5 Hacks for a kick ass Content Strategy on LinkedIn

LinkedIn hasn’t always been the most visual of social networks – it’s no Facebook, and it’s certainly no Instagram. However, that's changed quite a bit in recent years, and even though it might seem that LinkedIn isn’t as visual a platform as the other top social networks, the truth is that visuals do still play a key role, with photos, videos, infographics, presentations and so much more being shared on LinkedIn every day.

In fact, even Megan Golden, LinkedIn’s group manager of global content marketing, has discussed the importance of visual content, and the power it can have. After all, it doesn’t matter if you’re a professional at work, a customer, or a professional in your free time, visual content speaks to all of us, much more so than text alone.

In this post, I’m going to share some key tips and tools for developing a winning LinkedIn visual content strategy and maximizing your on-platform performance.

• Profile image - For your personal profile, use a clear picture of you. For your company page, use your logo – this is the easiest part of the process
• The LinkedIn banner - Your LinkedIn banner is one of the most visible elements of your profile, especially at first glance. As a company, it’s important to leverage this part of your profile in order to promote your website or blog, to explain who you are and what you do, or simply to compel people to explore more of your page. For example, Hays, the staffing and recruiting company uses its LinkedIn banner to promote their expert insights blog, Hays Journal:

• Throughout the rest of your profile - Whether you're using a personal profile or a company page, it’s important to populate it with imagery throughout. From the updates, you share to the 'What We Do' tab, try to incorporate visual elements in each section.

Build your visual content strategy

What do you want to achieve with LinkedIn marketing?

Your visual content strategy for LinkedIn should support your broader goals, with a view to helping you achieve them:

• Want to maximize brand awareness and generate more engagement? Share more educational content that brings value to your target audience
• Want to promote your business and boost conversions and sales? Then promote your best products, services and features - for example, here’s how LinkedIn promotes its referral feature with a video:

• Want to become a thought leader in your niche? Then share amazing curated content, as well as useful tips and educational content (which can be articles, images, videos)

First, start by writing down what you want to achieve with LinkedIn, and only then start planning the content that you’ll need to create in order to achieve the results you want. There are several types of visual content that you can publish on LinkedIn:

• Images
• Videos
• Infographics

Plus, whenever you share any text updates, it’s worth including some form of visual content to make it stand out and make people want to stop and read your message.

Using tools to help you implement your LinkedIn visual content strategy

To better plan your LinkedIn social media calendar, you can use a social media management tool like Agorapulse:

This will enable you to create drafts of your content ideas and place them in your calendar to gain a better idea of what your publishing schedule should look like. You can also collaborate with your team on this process, and ensure that you only publish or schedule content that's been previously approved by a relevant editor/manager. But what’s really cool here is that you can schedule and publish all of your visual content, including videos, directly to your LinkedIn Company Page. What’s more, you can actually publish up to 10 different images per post, both on your LinkedIn Profile and customer page:

Another type of tool you need is one to create the visual content, such as Canva, one of the leaders in the biz. You can use Canva to create numerous types of designs for LinkedIn (and not only), including banners, infographics, images (and animated images), eBook covers and many more:

It’s very easy to get the hang of Canva, even if you’re not a designer, and the app has numerous templates to choose from, for any type of design you want. And last but not least, it’s also a good idea to leverage more videos on your LinkedIn page. In order to do so, and be able to produce video content easily and quickly, you can use a tool like Adobe Spark. Creating videos in Spark is actually quite simple - you just need to combine video clips and photos, add text overlay and other elements, and voila – it’s ready to download and publish. And as you can see in the screenshot below, you can either start completely from scratch or if you’re not sure where to begin, you can use one of their existing templates:

Measure, analyze and optimize your LinkedIn visual strategy

In order to continually improve and optimize your LinkedIn visual content strategy, it’s important that you also measure and analyze your results.

• How many views are your videos getting? Why are certain videos getting more views than others?
• Which of your visual updates perform best/worst? Why is that? The more you understand the reason behind why some posts perform well and some don’t, the easier it will be to create more content that resonates with your target audience

Ideally, you can use A/B testing techniques to see how different visual content is affecting your results – do you get more clicks on a blog post when you use a specific graphics/video? Do you get more views on a video when you use different headlines/captions? Keep measuring your LinkedIn results continuously, and try to interpret them to understand what they mean for your broader visual content strategy.