If you’ve spent any time on LinkedIn in the past 5 years, you know it’s a bit of a mixed bag.
Career updates from people you briefly knew in college. Advertisements for MBA programs. People posting obviously AI-generated content. Others complaining about those people. If you scroll long enough, you might actually see a post or article with a useful business application.
As marketers, we are frequently asked if posting on LinkedIn is worth the time, and we certainly have opinions.
We’ve spent almost 2 years testing the theory that LinkedIn and personal brands are an effective way for B2B companies to communicate with their audience. We’ve learned a lot, and we are excited to share our findings.
Is posting on LinkedIn a worthy business development strategy? Our short answer is “yes,” but there is plenty more to unpack. Let’s dive in.
Why posting on LinkedIn is advantageous
The personal touch
Organic LinkedIn posting (from a personal account) works for the same reason that influencer content does. People connect with other people more naturally than with brands.
There’s no such thing as a real “business-to-business” sale. People buy from people. One of the best ways to give business decision-makers the confidence to trust you is to bring your people and personalities to the forefront.
Broader reach
The sum of your employees’ followers on LinkedIn may be bigger than your company’s followers. It’s common for individuals in the B2B space to amass hundreds or thousands of connections throughout their careers. Your executives, senior members, and sales representatives likely have thousands of connections across all of their networks. Personal networks are often more curated and intentional than company followings, which can be bloated by bots and low-intent followers.
Mental real estate is expensive
Brands are always vying for attention. Even with great positioning, it can be hard for a brand’s value proposition to get through the noise. Encouraging a team of employees to regularly post from their personal LinkedIn accounts is an effective way to reach an audience that is tired of being sold to. Personal posts subtly get your brand and offerings in front of an engaged audience, while emphasizing your people.
→ USDP’s Experience: “Thanks to our posting, people who had known us for years seemed to suddenly have a new understanding of who we are and how we help. Prospects would know our salespeople before meeting them thanks to their posts on LinkedIn.” - Ben Jacoby, Client Leader
There is zero barrier to entry
Posting on LinkedIn is free, and you can start anytime.
The only tradeoff is the opportunity cost of time spent creating posts. While ghostwriters and AI assistants exist to minimize this cost, a lot can still be accomplished by jotting down ideas during moments of inspiration, then posting them when the time is right.
For LinkedIn, authenticity is usually the best strategy. Log on, be yourself, and start posting. You’ll never know what opportunities you might be missing unless you get started.
How to use LinkedIn well
Have a strategy and stick to it
If you’ve been following us for a while, you know how important it is to govern your marketing with a content strategy. The same is true for content shared from a personal LinkedIn account. Your LinkedIn strategy should blend your company's content initiatives with personal flair and interests. We recommend selecting 3-4 “content pillars” that focus your content. Your posts should somehow relate back to one or more of these pillars.
Example: You are a senior marketing manager at a wealth management firm, and you also happened to play football at a D1 college back in the day. Your content pillars are investment, marketing, and football. One week you share a post about investment trends your company has been observing. The next, you talk about a recent marketing campaign’s success. A few days later, you teach a finance lesson by telling a story from your college football days. Build your personal brand and stay consistent.
Get personal… sometimes
AI-generated slop has people craving authenticity.
Personal content, such as photos from a trip or a story from your past, can be quite popular on LinkedIn. But there is still a difference between LinkedIn and Facebook. Your LinkedIn page shouldn’t be a personal diary or a place to show off. You should aim to blend professional content and a personal touch to make your account equally valuable and interesting.
What not to do on LinkedIn
Rely on AI
LinkedIn users are among the best at sniffing out and immediately rejecting “AI slop.” AI-generated text and images can be used well, but a misstep can erase your credibility. Leaning too heavily on AI appears disingenuous and threatens your reputation. Don’t dream of being a “thought leader” if you aren’t willing to take the time to share your own thoughts.
Get Political
In case you haven’t noticed, there are a lot of polarizing opinions floating around the internet. Many issues are worth discussing in the right forum, but a LinkedIn post is rarely the right place to spout off about a hot-button topic. Even doing your best to present a “balanced approach” runs the risk of aggravating half of your network. Controversial topics make for great engagement, but they can also diminish the impact of anything else you’d like to say.
Give up too soon
On LinkedIn, as with most other marketing tactics, consistency is key. If you post a few times and see that your impressions are in the low triple digits, it can be easy to get discouraged and give up your effort. As frustrating as this can be, inaction has an even lower success rate. Set a specific goal for yourself, such as posting once a week, and stick to it for a set amount of time. You’ll be surprised by the results.
Signals of success
Don’t expect immediate results from an organic LinkedIn strategy, but keep track of your results. At USDP, we’ve moved away from metric-focused attribution modeling toward a signals-based approach. Signals paint a broader picture of a campaign’s effectiveness. Here are a few of the signals that you should be on the lookout for.
Impressions and engagement
Impressions shouldn’t be your only success metric, but you can still learn from them. One post will get a few hundred impressions while another gets a few thousand. Just because a post doesn’t rake in views doesn’t mean you failed. Even so, posts with lower impression counts can still resonate strongly with the right people.
So what can you learn from LinkedIn’s impression and engagement metrics? Tracking the reach of each post can help you estimate which topics and content types (text only, picture, carousel, etc.) get the most traction with your desired audience.
An important note: Virality does not equal success. As exhilarating as it can be to consistently hit home runs with your posts, that doesn’t necessarily indicate that you are meeting your business goals. Posting silly or inflammatory content gets people talking, but if it doesn’t result in people forming the opinions about your brand that you want them to, you have missed the mark.
Comments
Having a lot of comments can be a sign of success, but be sure to pay attention to what they say. How people engage with your content can be a good signal as to whether or not they are grasping the message you are trying to send.
In-person interactions
After posting consistently for a while, you are bound to start hearing remarks about your LinkedIn posts during conversations. Pay attention to what people are saying. You can even go as far as asking for feedback. Doing so is always a little risky, but you will be able to figure out if your posts are making the impression you would like them to.
So, should you start posting on LinkedIn?
LinkedIn can’t be the answer to all your sales and marketing problems, but don’t leave it out of your tool belt. Getting started can feel intimidating; sharing your thoughts with the Internet might be foreign to you. However, it is that exact authenticity that makes LinkedIn the perfect place to cut through the noise and connect with business decision-makers at a personal level. Put yourself out there, and seize opportunities you didn’t know you had. You won’t regret it.
