Program

Audience Community of Practice: Leveraging LinkedIn

May 22, 2024

The Audience Community of Practice met on June 20 for a peer-led conversation about how to leverage the current renaissance of LinkedIn.

When it comes to LinkedIn audiences, remember that everyone wants an opportunity to look smart on the platform and boost their professional reputation. To drive engagement, invite people to show off their expertise by asking a question at the end of a post. Because comments are prioritized in the algorithm, encouraging people to start a conversation in the comments will boost engagement levels. In this way, opinion pieces and interactive polls also tend to gain traction on the platform.

Another successful tactic is to share your personal and organizational wins on LinkedIn. This could be your organization’s impact report, kudos for your team members’ accomplishments, or highlighting an important story from one of your journalists. People love affirmations and celebrating others, and LinkedIn has been increasingly trying to become more personal with birthday reminders, work anniversaries, and games. 

Because LinkedIn favors personal posts, encourage your journalists and other members of your team to turn on creator mode on their individual profiles. When you post a story on your organizational profile, have the individual repost and add commentary to boost reach and engagement. A few tips for a good author post are to dig into something strange or odd in the story, find a way to tie in something personal, be anecdotal and add to the conversation. 

There was a clear consensus that hashtags are important on LinkedIn. Folks said they see higher reach on posts with hashtags, and they can be helpful in reaching new audiences through topical search results. The sweet spot is three hashtags focused on the broad theme of the post or story. Along these lines, try to monitor trending topics on LinkedIn and join the conversation on topic areas relevant to your outlet.

Trade publications, in particular, have found success in reaching audiences on the platform.  LinkedIn provides detailed insights and analytics including education level and job role, which makes it easier to target specific subject areas and professional levels. This can help build an online community of folks interested in niche content. 

When is the best time to post on LinkedIn? Monday mornings are the most active time on the platform, so try to post (or schedule posts) for Sunday evening or first thing Monday when the most people will see it. Saturday afternoons are a good time for longer reads, and formatting longer posts as multiple small paragraphs tends to work best.

The group has had mixed success when it comes to conversions and CTAs. Some folks have found that LinkedIn provides a high number of newsletter sign-up leads, but across the board donation and memberships have not performed well. 

A common theme that arose among the group is that it is easy to build a large audience on LinkedIn, but engagement levels are inconsistent and conversions are very low. This is especially true with LinkedIn Newsletters. A lot of folks described similar experiences where their newsletters had high reach, but low engagement and conversions. If you choose to launch a LinkedIn Newsletter, their team recommends you wait until you have an existing following/audience on your organization’s profile. All followers will get a notification to subscribe to your newsletter when you launch, so be sure to leverage that moment. We’ve also heard that LinkedIn is working on monetization options for newsletters.

For industry or professional events, much of the conversations during and after the event take place on LinkedIn because of its professional focus. Leading up to the event, focus advertising dollars and event promotion on LinkedIn. After the event, make sure you post photos and recaps on the platform and tag the attendees. A few folks have experimented with LinkedIn’s native Events features, but found that they didn’t pay off because there was no way to capture leads and attendee emails.

The LinkedIn team is genuinely interested in media organizations, but it can be difficult for publishers to get in touch and develop one-on-one relationships with their representatives. If you haven’t already, get involved with the LinkedIn for Journalists program. Not only does it include trainings, group discussions, and free Premium subscriptions, it can also unlock access to the news team at LinkedIn. You can also see which LinkedIn editors are curating newsletters and trending conversations, so reach out to the people covering your beat. And this may sound obvious, but LinkedIn team members are typically easier to access through LinkedIn messaging than email.