This is the third in our series of how you can use LinkedIn to grow your business!
One question that comes up a lot is: What content should I post?
The answer to this is: content your target audience wants to view! What is that? They may be interested in your product or service, but they might not be willing to invest a minute in the boring self-serving details. So, give them news they can use. What questions do you hear most often from clients? Post the answers to that. For us, that has been posts about how we recruit our panel, how do we detect fraud, what diseases do we cover, practical information like that.
Should the content have videos, pictures, in addition to text?
That is an interesting question. Based on the responses we have seen, the answer is an ambiguous “all of the above.”
As you may have seen, I post a lot of videos. And I get a lot of feedback from clients at conferences telling me they see my videos! So that works. But our posts that have gotten the greatest number of views and likes either just had a picture, or were just text! So, it appears to me the content is more important than the format.
One thing that is continually appealing – posting pictures of others, and labeling with the @ function. People love to see others they know. We’ll take pictures at conferences and at client meetings with clients, and people love to see them. Just like you want to see yourself or someone you know on TV, people like to see them on LinkedIn. And by putting their @name there, they will be notified of it, like it, and spread the word even further.
And comedy is also appealing. Our top-viewed post, now at 20,000 views and still gaining, was a funny post of a questionnaire about where people had heard of the YMCA – TV, Radio, mail, etc. And someone wrote, “Other – Village People.” That must just have struck everyone’s funny bone. Not sure that directly promotes our business, but in that example, we got likes from many people we hadn’t been linked to, including the CEO of Microsoft, and gave us the opportunity to link with many of them.
If you do share a video, my advice is to also caption the words. If you’re like me, your LinkedIn defaults to mute, so if you are just paging through your feed, if no caption is on, you may not see anything but a talking head and no sound. But with a caption, viewers can at least see if the topic is interesting and watch further and even turn the sound on!
