LinkedIn has positioned itself as the de facto social platform for professional networking, surpassing Facebook and Twitter in usage for B2-B marketing. It’s the ultimate tool for building your own professional brand, showcasing your expertise, and engaging with your audience.
However, creating compelling LinkedIn content works a little differently than other social media platforms. On LinkedIn, you aren’t just tweeting out marketing promos for consumers – you’re supposed to write insightful, engaging content that your target audience will actually find valuable.
Why? LinkedIn has a professional audience, and your content should be designed to attract and engage with them. In this article, we’re going to share some important tips for crafting the best LinkedIn outreach posts.
1) Be Consistent and Write Often.
The best way to create a robust audience on LinkedIn is to consistently publish quality content, and maintain a high standard of quality over time. As we’ve mentioned, you want to position yourself as an expert, someone with incredible resources of knowledge that can help your prospects get the most value from your services.
This means that you should consistently be writing fresh content, offering the latest insights and suggestions. Don’t be a trend follower, be a trendsetter and be the first to publish new content and information that your prospects are looking for.
Writing is also a skill that can be honed over time, so the more you write on a regular basis, the more comfortable and confident you’ll feel about your writing skills, and the better content you’ll be able to produce.
It’s a great idea to write posts ahead of time, and then use a social post scheduler to publish your content on the days you specify. This is highly useful for those days when you feel super creative and can write a week’s worth of posts in one sitting because that sort of in-the-zone random creativity isn’t something you can schedule!
2) Write Unique and Helpful Industry Insights.
Positioning yourself as an expert in your particular industry is one of the major goals here, and so your LinkedIn content should reflect the knowledge and expertise that you’ve gained over the years in your career.
For example, if you run a B2B service company, your LinkedIn content should detail common issues that business owners face in their field and the solutions that you’ve developed. The key here is to communicate a professional, informational message about your company, without being overly promotional.
Let’s say your company offers CRM integration services to help small and medium-sized businesses connect their apps to their data analysis software. Instead of writing content on the surface-level features of your services, write detailed insights on common grievances that your target audience has with their current CRM provider.
In other words, you don’t want to promote your product in hit-and-run ad posts, but instead write articles that provide valuable insights about your industry and clients, and position yourself as an expert.
3) Share Relatable Stories and Anecdotes in the Bropost Format.
LinkedIn broposting is a colloquial term for the single-line sentence story posts that became popular amongst growth marketers, and while it seems odd that people are basically writing corporate stories in what looks like haiku format, it’s actually been proven to be highly effective in LinkedIn marketing.
We’re not exactly sure why LinkedIn bro posting works so well, but it does.
Maybe these single-spaced sentences add a personal touch, or they just capture the attention of your target audience.
Maybe they create a dramatic effect and hook your readers into reading your content line-by-line.
Maybe they simply create an intriguing curiosity that leads people to click through and read the rest of your post.
It’s hard to say why exactly LinkedIn bro posting works so well, but it’s not a bad idea to incorporate it into your outreach posts. However, there’s a specific format to follow when adopting this post strategy.
First, you should know that the first 240 characters are the most important for hooking your audience – 240 characters is the cutoff before LinkedIn displays a “see more” button, so you need to make sure your first 240 characters (30 – 60 words, roughly 2 sentences) are engaging and interesting.
Next, you need to create a compelling and interesting story. It can be an anecdote from your own experience or an insight into common industry pain points that you’ve experienced in your career. The more relatable and interesting the story, the better.
Finally, you should ask a question at the end of your post, to stimulate reader responses and encourage them to share their own experiences with you. This gives you the opportunity to address specific comments, and further share your own insights and expertise.
4) Be Personal and Follow Your Followers.
Remember that while you’re using LinkedIn for promoting your own business, it’s still a social media platform – so be social. Engaging with other people’s content is a great way to get them engaged with yours, as people tend to operate on a reciprocal basis when it comes to social media networking.
Instead of sending cold outreach DMs to potential clients right off the bat, try following them and offering your unique insights on their posts, if they mention pain points or grievances that your business is in a position to help with.
By engaging with their content, you’re not only providing value to them, but you’re also building a personal relationship with them, which will help you stay top-of-mind when they’re ready to hear more about your service.
5) Avoid Confusing Buzzwords – Use the ELI5 Principle.
ELI5 is an internet acronym that means “explain like I’m 5”, and is commonly used when people want technical information summarized into easily digestible, concise, and actionable advice.
This is a great approach to writing LinkedIn content because corporate word salads laden with buzzwords only makes your content sound more complicated than it actually is, and may lose readers at the start.
Even if people can navigate through the buzzwords, it just looks like overcompensation for when you don’t really have anything insightful or useful to say.
If you can’t clearly explain exactly what your business does and instead rely on buzzwords and technical jargon to try and capture their attention, you’re losing a lot of potential customers who would’ve otherwise considered working with you, or taking a look at your profile.
You can improve your LinkedIn outreach posts by simply using the ELI5 principle, and writing as if you were explaining things to a layperson for them to easily understand.
As a final point, always remember to be genuine. In a highly competitive platform where other voices are competing for readers and engagement, it’s easy to write content that sounds like it was copied and pasted from a template, and it will only lead to you losing credibility with your prospects.
Instead, aim to be as unique and genuine as possible, which will help you stand out from the crowd and ultimately win over more prospects and customers.
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