn: Your interactions and comments are also shown to your network in their feed. This means that you can initially get involved in discussions under existing posts, position yourself there as an expert on your topic and also expand your network.

Posting the right content in the right way – a guide

1. Content Mindmap

Consider who you want to address and what interests them. To be successful with your posts on LinkedIn, you should make sure that you offer the users added value and show personality at the same time.

You can create an infinite number of content pieces from your topics. To find ideas, a content mindmap can help you, where you break up your topic into different sub-topics, sub-sub-topics etc. that occur to you and from which you can draw for a long time. The subthemes can, for example, result in different content formats, while the topics on the smallest level can be processed into individual posts. This way, you always have ideas at hand, even when creativity falls short, and you can always record new ideas directly.

A tool you can use to create such mindmaps for free is miro. In the figure, you can see how you could start finding such topics with the help of a content mindmap for your company. For a personal profile, the topics would naturally be a little different. Here, there would be topics like "How I deal with stress" or "My foundation story". For each of these points, countless subpoints can now be found – the more detailed you get, the better!

2. Content plan

Once you have collected many topics for your LinkedIn posts, it makes sense to organize these in an editorial or content plan. This ensures a regular posting frequency, and you save time by preparing and planning posts directly. In addition, such a structure simplifies cooperation with other people who may assist you in creating the contribution.

The project management tool Asana is very suitable for cooperation in a content plan. Simply create a new project here and best use the calendar view for your editorial plan. In the respective tasks for the LinkedIn posts, you can then insert subtasks for the creation of visuals or the writing of the text.

3. Creating a LinkedIn post

When you create a LinkedIn post, there are a few things you should be aware of so that it is successful.

• Variety of formats: Besides text and image posts, it's worth trying out other formats. For example, shared documents (PDF slides) or polls perform very well. Formats that are usually less successful are link posts or shared posts from other users.
• Platform appropriate visuals: I like to use Canva Pro for the creation of visuals and PDFs. Pay attention to the correct image size for your LinkedIn post! You can set this directly in Canva. As many users use LinkedIn on mobile as well, you should post your contributions in a 1:1 or 4:5 format.
• Pay attention to the structure of the post: For personal profiles on LinkedIn, longer, content-rich texts usually perform better – if they are well-structured! So feel free to use the maximum character length of 1,300 characters. It's important to start with an exciting headline that makes users want to read more so that they 'expand' the posting text. The content should then be structured with sufficient paragraphs, emojis, listings etc. so that it is easy to read. At the end, it's useful to ask a question, which encourages the readers to react and join the discussion.

Insider Tip: I am often asked whether it isn't ridiculous to ask a question at the end that nobody answers anyway. I say: NO! Because that's the only way you can create an active community that likes to discuss with you under your posts in the future. How can you give it a little boost at the beginning? Just tag one or two people who might be interested in the topic in the text or in the comments and ask them specifically for their opinion. An alternative would be to send the LinkedIn post directly to these people via direct message and ask them for their opinion.

4. Publish LinkedIn Content

Once you know what and how to publish, of course, you still need to know when. From experience, posts perform best for me during the week in the morning. However, this also strongly depends on your target audience and their use of the platform. Thus, I would advise you to test the perfect posting time for you. For example, you can plan posts for your company page with Hootsuite.

However, especially for publications on your personal LinkedIn profile, I would recommend manual posting at the corresponding time. Why? On the one hand, it is assumed that the algorithm "prefer" contributions posted "natively" to LinkedIn, and on the other hand, you should be available anyway immediately after your publication to be able to respond directly to comments and thus support the performance of your contribution.