LinkedIn is one of the best and cost friendly tools available to B2B businesses who want to elevate and spread awareness of their brand, foster trust, and build lasting relationships. By following these best practices and crafting a compelling LinkedIn strategy, MSPs can effectively promote their services and connect with their target audience. Dive into this blog to learn how to make the most out of your company LinkedIn page.
Avoid spam perception
One of the most important considerations when posting on LinkedIn is to avoid things that flag your posts as spam. Be mindful of the following:
- Grammar and spelling: Ensure your posts maintain professional credibility by avoiding poor grammar or spelling errors. Clear, well-constructed content fosters trust within the professional sphere.
- Link usage: Be cautious with multiple links in a single post. While sharing resources is valuable, an abundance of links can be perceived as promotional or spam-like.
- Engagement requests: Avoid explicitly asking for likes or comments, as this can be viewed as artificially inflating engagement. Let your content naturally elicit responses, creating genuine interactions.
- Hashtag usage: Hashtags can enhance visibility, but moderation is key. Limit yourself to three to five relevant hashtags per post. Quality over quantity ensures that your post reaches the right audience without appearing overly promotional.
- Tagging: Exercise discretion when tagging people in posts. Tagging numerous individuals might be perceived as excessive or intrusive. Focus on tagging those directly relevant to the content
- Post monitoring: Pay attention to audience feedback. If someone marks your post as spam, consider reassessing your content strategy.
Low quality content vs. high quality content
An obvious best practice when posting on LinkedIn is to share high quality content. Content your customers view as valuable is more likely to spark engagement. By default, LinkedIn will put your posts in front of a fraction of your company’s followers to see what kind of response it gets. The higher engagement your posts get initially, the more likely it is to perform well.
There are several factors that will influence how far your content goes. Here are a few of them:
- Recency: Content that’s “fresh” or shows recent engagement boosts its likelihood of appearing in other newsfeeds.
- Time interval: LinkedIn favors a balanced posting frequency. A 24-hour interval between posts is recommended, steering clear of overwhelming your audience.
- Relevance: Tailor your content to specific audiences by embracing niche topics. The more specialized your content, the easier it is for LinkedIn to accurately index and deliver it to the right audience.
- Demonstration of expertise: Showcase your expertise by aligning the concepts and keywords in your LinkedIn profile with those featured in your posts. This consistency bolsters your credibility as an authority on the subject.
Additionally, consider incorporating the values and characteristics of your company into your content. Express opinions or showcase unique perspectives from the subject matter experts within your company to make your posts more engaging and shareable.
Length and organization of LinkedIn posts
Be conscious of the length and organization of your LinkedIn posts. The LinkedIn algorithm prefers posts to be at least 1,000 characters or more. This shows that your posts are thoughtful and provide good insight into the topic of the post.
In addition, pay attention to the language you use. Aim for shorter words, shorter paragraphs, bullet points, and a format that is easily digestible for the viewer. LinkedIn prefers you keep people on LinkedIn. That means occasionally favoring content that keeps users in the app, instead of sharing external links that drive people away from LinkedIn. Things like photos, events, polls, occasions, hiring posts, or documents shared within your post can all be viewed on LinkedIn. You can even publish blogs to your LinkedIn company page and share that way, versus sending the viewer to your company website.
Lastly, LinkedIn loves engagement. They want to see your followers like, comment, and repost your content. It’s especially useful if the people engaging with your content have a history of engaging with content similar to the content you’re sharing. LinkedIn measures how long users interact with posts to gauge the quality of engagement. Engagement should improve if you follow the best practices in this blog!
LinkedIn engagement strategy for MSPs
If you're not sure how to get started, that’s ok. The following are some recommendations of what to do and what not to do:
What increases LinkedIn engagement?
The first sentence of your post is the most important. It’s the hook of your post and it’s the first thing people see. This could be something like an interesting statistic, intriguing question, or important announcement. If you have an engaging first sentence it will lead your audience to click the “…see more” link on your post which will expand the reach of your post to a wider audience.
Occasionally, include photos of people in your posts. People are drawn to connection – especially on a platform that can, at times, feel very impersonal. Sharing a picture of your team or a team member highlight can personify your business, which increases engagement.
Certain post formats get better engagement. For example, PDF carousels, text (+ image), and video posts often get better engagement. In addition to these, newsletters, articles, and polls also do well on LinkedIn.
What decreases LinkedIn engagement?
Several times in this blog, we’ve mentioned quality over quantity – and that’s because it’s one of the most important features of LinkedIn content. Don’t post short, text-only, mundane, or broad content. Your posts should be relevant, easy to absorb, well thought out, and thought provoking.
Limit your use of external links, and don’t overdo it with images. External links are necessary in many instances, but don’t include an external link in every post – switch it up. Images are great, but aim to use one good quality photo per post rather than multiple.
Posting and engaging at the right time
Every industry is different, including managed IT. Aim to post when your audience is online; for most businesses this is Monday thru Friday, with the heaviest traffic on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays from 9:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m. When someone comments on your post, you should respond as quickly as possible – so stay on alert and pay attention to engagement once you’ve published a post.
For most industries, the least advantageous time to post is weekends and late at night. An occasional weekend post may be ok – less content overall means a higher likelihood of your post showing up in people’s timeline – but less viewers also means lower engagement.
Putting these LinkedIn best practices into action
When it comes to executing an effective LinkedIn strategy for your company, there is a lot to pay attention to, and we recognize it’s challenging to keep track of it all. Collabrance provides white label marketing materials to help service providers get started with marketing on LinkedIn and elsewhere. Learn more about our sales and marketing support – a value-add free to all Collabrance service providers – by submitting a contact form below and discovering the ways we can help your MSP grow – fast.
