Once known as the social platform exclusively for networking professionals and recruiters, people are turning to LinkedIn to find more than just their next job opportunity. 

LinkedIn is now a place where people build their personal brand, promote their products and services, and share expert tips and hot takes on trending industry-specific topics. 

Whether you work in the B2B space and want to generate leads, network with others in your industry, or are looking to recruit new employees, LinkedIn is a powerful tool to use.

If you’re not sure which social media platform is right for your business, jump over to our social media quickstarter guide. Otherwise, let’s take a look at our LinkedIn post best practices for marketers and small businesses.

Your LinkedIn business profile is the perfect place to reach your target audience, share what makes your brand great, and promote your products or services. 

It’s important to have a plan in place before you begin posting on LinkedIn and building your audience on the social media platform. When you know who you want to reach on the platform and how you will try to reach them, you’ll start to see a positive impact on your return on investment (ROI).

How long should LinkedIn posts be?

Your LinkedIn posts can vary in length. Like most social media platforms, LinkedIn has a character limit for posts. When you reach more than 140 characters, your post will show a “See More…” button that people can click to view the rest of your caption.

With that said, post length is ultimately determined by your end goal. For example, if your goal is to keep your audience engaged with your content on LinkedIn, you can experiment with long-form captions. However, if you want your audience to stop scrolling and take actions like commenting on your post or visiting your website based on your call to action, experiment with short, captivating captions.

Types of posts that work best on LinkedIn

Along with experimenting with the length of your posts, for LinkedIn post best practices, you should also try out different types of posts and keep track of they perform. The types of posts that work best on LinkedIn include:

  • A visual element with a caption that either educates, informs, or entertains your target audience
  • Relevant hashtags in your caption to reach people who are searching for similar content
  • Tags (known as mentions on LinkedIn) of any brands or people you shout out in your posts to increase engagement on your post from reactions and comments.

You can plan out and schedule a variety of posts for a set amount of time, like one month to three months, and take note of how many engagements those posts received. Once you identify which ones are the top-performing post types, you can create more posts using the same post type and LinkedIn posts best practices.

Share a variety of content types

LinkedIn has a unique user base that responds differently to the types of content you share.

Share a mix of content that goes beyond promoting your product or services. Along with your promotional posts, plan content that resonates with your audience’s interests and pain points using LinkedIn post copy best practices. 

Here are some of the best content types for posting on LinkedIn to ensure your posts perform well on the platform:

Have audience-focused content

Like other outlets, the content you post on LinkedIn will depend on what kind of audience you’re trying to reach. 

Consider your specific target audience on LinkedIn as you create your strategy based on LinkedIn posting best practices. So even if you’ve been optimizing your social media strategy for a while, don’t assume that what works on one platform translates well to the other social media platforms. 

While some people and businesses use LinkedIn to network with other professionals in their industry, either to fill job vacancies or develop their skills and knowledge, others utilize posting on LinkedIn to market to their customer base, especially for B2B products and services. 

You can use the steps below to easily create audience-focused content.

  • Figure out who you’re speaking to in order to be sure you’re sharing content on topics that interest your target audience. 
  • Research your audience to learn what pain points they face in their business or life, their goals, and their interests. 
  • Create posts that will resonate with your audience by entertaining them, educating them, or informing them on topics that help them or be interesting to them.

Examples of audience-focused content

For example, you can look into what news outlets and magazines people in your industry follow, then share related content to capture their attention using LinkedIn post best practices.  

A CEO seeking to network with other CEOs and leaders in their industry could share content about the latest market trends, advancements in their industry, and leadership tactics. 

A marketing professional who wants to connect with other professionals can follow marketing influencers and share their thoughts on the influencers’ thought leadership posts and other content.

LinkedIn content creators focusing on marketing-related topics, and marketing industry newsletter editors like Total ANNARCHY’s Ann Handley or The Baer Fact’s Jay Baer are great examples.    

Include visual content 

Visual content has become an expectation on social media outlets, and LinkedIn is no exception. 

Images, graphics, infographics, memes, and other visual elements help catch attention as people scroll through their social media feeds. LinkedIn post best practice is to always include a visual element when posting.

Most professionals on LinkedIn today know they need to include visuals but don’t understand the true value. They add a simple stock photo to their blog post to make it “visual” when there are more valuable ways to create visual content on LinkedIn. 

Some examples of visual elements you can share in your LinkedIn posts include:

  • Sharing an infographic of industry data
  • Showing a photo of your employees or customers
  • Creating a graphic or chart using an interesting quote or statistic you pull out from the article you’re sharing
  • Posting one visual element or several in a photo carousel 
  • Creating a relatable meme that speaks to your audience’s interests or pain points. 

Sharing a graphic with simple design edits to show a visualization of your point of view is a great way to get LinkedIn users to stop scrolling and engage with your post:

Brianne Fleming, host of the ‘Making the Band’ Podcast, shares her thought leadership take on Pedialyte’s branding and marketing tweaks to its electrolyte solution product.

Include video content

Just like other outlets, video content on LinkedIn performs extremely well compared to text-only content. 

You should create a video marketing strategy for your LinkedIn posts because many people will stop scrolling to check out a video post over reading a caption in a post without any visual or video elements. 

Keep in mind that, like Facebook, LinkedIn will auto-play videos, so it’s important to use LinkedIn posting best practices tactics to capture your audience’s attention and always offer value to them. You can share captivating video content that will get your audience to stop scrolling when the video auto-plays by including a mix of either educational content, entertaining content, or content that addressed your target audience’s pain points.   

Also, consider the Linkedin post copy best practices of adding closed captions to make your video accessible to everyone. Closed captions are also a great way to reach LinkedIn users that prefer to scroll through social media with their audio turned off.

Make the most of LinkedIn Articles & Newsletters

LinkedIn Articles and LinkedIn Newsletters are valuable features for marketers. You get unique benefits to help your content get more visibility when you use either feature to showcase your brand’s voice and your industry expertise.

The LinkedIn publisher platform gives marketers access to native audience targeting and tagging features you can use to reach the right people with your content using LinkedIn publishing for pages. Posting articles and newsletters on LinkedIn is also great for SEO — since LinkedIn is such a high authority domain, your content has a better chance of ranking well in search results than native blog content.

Let’s dive into how you can establish your brand’s voice and expertise using LinkedIn post best practices in your articles and newsletters on the social platform.

Educate

Teach your audience about topics that interest them. Offer value by showing them how to navigate certain tasks or challenges related to your industry. A LinkedIn statistics guide found that 91% of executives rate LinkedIn as their first choice for professionally relevant content. Ensure that your LinkedIn content is focused on providing educational value.

Be a thought leader

Most successful LinkedIn marketers use Articles & Newsletters as a platform to create and share thought leadership. In fact, 97% of leading B2B marketers use LinkedIn to publish content. 

LinkedIn is the place to go beyond highlighting the latest trends in your industry. Instead, take a stand on controversial topics. Maybe last week, someone published an opinion in Forbes that you don’t agree with. Explain your position in an article or newsletter post on LinkedIn. 

You can also stretch beyond industry topics when sharing thought leadership.

CEOs, COOs and other business leaders often share insights on how to run a business, how to manage teams, their points of view on changes in their industry or the job market and other insights. Sales professionals and marketing specialists often share insights into how they view workplace and industry trends, as well as their success and failure stories.

Develop your brand presence

You can develop your brand presence using LinkedIn post best practices. The LinkedIn Publisher platform is a great platform to share what’s going on at your business. If you use your native blog to market to potential customers, then use LinkedIn Publisher to share and discuss business with your industry. 

Share updates about major company events like product launches, mergers, etc. You can also use examples from everyday life at your business as anecdotes in your thought leadership articles.

When to post on LinkedIn

Now that you know the benefits of posting on LinkedIn and the types of content you should post, you can optimize your LinkedIn content by strategically posting using LinkedIn post best practices. Having a plan and schedule in place for when you post on LinkedIn will ensure your content gets viewed by your target audience. Here are key tips on when you should post on LinkedIn: 

  • Post at least once a week to keep your LinkedIn posts visible on your target audience’s feed. 
  • Focus on posting when your audience is most active to boost the number of engagements on your LinkedIn posts. 
  • Use LinkedIn Analytics to get insights on which posts performed the best and take note of when you published them. Use these insights to tweak your future posts and posting schedule

Use data analytics to measure success

LinkedIn Analytics is one of the best social media analytics tools out there. You can use it to look at important things like:

  • Traffic. Monitor how your audience grows based on your content strategy. From your Company Page, you can visualize your traffic data for the past 15 days up to the last 365 days. Or you can set a custom range of dates to view. 
  • Engagement. Get a qualitative look at your content’s performance. Go to the Activity dashboard to see likes, shares, comments, and mentions. 
  • Audience Demographics. Use these insights to better target your audience with content. On your Company Page, you can also look at visitor demographic information, like job function, location, seniority, industry, and company size. 
  • Followers. You can also visualize your follower gains over the past 15 days up to the last 365 days. Or you can set a custom range of dates to view, including gains from organic vs sponsored content.
Here is an example of visitor demographics for a company page on LinkedIn. You can view your company’s LinkedIn Page analytics by navigating to your company’s page on LinkedIn > clicking on Analytics > and then clicking on Visitors.

Monitor key metrics on LinkedIn Analytics to monitor your marketing performance and make informed changes to your LinkedIn marketing strategy.

Get started with posting on LinkedIn

While it’s the only major social platform that’s specifically for professionals, LinkedIn has turned into a popular online space to open up to your peers to share important topics like your personal career journey, life updates, workplace trends, hot takes, and more. This makes using LinkedIn post best practices to consistently post on LinkedIn great for marketers, small businesses, and most brands in general.  

Start by figuring out your target audience, then research their pain points and interests, and create a mix of content to post that includes different types of visual elements. Lastly, use your LinkedIn analytics data to monitor the performance of your posts and adjust your posting strategy as needed.