Since the dawn of social media, marketers have tapped the enormous potential of shareable content to gain awareness among key audiences. On LinkedIn, highly shared content can be a total game-changer for brands and individuals alike.
What’s the secret to shareable content on LinkedIn?
There’s no gimmick, or “gaming the system.” It’s all about building content and ads around the type of response you want to elicit. It’s about appealing to the motivations that prompt people to share content.
If you advertise or plan to advertise on LinkedIn, also know that advertisers can get free reach on Sponsored Content that gets organically shared. In this way, shareable content has become a secret weapon of sorts for marketers looking to maximize their brand-building budget and boost content ROI.
3 Keys to Shareable Content on LinkedIn
Let’s explore three ways marketers can maximize their content’s shareability on LinkedIn.
Understand what your audience wants to accomplish on the platform
When it comes to educating, inspiring, and providing value to their professional networks, many LinkedIn members are what you’d call highly motivated. If expanded reach is your goal, creating content that helps your audience educate, enlighten, or entertain their network is bound to get shared.
What does that mean, exactly? Well, if we’re to use most shared content on LinkedIn in 2022 as a guide, it’s clear that remote work was a huge topic. This isn’t too surprising. The current state of work culture has always been a popular discussion on LinkedIn. As such, creating content that sheds new light on how people are working, what’s effective, or what isn’t can be a good option for gaining greater brand recognition in any given sector.
In addition to keeping up with work trends, it’s clear that LinkedIn members like to express their views and core values via the content they share. Kindness and empathy were among the most popular themes this past year.
If your ideal customer profile shares core values, keep these values front and center when choosing themes for your content. For example, if your audience values, say, precision, an article about rising or declining standards in your industry could potentially help your brand gain attention among key audience members. More importantly, addressing trends in precision can enable these same stakeholders to positively associate your brand with a value they hold dear.
Of course, professionals on LinkedIn also like good stories and impassioned opinions. To help clarify, here are three of the primary reasons audiences are compelled to share content on LinkedIn.
I want to share this because:
- It’s really helpful information and I think my peers in my network would find it useful.
- It’s clever or funny or unique and I think my friends and colleagues would get a kick out of it.
- It’s thought-provoking or contrarian and I think it will generate good discussion on my feed.
If you can genuinely characterize your content under any of these descriptors, you’re on the right track for shareability.
Always be testing your headlines and visuals
For content to be shared, it must first be noticed. Coming up with catchy headlines and creating visuals that command eyeballs can be difficult. Testing headlines and visuals not only gives you more chances to “get it right,” it also promotes collaboration and a performance mindset among your team.
The visual element is especially critical. If you’re not currently using visuals with your content, we highly recommend that you start. Images typically result in a 2x higher comment rate on LinkedIn.
If you’re currently using static visuals, try testing collages or video. Custom image collages have worked particularly well for organizations, and audiences on LinkedIn are 20x more likely to share videos than any other type of post.
The more you test, the more you learn, and the more skilled you become at creating headlines and visuals that stand out. On LinkedIn, testing in Campaign Manager can allow you to:
- Gain insight into the market sentiment of your ads and your brand
- Optimize your campaigns based on data
- Prove the success of your ads
Foster engagement and interactions
Engagement is key to driving content sharing and brand visibility on LinkedIn. Never just assume that your audience will engage with your content. Instead, set a certain type of engagement as your goal and actively encourage your audience to interact with your content in the manner you desire.
For example, if your goal is to generate discussion, you could add a CTA encouraging audience members to leave a comment. And while commenting isn’t the same as sharing, it works similarly in that your audience’s interactions can show up in the feeds of those who follow them, providing your content with a boost in visibility.
Experiment with creating LinkedIn polls and try to come up with thought-provoking questions that invite your audience to share their expertise and opinions. And be sure to respond and engage in the conversations you start. Your ongoing participation can foster a sense of community that encourages others to join the discussion – and in doing so, help to amplify it.
Finally, if you’ve found yourself with some highly shareable content, give serious consideration to sponsoring it. To reiterate, Sponsored Content that gets organically shared is essentially “bonus reach” that you don’t pay for. The fact that your content has already demonstrated high shareability may bode very well for ROI, particularly if reach or awareness is your goal.
For more advice and insights on getting your content seen and shared, subscribe to the LinkedIn Ads Blog.
Topics: Content marketing
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