How to Create and Automate Your LinkedIn Content Strategy
How much thought do you currently put into “what” and “when” you post on LinkedIn?
You want every piece of content you post to help you get closer to reaching your LinkedIn goals, especially if you’re using LinkedIn for social selling.
In this article you will learn how you can build an effective posting schedule for LinkedIn, in order to achieve your goals as well become more efficient with the time you spend on LinkedIn.
You NEED to create a LinkedIn content strategy before posting anything else.
In order to get results from any social network – or any marketing tactic or channel – you need a plan or a strategy. Planning helps you focus on what matters; namely, on what will get results or move you closer to achieving your goals, whether it is increasing brand awareness, finding more sales prospects, or generating more revenue, to name a few.
With a plan in place you can focus your efforts on just those tasks and activities which produce results, which will help you be more productive with your time and efforts on LinkedIn and ultimately help you grow your business.
How to create an effective LinkedIn content strategy
There are several aspects to creating a LinkedIn content strategy, and it all starts with your objectives and goals.
First though, consider your business objectives; what is your businesses’ focus? How exactly are you planning to grow it and where does LinkedIn fit in?
Once you’re clear on what you want to achieve, you can also establish what your objective is with LinkedIn so that it reflects your overall business goals.
After all, that’s why so many businesses use social media: to help them achieve their business goals faster and more efficiently.
Some of the most popular LinkedIn goals are:
- Promoting your blog/website and driving traffic
- Generating more leads and sales for your business
- Becoming a known expert/thought-leader in your industry
- Improving awareness of your brand and reaching more of your target audience
- Increasing your revenue
Once you know what you want to achieve with LinkedIn, the next step is to understand your audience so that you can create content that will inspire them to take action – whatever action you want them to take.
Put together a few different audience personas answering these questions:
- Who are they?
- Where are they from?
- Where do they work? What is their industry?
- What are their needs and interests?
- What are their problems?
- What language do they use to communicate these?
By knowing exactly who you’re targeting, you can create more personalized content that will resonate with each of your different audience personas. The more specific you get, the easier it will be to create the right content to get them to convert.
For example, if you provide social media marketing services to business owners who are struggling to keep up with their profiles, you could post short tips to help them save time or direct them towards curated content that will help them solve their problem in some way.
What and when to post content on LinkedIn
Ideally, you should build a thorough posting strategy and post different types of updates to not only keep things interesting, but also to cover all the different audience personas you’re targeting.
Some of the content you could share include:
- Blog posts (yours and curated content)
- Videos
- Images, infographics, and other visuals
- LinkedIn Pulse articles
- Slides
- Whitepapers, research papers, and case studies
But, no matter the format you’re using, anything you post MUST:
- Help you achieve your business and LinkedIn objectives
- Be relevant to your target audience
As to when you should post, it’s important to remember that you’re targeting professionals – which means they’re more likely to be active during weekdays, during their working hours:
As a general rule, LinkedIn users are most active right before and after work (7-8 am and 5-6pm), as well as during lunch time (12 pm). That said, your audience might be different – it’s worth testing various days and times to see how it affects your reach and engagement.
Keep in mind, if you are targeting audiences from different parts of the world, they will be active at completely different times. That’s why it’s a good idea to plan your content ahead of time and schedule it to go out at the right time to get maximum engagement/reach.
Here are some of the best tools for scheduling LinkedIn updates:
1. Agorapulse (Get 2 months free with Agorapulse here.) is a great option for scheduling your updates because it has several different scheduling options to suit your needs, beyond regular scheduling (i.e. specific dates and times):
- A social media calendar for visualising and planning your entire LinkedIn strategy in advance:
- Bulk uploading for multiple images, as well as for multiple updates at once through a CSV file. Plus, you can also quickly curate content from any website with an RSS feed – just pop over to the website URL and the tool will pull up their posts so you can select the ones you want to publish and customize them with your own thoughts and visuals
- Queue content in categories: this is a very useful and a time-saving feature which you can use for automatic resharing of your evergreen posts, as well as to automate sharing your content (just once, or as many times as you want). You can create different categories of content (blog posts, curated content, infographics, promotional posts, and so on) and set up time slots for each one so that the posts in each category are automatically shared (as I mentioned earlier, even multiple times if you want to)
Plus, you can also collaborate with other team members and assign tasks, create drafts, and easily check updates that were assigned to you or need your approval.
2. Sprout Social is another social media management tool, one which you can use to fully manage your LinkedIn company pages.
There are several ways to use Sprout Social for setting up your schedule, and not just one-off scheduling for each of your posts.
One of these ways is to upload your evergreen content to a queue and set daily posting times so the updates go out automatically. Plus, you can also use their bookmarklet to quickly schedule updates from around the web, directly from your browser.
But my favourite feature is the content curation; you can set up RSS feeds from your preferred publications, or you can use their own search engine to find quality content to share with your audience:
You can browse through all kinds of business categories, as well as other industries to find content to share. You can also see exactly how well a post has performed, so you can gauge its potential to engage your audience. Once you find what is working, you can easily customize posts and schedule or queue them up to be published again at a later time.
3. While the two previous tools are full-suite social media management tools, MeetEdgar is all about the scheduling – mostly the queue.
While you can also schedule updates for specific dates and times, the big attraction with MeetEdgar is the evergreen queue.
You can pretty much create as many categories of content as you want and upload your content; the tool will then automatically share the posts in each queue and unless you specify otherwise (you can set an expiry date for each individual post so that they don’t get shared beyond that date) they will be automatically re-shared once the queue of content is finished.
Once you’ve finished creating and uploading content to your different queues, the next step is to set up time slots for each category:
And once that is done, you can pretty much leave the tool to do its job and simply add more content when you want.
The other big MeetEdgar feature is that you can also queue up curated content; however, you don’t have a lot of customization options, as it’s more about saving time: basically, you add the RSS feeds you want, and the tool will share the posts automatically at the rate you prefer.
Free up more time with a LinkedIn content strategy
Creating a LinkedIn content strategy with a schedule ahead of time and strategizing your updates will ultimately help you save time and generate better results for your business and company page.
Automation of your content (but NEVER your engagement) is an effective part of your LinkedIn content strategy, so that you can plan to post more varied content, be more consistent with your posting schedule, and make sure that you’re posting the right content at the right time.
Highly regarded on the world speaker circuit, Lilach has graced Forbes and Number 10 Downing Street. She is listed in Forbes as one of the top 20 women social media power influencers, named one of top ten digital marketers by Brand24 and was crowned the Social Influencer of Europe by Oracle.
