What to Post to Engage Your LinkedIn Connections and Followers

In this blog post, I will share my analysis of a 12 months of LinkedIn posts, what I learned about what has helped to engage my LinkedIn connections and followers, and what to post on LinkedIn.

My LinkedIn Obsession

I have been on LinkedIn since 2004, and while I dabbled with it for many years, I never really understood how to use the medium effectively.

When I started healthlaunchpad in 2020, I felt I had unfinished business. I ran a software company, Uniphy Health, and we used LinkedIn early on to help win several customers, but we lost our way and failed to scale what we had learned.

This was especially frustrating, as I have been a B2B marketer in various guises for decades. Social media has been an obsession since the early days. I was determined not to repeat the missteps from my Uniphy days and using LinkedIn and content effectively was my “white whale.”

Before starting healthlaunchpad, I engaged a fantastic LinkedIn marketing coach, Adam Franklin. He taught me a system for improving my LinkedIn profile, how to use my LinkedIn company page, and most importantly, how to grow my LinkedIn connections and how to turn these into relationships. This includes how to create content that would engage my growing network of LinkedIn connections.

From 3,000 to 9,000 LinkedIn Connections

By applying what Adam Franklin taught me, I grew my network of connections and followers from around 3,000 to close to 9,000 in three years.

This was more than vanity. My view about your LinkedIn network is that your connections and followers are one of your most important marketing assets. It’s a bit like building your own personal media channel. If you engage them effectively, you will turn your LinkedIn connections into a loyal audience.

In my case, the most important thing was that the additional 6,000 connections were nearly all in healthcare, so I tripled my network, but more importantly, the additional connections were more likely to be prospective clients.

I can attribute nearly all our clients in some way to this. In many cases, LinkedIn connections have become clients because they attended a webinar and then followed my various posts, were engaged by a few of them, and reached out and scheduled a meeting when the time was right. In other cases, people I had known for a long time told me that the content they saw from me on LinkedIn built trust and confidence that our firm would be the right resource for them.

The key to this is consistency and the frequency of how often I post content on LinkedIn.

A Deliberate LinkedIn Content Strategy

Consistency takes a lot of planning and I have a schedule of posts using many different types of content. The types of content I post include text posts, image posting, LinkedIn offers such as webinars or long-form content, videos, case studies, research and data, and occasionally user-generated content like polls.

I learned early on that the LinkedIn algorithm favors original content posted natively. Conversely, simply sharing links to content posted elsewhere gets every little reach. Why? LinkedIn wants users to stay on the platform.

To that end, I have a content calendar of original daily posts Monday through Friday. From time to time, I will post more than once a day. Here is what a typical week looks like

• MONDAY – A point of view about issues related to ABM
• TUESDAY – I write a new blog post every week and I share that as a LinkedIn article via my newsletter on Tuesdays typically
• WEDNESDAY – A short video excerpt from my podcast
• THURSDAY – Repost of someone else’s articles or posts with commentary
• FRIDAY – Something about the Total Customer Growth book, such as a review

The most important thing is engaging in what others post on LinkedIn. This helps me to understand the current issues, and by tapping into what the broader B2B marketing community is interested in, I have no problem coming up with new Linkedin post ideas.

By the way, I rarely post about our products or services unless it is hyper-relevant to the post I am writing about.

Analyzing What Engaged My LinkedIn Connections

As I was planning my next batch of LinkedIn content ideas, I thought it would be good to assess what performs best.

You get access to several analytics tools if you are a premium member. In my case, my current weekly engagement score is under my profile image in the left column. By clicking on this, you get to your weekly analytics dashboard showing post impressions, followers, profile views, and search appearances.

By clicking on post impressions, you get a chart like this:

I changed the view to look at the last 365 days. This looked something like this.

You can export this data as a csv. This allowed me to analyze the data on the posts. This includes engagement and impressions by data, top posts, data about followers, and demographics.

I was most interested in the data about the top posts. I analyzed the top 60 posts from the prior 365 days.

When I conducted the analysis back in May, the top post had been on December 27th and was a reshare of a fascinating animation about what the most popular websites have been over time. I am pretty chuffed (that’s Yorkshire for pleased) that the announcement of my book with Ben Person, Total Customer Growth, has exceeded this since then.

I analyzed a year of LinkedIn posts by creating a list of tags that covered the different types of content that I had posted. This included:

• Customer insights
• Posts. that were educational and actionable
• Funny posts
• Newsjacking posts
• Video
• Content about SDRs
• Polls
• Sharing others content
• Posts included selfies with others
• Celebrations
• Personal stories
• Slideshows
• LinkedIn Newsletter posts
• Use of @ to tag multiple people
• Use of @ to tag a well know LinkedIn personality with a much bigger following than me
• Posts shared in a group

Note that this was not a mutually exclusive list, so some posts included multiple tags. I was looking for attributes that made a post highly engaging.

So What Types of Content Engage Best

The chart at the top of the post, again for your convenience, shows the output of my analysis.

Over a year, two types of posts consistently performed best.

My #1 most engaging content is actionable education content.

This meant a lot. I put a ton of work into creating content I hope others will learn from. It’s been the keystone of my marketing strategy since day 1, so I was relieved and validated by this.

Here is an example.

Second, were customer insights-related posts.

A close second to learning new things is gaining insight into the market that can provide a competitive edge.

This includes polls like this one.

Tagging others is the #1 Amplifier

Acknowledging others on LinkedIn using the @sign is a great tactic. It has been the most powerful way to boost the viewership of my content. How? When you @ someone, your content is displayed to their followers. It also increases the likelihood that they will reshare or at least comment on your post.

Be careful!

The important thing is to be authentic. Gratuitous tagging will get you in trouble, especially if you try tagging people who have a big following a little too often. They get pissed off, and they look out for people piggybacking on their following.

Text works best, but video is worth the investment

Overall, I have found that a simple all-text original post with 3-4 #tags and a few @references to relevant people is the best-performing format.

There is some debate about the effectiveness of video on LinkedIn. Most importantly, you MUST load the video natively into LinkedIn. In my view, sharing a Youtube video is a waste of time.

Short (less than 90 seconds), well-produced videos that provide some insights work well. They work even better if you include someone with a big following. My most effective use of video were a series of short videos interviewing the remarkable Nick Patel. Nick has a huge following and a well-deserved reputation for being a thought leader, and he did not disappoint in these videos.

This was one of the highest-performing posts in the series.

LinkedIn Newsletter is a great way to increase distribution

I started the Healthtech Marketing Ideas newsletter on LinkedIn about 18 months ago, and the 63 editions have attracted over 2200 followers. What I love about the newsletter is that it allows you to create much longer and deeper posts as articles.

Many of the earlier newsletter articles are among my highest-viewed posts. I have noticed that this has tailed off. I wondered if that was because the content was not as good. However, I have read elsewhere that newsletters are not performing as well overall.

Regardless, the Linkedin newsletter works much more effectively than my email newsletter, which gets a 20% open rate and a ~5% clickthrough.

Keep it fresh and keep trying new things.

The most highly viewed posts were one-offs. For example, posting about being in the UK when the Queen died or a celebration of our third anniversary.

You can’t build a content strategy on that. Or at least I can’t. However, it reinforces that you have to mix it up. Share personal news occasionally but don’t forget that LinkedIn is not Instagram.

• Celebrate big news
• Celebrate your clients
• Share updates about your team
• Tell stories
• Keep it human
• Keep it fresh!

Going Foward

The conclusion from the analysis from this is that LinkedIn is many things but above all, it is a trusted place for business professionals to learn. 

That may not be especially surprising, but this focused me on redoubling our efforts in doing what we have been doing for 3+ years. Creating content and sharing insights that we hope our connections and followers will learn from.

Watch this space. We are working on a new thing that will launch after Labor Day.

By the way, we offer a content marketing program. Please let me know if you would like to learn more.

If you are interested and when you are ready, we can help you on your with your marketing. Here are some ways to get started:

1. Check out more posts like this in the Healthtech Marketing Learning Center. It is chock-full of articles, use cases, how-to’s, and ideas to get you started on your ABM journey.
2. Follow me or connect with me on LinkedIn. I publish videos and articles on ABM and health-tech marketing.
3. Work with me directly. Let’s book a growth session, and we can explore ways you can improve your marketing using the latest techniques in account-based marketing.