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But with a market that’s flooded with options, you may have a hard time choosing the best LinkedIn analytics tool for your business. This post helps you narrow down your options and provides you with a list of the top choices. Let’s take a look.

Why do you need a LinkedIn analytics tool?

LinkedIn analytics refer to a set of metrics used for measuring how your Page and posts are performing on the platform. LinkedIn analytics tools help you keep track of those metrics and understand the effectiveness of your strategy.

According to the latest LinkedIn stats, the platform is the most effective channel for generating B2B leads. However, those leads don’t appear out of nowhere. You need to actively work on producing content that would attract your target audience and turn them into valuable leads.

With the help of a LinkedIn analytics tool, you can get key insights into your audience and better understand how to engage them. You’ll be able to see what types of content resonate with the audience, what information they’re seeking out and so on. This helps you strengthen your strategy to make more effective use of LinkedIn for your business.

Which LinkedIn analytics tool is the best and why?

The native LinkedIn analytics tool offers a range of essential insights into your Page performance. But if you need to dig a little deeper than that, you should consider using a third-party tool. Ideally, these tools should offer data-backed suggestions on how to improve your performance. This includes suggestions such as the top content types and the best times to post on LinkedIn.

The best LinkedIn analytics tool for your business depends on your unique needs and operation size. For example, agency users would want a tool that lets them generate multiple client reports.

At the bare minimum, the tool should let you track key performance metrics for your LinkedIn Business Page. This includes follower and visitor metrics, update metrics, profile metrics and lead metrics. Additionally, you should be able to measure your standing in the competitive landscape. Some tools even let you track metrics related to LinkedIn employee advocacy.

Beyond these basics, you can look for an analytics tool that supports other aspects of your LinkedIn strategy. For example, if you’re running LinkedIn ads, you need a tool that keeps track of your paid campaigns.

Keeping this in mind, here are 12 of the best LinkedIn analytics tools in the market to help you make the right choice.

1.     Sprout Social

Sprout Social’s powerful LinkedIn analytics features put it at the top of our list. The platform gives you a comprehensive look into your LinkedIn performance through key metrics.

What makes Sprout stand out is the ability to help you visualize your LinkedIn data, making it easier to analyze your performance.

An overview of your LinkedIn Page performance helps you understand your Page growth over time. The Performance Summary shows you changes in impressions, engagements and post link clicks. And the Audience Growth chart helps you visualize the number of followers gained or lost over time in a color-coded graph.

For more in-depth insights, Sprout breaks down your performance at the post-level. So you can understand what resonates with your audience based on engagement rates and content types. This informs your LinkedIn strategy by helping you develop more effective content.

Meanwhile, the Paid Performance Report shows you how your LinkedIn ads are performing. This reveals paid metrics such as ad spend, impressions, engagements, clicks and web conversions. You can really drill down on specific campaigns and ads to identify your top-performing ones.

Beyond this, Sprout offers the following key LinkedIn analytics features:

• Tag Performance Report to analyze volume and performance patterns of tagged messages
• Competitor Report for advanced social media competitive analysis
• Inbox Team Report and Case Performance Report to measure the productivity of teams and individual members

Pricing: Starts at $249 per month

Free trial: 30 days

2.     Keyhole

Keyhole offers a powerful Profile Analytics tool to measure your LinkedIn performance. The dashboard gives you a summary of your activity and performance during a given time period. You can keep track of the number of posts, engagement rate and average likes per post during this period.

The tool helps you visualize your post performance with a chart depicting the timeline of posts and engagements received. You can access comprehensive analytics to compare your performance against the competition. The dashboard lets you benchmark your account size, engagements, share of voice and sentiment against theirs.

One of the main highlights of Keyhole is the data-backed suggestions on how to optimize your performance. It gives you recommendations on the best time to post and optimal post length to grow your social media engagements.

Pricing: Starts at $99 per month

Free trial: Limited to 3 account trackers and a sample of historical data

3.     SocialPilot

SocialPilot provides you with detailed insights to see which LinkedIn posts are the most visible and engaging. This helps you fine-tune your content strategy and get more out of LinkedIn marketing.

You can access comprehensive audience insights to research trends in reach and growth patterns. SocialPilot even shows your most active fans so you can amplify their voice for better brand advocacy.

Pricing: Starts at $30 per month

Free trial: 14 days

4.     SocialInsider

SocialInsider offers a powerful analytics tool for LinkedIn. It lets you track your engagement evolution along with vital metrics such as reach and impressions. This gives you an idea of your most impactful strategies so you can optimize your content mix for greater results.

The tool comes with competitor analysis features to see how you stack up. You can keep track of your competitors’ follower growth, engagement rate and campaign performance from this tool.

SocialInsider provides detailed post analytics insights to inform your social media content strategy. These insights help you understand optimal caption lengths, hashtags and content formats. You can then optimize your posts for performance based on this information.

Pricing: Starts at $149 per month

Free trial: 14 days

5.     Brand24

Brand24 is an analytics tool with a focus on social listening insights. It lets you measure brand awareness and presence through brand mentions. These insights help you assess the impact of your latest LinkedIn efforts on improving reach and brand awareness.

You can use the tool to analyze sentiment and understand how people feel about your brand. This gives you an idea of what they like or dislike so you can fine-tune LinkedIn strategy accordingly.

Brand24 helps you measure the effectiveness of your campaign with hashtag analytics. Beyond hashtag volume, it keeps track of metrics such as reach and engagement. This paints a clearer picture of how your campaign hashtags are performing.

Pricing: Starts at $99 per month

Free trial: 14 days

6.     Social Status

Social Status is a full funnel LinkedIn analytics tool. It lets you track top-of-funnel metrics such as reach and impressions. You can measure middle-of-funnel metrics like video views and engagements. Plus, it shows you the effectiveness of your LinkedIn efforts through bottom-of-funnel link clicks.

The Content Feed gives you a comprehensive look at your post performance metrics. This helps you visualize the type of content that makes an impact with your target audience.

Pricing: Starts at $9 per month

Free trial: 14 days

7.     RivalIQ

RivalIQ gives you comprehensive insights into your LinkedIn post performance. You can easily identify your top-performing posts and replicate them for your content strategy. It helps you visualize how your posts are performing by post times. This allows you to optimize your publishing strategy to target optimal post times.

This LinkedIn analytics tool lets you measure hashtag performance by activity and engagement. You can then use these insights to inform your hashtag strategy and maximize your LinkedIn reach.

Pricing: Starts at $239 per month

Free trial: 14 days

8.     DrumUp

DrumUp is a social media management tool that offers comprehensive LinkedIn analytics. It lets you track key performance metrics such as shares, comments and clicks. This paints a clear picture of the types of content that works for your brand so you can fine-tune your strategy.

You can use smart filters to perform a deep-dive analysis and quickly identify your top-performing content. Plus, you can easily spot trends by tracking changes in engagement metrics.

Pricing: Starts at $15 per month

Free trial: 14 days

9.     Iconosquare

Iconosquare is one of the most comprehensive LinkedIn analytics tools in the market. It gives you engagement insights so you can track how they correlate to your content efforts. You can then refine your strategy to boost engagement and improve your brand presence.

The tool helps you visualize your community growth on LinkedIn. It gives you a detailed breakdown of your audience demographics. So you can optimize your efforts according to where they are and what languages they speak.

Pricing: Starts at $49 per month

Free trial: 14 days

10.  Talkwater

Talkwater comes with powerful analytics for audience insights and social benchmarking. Additionally, it offers tools for media monitoring, customer feedback analytics and social listening. It lets you measure your competitors’ social media performance and analyze where you stand. This helps you identify areas for improvement and opportunities to capitalize on.

This analytics tool provides comprehensive audience insights to inform your targeting efforts. You can use it to discover new audiences and uncover prospects that are ripe for purchase.

Pricing: On request

Free trial: No info available

11.  Inlytics

Inlytics is an analytics and scheduling tool specifically designed for LinkedIn. It provides you with real-time and historic visualizations of your content performance. You can use it to track metrics such as impressions, reactions, comments and engagement rates.

One of the most useful features is the Profile Improvement Recommendations. You can get actionable suggestions on how to optimize your profile and improve visibility. Plus, your audience engagement insights will help you understand your audience better. This will then inform how to optimize your content to better resonate with them.

Pricing: Starts at $12.50 per month

Free trial: Free plan with limited analytics

12.  Hootsuite

Hootsuite offers advanced analytics to measure the return on your LinkedIn marketing strategy. This lets you visualize your organic and paid metrics in a single dashboard. So you can better understand how your organic content efforts and your ad campaigns are paying off. It shows you your top-performing posts and best times to post to help you optimize your strategy.

The tool provides you with reports that compare your LinkedIn performance against that of your competitors. These insights can inform how to duplicate their success and leverage missed opportunities.

Pricing: Starts at $99 per month

Free trial: 30 days

Which LinkedIn analytics tool will you choose?

When choosing the best LinkedIn analytics tool for your business, it’s important to clearly assess your needs and budget. This will help you narrow down the features that are important to you and the ones you can sacrifice.

If you’re marketing on other social media platforms, make sure to look for a tool that provides analytics for those other channels as well. This will streamline your social media analytics efforts so you don’t have to switch between multiple tools. Learn more about the top social media analytics tools that offer analytics for LinkedIn.

The post Best LinkedIn analytics tools to maximize your marketing appeared first on Sprout Social.

That’s where LinkedIn automation tools come in, helping you streamline your efforts and get more out of your LinkedIn strategy. Let’s find out some of the best tools to help you with LinkedIn automation.

Table of contents:

• What is LinkedIn automation?
• Best all-in-one LinkedIn automation tool
• LinkedIn automation tools for publishing
• LinkedIn automation tools for lead generation
• LinkedIn automation tools for analytics

What is LinkedIn automation?

LinkedIn automation involves using social media automation tools to automate certain LinkedIn tasks. Auto-publishing posts and pre-populating lead generation forms are some examples of LinkedIn automation. These automation activities help you save time and streamline your efforts for higher returns.

Note that LinkedIn prohibits some types of automation activities. So it’s important to only use trusted tools that will ensure you’re adhering to the platform’s user agreement

Best all-in-one LinkedIn automation tool

1. Sprout Social

Sprout Social offers a robust set of LinkedIn management tools to assist with automation. These tools let you automate your publishing, response management and analytics. This puts it at the top of our list, making it the best all-in-one tool for LinkedIn automation.

The platform’s publishing features let you draft and schedule your LinkedIn updates to automatically go out at a set time. You can add these updates to a queue and automate them for not just one but multiple LinkedIn Pages. Sprout even lets you automatically target people based on industry, company size and job title.

Sprout simplifies your response management by allowing you to monitor and respond to your LinkedIn comments in one place. The LinkedIn Contact View automatically pulls up a user’s previous interactions with your Page. This gives you the context you need to personalize your response.

One of Sprout’s standout features is the ability to automatically collect performance data for your LinkedIn Page and posts. This helps you analyze your publishing strategy and understand how you can improve it for better growth and engagement.

LinkedIn automation tools for publishing

With LinkedIn’s limitations on most automation activities, publishing is where you have the most leeway. Here are a few LinkedIn automation software solutions to help with LinkedIn publishing and scheduling.

2. SocialPilot

SocialPilot comes with a comprehensive solution to automate your LinkedIn publishing tasks. This includes the ability to draft your LinkedIn post and schedule it to auto-publish at a later date. Plus, you can draft and schedule a first comment to boost visibility and engagement for your posts.

One of the top features of SocialPilot is its AI Assistant, which helps you automate caption creation. Enter your prompt and select a tone to instantly generate captivating caption ideas. The AI Assistant even provides strategic hashtag recommendations to get your content in front of the right audience.

3. Loomly

Loomly is a social media marketing platform to streamline your publishing efforts. It provides you with an endless feed of post ideas based on trending topics, current events and more. This saves you plenty of time in brainstorming content ideas for your LinkedIn publishing strategy.

The platform comes with a Hashtag Manager to automate your hashtag strategy and drive more visibility for your posts. Use the UTM parameters generator to quickly create custom UTM tags to include in your posts. Once you’ve finalized your post, schedule it for Loomly to automatically publish it at the desired time.

4. NapoleonCat

NapoleonCat offers a powerful set of tools to manage your LinkedIn publishing. It provides you with one dashboard to create and schedule posts for multiple LinkedIn Pages. This allows you to prepare several updates in advance and free up time for other important tasks.

You can even optimize your scheduling based on the platform’s suggestions on the best times and days to publish. That way, you don’t have to manually search through your previous posts to see how to improve your publishing schedule.

5. Agorapulse

Agorapulse has one of the best social media publishing tools for LinkedIn automation. A standout feature is the Writing Assistant, which uses AI to enhance your content. All you need to do is create your initial copy and apply a “filter” to automatically improve it. This will help you develop compelling LinkedIn posts to drive more engagement. You can then schedule your improved post to automatically go out at a time of your choosing.

LinkedIn automation tools for lead generation

Prospecting and nurturing leads on LinkedIn is a time-consuming process. Use the LinkedIn automation tools below to improve your lead generating efforts.

6. LinkedIn Sales Navigator

LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator comes with powerful features to automate your lead generation. It provides recommendations on which accounts to prioritize based on several factors. This includes factors such as firmographics, connectivity and recent growth. That way, you can focus your time on nurturing accounts that have the best chance of converting.

Sales Navigator automates the process of identifying buyers based on intent signals. It notifies you when they’ve engaged in certain activities that indicate intent. This allows you to engage them when they’re in the market and more likely to buy.

7. Dripify

Dripify lets you build an automated sales funnel to fully automate your lead generation process. You can build a prospecting sequence using certain LinkedIn actions and time delays. Then select the conditions that will trigger an appropriate automation action. For example, you could set up an introductory message to go out one day after a prospect accepts your connection request. This allows you to proactively manage your lead generation and nurturing efforts.

8. Wiza

Wiza is a powerful email finder tool to improve your LinkedIn prospecting efforts. The tool instantly converts your LinkedIn searches into a clean prospect list. This provides you with valid contact information so you can connect with your most valuable prospects. It even removes emojis, prefixes and suffixes to normalize people’s names.

Wiza further enriches your list with datapoints such as firmographics, career and social media links. This gives you an even more comprehensive look into your prospects to help you enhance your outreach efforts.

9. Expandi

Expandi is a tool for automating and personalizing your LinkedIn outreach efforts. It lets you build automation workflows for different scenarios based on the prospect’s behavior. For each sequence, you can include a combination of nine actions and add a time delay in between.

The platform lets you set up omni-channel outreach automation based on the prospect’s action. Expandi even comes with dynamic placeholders to build hyper-personalized messages for each prospect. This improves the chances of your prospects engaging and turning into valuable leads.

10. Octopus

Octopus is an advanced LinkedIn automation software tool for simplifying your lead generation. It helps you reach your target audience through personalized and automated connection requests. Octopus then automatically sends out “thank you” messages to prospects who accept your request. It helps you ramp up your engagement efforts by messaging hundreds of your first-level connections at once. You can further warm up your new prospects by automatically endorsing their skills.

LinkedIn automation tools for analytics

You can’t optimize what you can’t track. So you need to stay on top of your LinkedIn performance to see what needs improving. Here are a few tools to help you automate your LinkedIn analytics.

11. LinkedIn native analytics

LinkedIn Page analytics give you a comprehensive look into your Page’s performance. The built-in analytics tool automatically tracks your visitors, followers and leads. This gives you a better understanding of the people you’re attracting and how to best engage them.

The analytics dashboard gives you access to post-level insights on your content performance. This shows you a detailed breakdown of how each post is performing in terms of reach and engagement. So you can understand the types of content that resonate with your audience.

12. Keyhole

Keyhole helps you visualize your LinkedIn analytics data using easy-to-read charts and graphs. The platform simplifies analytics with automatic reports on different performance metrics. It automatically identifies your top posts based on engagements, impressions and engagement rate. So you don’t have to scour through every single post to see which ones are the most popular.

It shows you the top industries of your followers and compares their company sizes. It even compiles reports on the top hashtags driving the most engagement for your brand. All these insights help you fine-tune your strategy to maximize your impact.

13. Klipfolio

Klipfolio is the perfect tool for building a custom Linked analytics dashboard to track metrics that matter to you. This custom dashboard will automatically pull up reports to measure your LinkedIn performance. You can add pre-built metrics such as clicks, likes, comments, impressions and engagements. Plus, there are metrics to understand your followers by company size, industry, function and location.

14. Unmetric

Unmetric lets you fully automate your LinkedIn reporting process with the option to choose from 30+ types of reports. The platform gives you a comprehensive picture of your brand’s performance and compare it against up to 15 other brands. It lets you create a schedule to automatically generate reports on your LinkedIn performance. Unmetric then sends the report to your inbox and to the inboxes of relevant stakeholders.

Do more for less with LinkedIn automation

Having a solid LinkedIn marketing strategy is one thing. Effectively executing that strategy is another. Things can easily get out of hand when you’re running on limited time and resources. So it helps to automate some of your LinkedIn tasks to boost productivity and maximize outcomes.

Sprout helps you save time with powerful tools to automate your LinkedIn tasks. Use these tools to streamline the time-consuming aspects of publishing and community management. Sign up for a 30-day free trial to see how you can do more with Sprout’s LinkedIn management tools.

The post LinkedIn automation tools for your brand in 2023 appeared first on Sprout Social.

A strong presence on LinkedIn provides your business with a professional digital presence and an opportunity for your brand to be seen by 930 million members and 75 million businesses.

One of the key components of building your brand on LinkedIn is creating a LinkedIn Business Page. This page serves as a hub for your company to showcase your products or services, share valuable industry insights, and attract potential clients or employees.

If you’re new to LinkedIn or want to optimize your LinkedIn business page, we’ve created this resource for you. In this guide, we’ll walk you through six simple steps to create an engaging LinkedIn business page to help you stand out and achieve your business goals.

Table of contents:

• What is a LinkedIn Business Page?
• How to create a LinkedIn Business Page
• How to manage a LinkedIn Company Page

What is a LinkedIn Business Page?

A LinkedIn Business Page, or a Company Page, is a dedicated profile representing your company or organization on LinkedIn to members. It is a standalone profile (independent of the founder or employees) that serves as a digital presence for the company where people can learn more about it. This includes the latest news, updates, events, life at your company and job openings.

Unlike a personal profile page, a Business Page talks exclusively about your company and includes several customizable sections, such as Home, My Company, About, Products, Posts, Jobs, and People. This way, you can effectively use LinkedIn for your business marketing and build a professional image for your company while still adding a human element by featuring your team members

How to create a LinkedIn Business Page

Building your LinkedIn Business Page may seem confusing, but once you get the hang of it, it becomes a powerful tool for establishing your brand’s online presence and connecting to a vast network. You might be wondering how to get started, what information to include, and how to get started.

Follow these steps to create an optimized LinkedIn Page.

Step 1. Login to LinkedIn

To create a LinkedIn Business Page, you must first be signed in to your personal profile. You need a personal account as an admin to create and manage your company page. On the navigation bar, click the “For business” dropdown to display multiple options. In the dropdown menu, navigate to the end of the list and select “Create a Company Page+.”

Step 2. Select a Page type to create

A new page comes up next with three different options for the type of page you want to create. You can choose either:

• Company Page: to build a new page for a small, medium, or large business that is non-educational.
• Showcase Page: to create a sub-page connected to an existing company page. Be careful not to choose this option if you’re building your LinkedIn page from scratch.
• Educational Institution: to build a page for school, university, or any other type of educational institution.

Select the option that best fits your organization; in this case we’ll select company.

Step 3. Fill in your Page identity

After clicking on the Company Page, a new page pops up where you are asked to fill in important information about your company. Pages with complete profile information get 30% more weekly views and are often favored by the LinkedIn algorithm.

The first three fields are for your company’s identification. This includes:

• Name: Type in your company’s name as you want it to appear on your company page. Be sure to include your company’s name to make it searchable.
• LinkedIn public URL:As you fill in your company’s name, LinkedIn will suggest a custom URL based on the inputted name for your company page. For instance, the URL for our Sprout Social Page is https://www.linkedin.com/company/sprout-social-inc-/. You can customize it to make it more unique and easy to remember.
• Website: Enter your company’s website. This shows up right on your profile and allows people to easily visit your website and learn more about your product when they want to.

As you fill out this form, LinkedIn provides placeholder text as cues to guide users on what information to fill out in a particular field. Advanced features like conditional logic and field rules are also applied to prevent people from choosing an existing name option.

Step 4. Input your Company details

Next, you must fill in additional company information. LinkedIn requires these details to properly understand and categorize your company so people can easily find you.

• Industry: Type in your industry and pick from LinkedIn’s lists. This will help LinkedIn properly categorize your business and recommend it to users interested in that particular industry. Choose something closely related if you can’t find your specific industry on the list.
• Company size: Pick your company size depending on your current number of employees. LinkedIn uses this to categorize companies as small, medium, or large businesses and personalize their offerings.
• Company type: Select the type of organization your company is. Options provided are public company, self-employed, Government agency, nonprofit, sole proprietorship, privately held and partnership. If you aren’t sure, reach out to confirm.

Ensure to fill in the correct information in the three fields, as they’re all required. Remember, the more optimized your profile is, the better its chances of performing.

Step 5. Upload a logo and tagline

The next step is uploading your company’s logo. LinkedIn recommends that the logo size be 300 x 300 pixels, and the file must be in JPG, JPEG, or PNG.

On LinkedIn, your company’s logo is a critical component that must be rooted in your brand’s personality. Use a color palette that compliments your brand personality, conveys specific emotions to your target audience and stays true to your vision and industry.

Next, enter your tagline which will be included right below your name and logo. Simply put, your company’s tagline is the short form of your Unique Selling Proposition (USP). The whole idea is to sell your company’s benefits in a matter of minutes as soon as they land on your company’s profile.

LinkedIn’s tagline has a character limit of 120 characters, so it’s best to keep it concise. Aim for brevity, avoid using slang and maintain a professional tone.

Once you’re done, read and check the verification box to confirm you have the right to act on behalf of the company. Then click on the “Create Page” button, and voila, your LinkedIn page is created.

Step 6. Fill out your LinkedIn profile

After creating your business page, you’ll be redirected to a new page. This is where you have to complete your company’s profile. Right on top is a meter reflecting your progress as you complete more sections and action cards representing incomplete page sections under the meter.

Now, you can start editing your page and filling in information. Let’s discuss what each section is about.

About

The About section appears “above the fold” when users check out your product. This is the place to highlight a brief overview of your company, including your story, mission, values and what sets you apart.

Canva’s About statement opens up with a clear and concise mission statement that immediately sets the tone for its goal. The section also touches on the company’s history, a comprehensive list of its product offerings, its long-term vision, values and positive impact on the world.

You should also note that the About section also displays your website, industry, company size, headquarters and specialties which include your company’s keywords.

Product

Although relatively new, LinkedIn’s Product Page was made with the aim of helping companies showcase their products. Check out Zoom’s LinkedIn Product Page.

According to LinkedIn, you can have up to 10 additional products, arranged alphabetically, that summarize the product description, its category and the connections with the product as a skill.

If you click on any product, the product page opens up. Here, you can display more specific information about the product, like a product description, product media and connections who use the product.

Life

Leverage the Life section on LinkedIn to provide information about your company’s culture. Here, you can find information about company leaders, culture highlights, photos of employees and testimonials from clients and employees.

Jobs

The jobs section shows a compilation of all open roles in your organization.

People

The People tab on your LinkedIn Page is a directory of all current employees currently working for that company. This section includes the employee’s name, job title, and location. Admins can customize this section by adding a header, subheader, call to action, or showing their employee’s qualifications.

There’s also an “Employee distribution” graph that displays the number of employees a company has in different locations and which is more dominant.

How to manage a LinkedIn Company Page

Creating the Company Page doesn’t mean the work is done. As with any social platform, it takes time to build an audience and a presence with the right strategy. But that’s not to say that it can’t be done.

There are two ways to manage your LinkedIn company page. First, you can manage your page Natively on LinkedIn via Page Admins or use a more effective tool like Sprout Social. Let’s take a look at both in detail.

Natively in LinkedIn via Page Admins

To manage your LinkedIn page, you first need Admin access to the page. Here’s how to do that.

1. Log in to your LinkedIn account and navigate to your homepage.

2. On the left side of your LinkedIn homepage, you’ll see a My Pages section. This section shows every page you’re an admin of on LinkedIn. Click on the correct page you want to manage from the list.

3.You’ll be redirected to an admin page where you can complete your profile and manage everything, including your Feed, Activities on your page (comments, mentions, reactions, or reposts), and your LinkedIn Analytics.

4. Monitor your LinkedIn analytics using the in-built analytics tool. You can track data on the number of visitors, followers, leads, content, and even competitors. Filter by date, type (sponsored or organic), and demographics, then you can export your report.

5. You can add multiple competitors to your page and monitor their follower metrics, organic content metrics and trending competitor posts.

Use a LinkedIn management tool such as Sprout Social

A better way to manage your LinkedIn company page is to use Sprout Social. Chances are, you’re probably marketing your business on social media, and you need a tool to effectively manage all your social channels on one platform, even LinkedIn.

Let’s take a look at how to use Sprout Social to manage your LinkedIn Business page and some of the benefits that Sprout Social offers.

1. Schedule your LinkedIn posts ahead of time and create a LinkedIn calendar

After writing your LinkedIn post, you can publish it immediately or schedule it in a queue to go out later.

Although there’s a native LinkedIn scheduler, several limitations may hinder your ability to schedule effectively. For instance, you can’t tag people or other pages, and there are limited posting options for articles, newsletters, etc.

Sprout offers advanced scheduling features like auto-schedule with Sprout Queue and ViralPosts to pick optimal times when your audience is most active on LinkedIn.

All your scheduled posts appear on the scheduled date on the social media calendar, not just for LinkedIn.

2. Organize and store brand assets in the asset library

With Sprout Social’s Asset library, you can store, organize and categorize your brand assets to enable team members to stay focused and aligned with the pre-approved content available. Think of this as an internal knowledge base that’s efficient for information retrieval, fosters collaboration amongst team members and prevents loss of information.

3. Collaborate with team members

On Sprout’s dashboard, you can collaborate with team members effectively. For instance, you can set up approval permissions for collaboration and approval before publishing a post to your LinkedIn page. You can also tag your messages to group and categorize posts based on your workflow.

4. Track and analyze your LinkedIn analytics

Sprout provides in-depth LinkedIn analytics to assess the effectiveness of your LinkedIn marketing efforts. You can track data on engagement, keep tabs on follower growth, learn about your audience and monitor post performance for organic and sponsored posts. Generate comprehensive reports or create customized reports to track specific metrics that matter most to your business goals.

Start taking advantage of LinkedIn Business page tools

Your LinkedIn Business Page is a valuable resource for establishing a strong online presence for your company. Creating an effective one requires careful planning and execution. In this guide, we’ve outlined steps to help you optimize your page and attract a wider audience of potential clients.

For more detailed guidance on using LinkedIn for business, download our LinkedIn strategy template. In there, you’ll find in-depth tips, recommendations and strategies for building your brand on LinkedIn.

The post How to create an effective LinkedIn Business Page in 6 steps appeared first on Sprout Social.

LinkedIn has grown into a hub of compelling content and thought leadership. And it continues to adopt new features for marketers to leverage it for business—from AI tools to interactive content types to accessibility features and more.

As LinkedIn evolves to meet the needs of employers, employees, job-seekers, buyers and investors alike, so should your brand’s LinkedIn strategy. This LinkedIn strategy template worksheet will help social media leaders think through how to use the platform for business beyond posting job openings and company news.

To reevaluate how to use LinkedIn to support marketing, sales and employer brand efforts, use the LinkedIn strategy template to:

• Map your current LinkedIn strategy to your business goals
• Understand how different content types and themes fit into your strategy
• Ensure your business Page is up to date
• Identify challenges that impact your approach to LinkedIn
• Brainstorm how employees across the organization can bolster your strategy

After completing this worksheet, you’ll receive a score that aligns with actionable recommendations for how you can build your brand, diversify your strategy, leverage employee networks and make the most of your LinkedIn strategy. Download the LinkedIn strategy template now to get more out of the platform for your team, and beyond.

The post [Worksheet] A LinkedIn Strategy Template Built to Expand Your Impact appeared first on Sprout Social.

This post serves as a comprehensive guide on using LinkedIn for business marketing. We show you all the essential steps starting from how to build your business page. Let’s dive in.

Table of contents:

• How to create a LinkedIn business page
• How to use LinkedIn for business
• Benefits of using LinkedIn for business

How to create a LinkedIn business page

If you’re going to build a strategic presence on LinkedIn, the first thing you need is a business page. This page will serve as the go-to source of information on anything related to your business. Prospective clients will check out your content to gauge your expertise. Meanwhile, job applicants will use it to understand your company culture.

Follow the steps below to create a LinkedIn company page for your business.

Step 1: Start by creating a company page

Go to your LinkedIn homepage and click on the “For Business” drop-down menu at the top right-hand corner of the screen. Then select “Create a Company Page.”

Step 2: Select your page type

Select the type of page that represents your business–a company page, a showcase page or an educational institution page. If this is going to be the main company page, select the “Company” option. Showcase pages are sub-pages that you can later create to link to your main page.

Step 3: Fill out your company profile

You’ll need to provide your business name, industry, organization size and organization type. Optionally, you can include a website URL, add a tagline and upload your company logo. On the right-hand panel, you can see a preview of your page to see what it’ll look like to others.

Step 4: Create the page

Click on “Create Page” to finish creating your LinkedIn business page. Now your page is all set up.

From here, you’ll have the option to follow additional steps to improve your chances of success. This includes adding a description, including a location, following relevant pages and more.

Beyond these essential steps, check out our guide on how to build the perfect LinkedIn page for more help. This will provide you with additional best practices and tips to set your page up for success.

How to use LinkedIn for business

Now that you have a proper LinkedIn business page set up, it’s time to focus on how to use it. Check out the video below for a crash course on using LinkedIn for business, including content types and employee advocacy.

Decide on goals

To build a more effective LinkedIn presence, you’ll need to create specific goals for the platform. Take time to meet with representatives from your sales, product, customer service and human resources teams. That way, you’ll be able to identify the top priorities across different departments.

For example, sales team members might be more interested in how LinkedIn can increase web traffic and drive sales. Meanwhile, the human resources department might want to attract more quality hires from the platform.

These conversations will likely result in a lot of ideas. If you’re not sure what to prioritize, here are some questions to guide the process:

• Which audience are you trying to reach?
• What are they interested in?
• What is the action you want them to take after seeing your content?

Engage with your target audience

Just like on other social media platforms, engagement matters on LinkedIn.

Engage with your target audience by participating in relevant conversations. Comment on their posts to add valuable insights or answer important questions. So when their connections see your comments, they might want to learn more about your business.

Moreover, when you engage with others, they might want to reciprocate and engage with your content. This means you get to drive more engagement on your posts, which could boost visibility and get your content in front of the right people.

When people engage with content on LinkedIn, their activity sometimes shows up in the feeds of their connections. That means when someone comments on your post, there’s a chance that their connections will take notice of the post. That way, you could grow your reach and attract a relevant audience.

Maximize reach and visibility

Using LinkedIn for business is all about amplifying your reach so that more people can discover your brand. One of the most effective ways to do this organically is by getting your employees involved.

Chances are your employees already have a solid professional network on LinkedIn, and you want to tap into it to maximize your reach. One employee advocacy study found that branded messages had a much higher reach when employees share them. In fact, branded messages shared by employees had a 561% higher reach than when shared through branded channels.

Have your employees reshare your company’s LinkedIn posts and latest articles. And make sure they’re regularly providing their connections with the latest company updates. As representatives of your brand, they serve as a reliable source when it comes to information about your company. At the same time, they add a more personal touch to the message since it’s coming from real people.

At Sprout Social, team members regularly share product update info and branded content on LinkedIn. This puts a human face to the brand and helps us to build a more personal connection with our audience.

Showcase your expertise

People aren’t going to follow your company page just because it exists. They have to be able to derive some value out of it. That means you need to showcase your expertise and give them a reason to tune into your brand’s updates.

You can share thought leadership pieces that address relevant and trending topics in your industry. Follow LinkedIn best practices and make sure to add original thoughts and ideas to give these pieces a unique touch. This is a great way to show your audience that you know what you’re talking about.

Additionally, you could use native documents such as how-to guides, reports and case studies. These types of content are a great way to address the needs of people who are looking for helpful information. How-to guides will show that your team has expertise in the field. Surveys and reports show your in-depth knowledge of the industry. Meanwhile, case studies serve as proof of your team’s capability.

For example, Semrush regularly shares how-to guides and practical tips related to SEO. It provides informative answers to pressing questions and guides the audience on how to do certain things. This has helped to establish the brand as an authority figure in all things related to SEO.

Track ROI with LinkedIn analytics

To maximize the potential of LinkedIn for your business, it’s important to make data-driven decisions. Best practices and assumptions can only get you so far. Instead, you need to look at what your LinkedIn data is telling you to fine-tune your strategy and get more out of the platform.

The native LinkedIn Analytics tool can provide you with valuable data about your page performance. You’ll be able to learn about how many people visited your page, how many followers you gained and more. You can even look at the performance of your content in terms of impressions and engagement.

Use these insights to understand how certain strategies impacted your performance. For example, did you see a spike in visitors after sharing your latest report? Or perhaps you might notice that certain types of posts are getting significantly more engagement than others. This should be able to inform how to improve your strategy and get more out of LinkedIn for your business. If your company requires more detailed data, a third-party LinkedIn analytics tool may be a better solution.

Benefits of using LinkedIn for business

So if you follow the tips above, what do you have to gain? How can you benefit from using LinkedIn for business marketing? Let’s take a look.

Builds influence and credibility

An active presence on LinkedIn helps you demonstrate your credibility. People can go to your LinkedIn page to find all the information they need about your business.

LinkedIn lets you update your page with all the essential details such as your company size and location. Plus, you can include additional details about your social impact, work-life balance and so on. By providing easy access to this information, you can showcase your credibility and earn the trust of your audience.

Moreover, you have the opportunity to use your LinkedIn business page to build your influence. This may involve consistently showcasing your expertise through valuable content. You could share thought leadership pieces and practical information related to your industry. Eventually, this will help you establish your authority in the field and build your influence.

Grows your audience

LinkedIn gives you access to a massive network of job seekers and B2B consumers. According to the latest LinkedIn stats, the platform has over 900 million members worldwide. While they may not all be relevant to your business, you still have millions of people you could potentially reach. With the right tactics, LinkedIn gives you the opportunity to exponentially grow your audience.

Develops relationships with your community

LinkedIn is the hub of conversations in the professional community. You’ll find people discussing everything from job opportunities to the impact of ChatGPT. These conversations serve as an effective tool to build relationships within your community.

You could join relevant LinkedIn Groups and participate in trending conversations. You could even start the conversation yourself and encourage people to share their thoughts. All this engagement eventually helps you build a relationship with the right people.

Ready to use LinkedIn for your business?

As the largest online professional network, LinkedIn is a goldmine for businesses that want to reach B2B consumers. Make the most of the steps provided above to get started with the platform.

Already have a LinkedIn strategy but not sure if you’re doing it right? Use our LinkedIn for Business worksheet to see where you currently stand.

The post The complete guide to using LinkedIn for business appeared first on Sprout Social.

If you observe socially-savvy B2C companies, they focus on marketing with personality and emotion – making their brand more appealing and memorable. If only it were so easy for B2B, right? Well, it might be time to think again. LinkedIn’s study, Emotion on LinkedIn’2022, has shown that brands in tech who utilize emotive marketing boasted a 25% higher engagement rate than their peers. 

But in a world where this style of marketing has been proven as desirable, it still remains critically underutilized. This means there’s a real opportunity for your business to stand out and gain competitive advantage.

In this webinar you’ll:

• Uncover how emotional marketing helps brands connect with their B2B audience.
• Learn how to optimize your LinkedIn strategy using emotion and personality.
• Be equipped with emotional marketing tactics you can implement instantly.
  

The post How to Captivate your B2B Audience with Emotional Marketing appeared first on Sprout Social.

With so many brands competing for users’ attention, managing and growing a LinkedIn account takes enormous time, dedication, and effort. So, it’s no surprise that many marketers find building a LinkedIn presence overwhelming.

If your content marketing strategy includes posting on LinkedIn, you may be wondering how to handle this task effectively. That’s where social media scheduling tools come in, allowing you to deliver content that meets your brand’s needs, while being timely and relevant to customer interests.

In this guide, we’ve compiled some helpful tips and best practices for scheduling your posts on LinkedIn.

Table of contents

• Why should you schedule your posts on LinkedIn?
• How to schedule posts on LinkedIn
• How to schedule posts with LinkedIn Native Scheduler
• How to schedule posts on LinkedIn using Sprout Social
• 5 Tips for Scheduling Your LinkedIn Posts

Why should you schedule your posts on LinkedIn?

Scheduling your LinkedIn posts allows you to optimize the execution of your LinkedIn strategy, which provides an efficient means to distribute your content on the platform effortlessly.

1. Saves time and reduces unnecessary workload

Establishing a LinkedIn presence requires much time, effort, and dedication, which is time-consuming. By scheduling posts, you spend less time on manual publishing on LinkedIn, freeing you up to focus on higher-level tasks such as content creation, analysis, and engagement.

2. Helps you stay consistent

Scheduling your posts allows you to plan content in advance and set them to post at the right times. This way, you maintain a consistent LinkedIn presence without staying on the platform or worrying about posting daily.

3. Grow your profile engagement faster

Scheduling your LinkedIn posts will help you reach your audience at the best times when they’re most active on LinkedIn. When scheduling your post, you can choose the best time when your audience will be available and target your posts to show up at that time, thereby increasing engagement.

4. Keeps you organized

Keeping track of your LinkedIn account can be stressful, especially if you manage multiple accounts simultaneously. Scheduling your posts takes the burden off of that. All you need to do is create your posts and schedule a publishing time.

5. Helps you scale your LinkedIn efforts

Growing your audience on LinkedIn comes with much dedication and time. Scheduling makes it easier. When you schedule your posts, it gives you the advantage of posting consistently and growing your account.

How to schedule posts on LinkedIn

There are two ways to schedule posts on LinkedIn. First, you can schedule your posts with the LinkedIn Native scheduler, but that comes with some restrictions we’ll soon discuss. The second option is scheduling with a third-party platform like Sprout Social. Let’s discuss each one in detail.

How to schedule posts with LinkedIn Native Scheduler

1. Log in to your LinkedIn account and click the ‘Start a post’ box at the top of the homepage.

2. Enter the body text of your post and attach any images, videos, or documents. If you’re attaching an image, you can edit it, tag other users, and add alt text. If you’re posting a video instead, upload a customized thumbnail and an SRT file for subtitles.

3. Click the clock icon in the lower right corner to open the schedule dialog.
4. In the scheduling dialog, select a date and time from the dropdown to schedule your post. If your audience is in a different time zone, consider scheduling in their time zone.

5. Select ‘Next’ to save your schedule settings and return to your post preview.
6. When you’re all done, review your post for spelling errors, formatting issues, and ensure it matches your brand’s guidelines and tone. Also, review your image and hashtags to ensure they’re accurate for your post.

7. Click the schedule button, and you’re done.
8. If you wish to view scheduled posts on LinkedIn, click ‘View all scheduled posts’ on the schedule dialog to see all scheduled posts.

In the scheduled posts window, you can preview all scheduled posts and their publish dates. To delete a post, simply click on the delete icon, and if you want to reschedule, click on the clock icon to select a new date and time.

That’s it. You’ve scheduled your first post on LinkedIn.

Limitations with the native LinkedIn scheduler

While it seems straightforward to schedule content with LinkedIn’s native scheduler, there are several limitations that social media managers should be aware of. These limitations may hinder your ability to schedule posts effectively.

• Limited scheduling options: LinkedIn’s native scheduler provides fewer options for scheduling posts. For instance, it only allows scheduling for up to three months in advance. In addition, LinkedIn doesn’t allow bulk scheduling, which means that each post must be scheduled individually, which is time-consuming.
• Limited analytic features: LinkedIn’s analytics only provide a basic insight into your LinkedIn content performance and audience behavior. It doesn’t give you much freedom to track your audience demographic data or metrics like click-through rates, follower growth, or engagement rates.
• Inability to tag people and pages: Using LinkedIn’s native scheduler prevents you from tagging people or pages in your post. This could limit the reach and engagement of your post.
• No support for managing multiple LI accounts at once: With the native LinkedIn scheduler, you can only schedule posts for one account at a time. This is a drawback, especially for social media managers who manage multiple accounts.
• Limited posting options: You can’t schedule articles, newsletters, multiple image posts, events, or polls with the LinkedIn scheduler. This has to be done manually.
• Limitations on approval collaboration: The LinkedIn scheduler discourages the collaboration of teams in real-time. Posts can only be made and seen by one person, so every review, approval, or collaboration must be done outside the tool.
• Posts cannot be edited after uploading: Once a post has been scheduled for upload, it can’t be edited. In the event that any corrections need to be made, you would need to delete the entire post and repost it.

How to schedule posts on LinkedIn using Sprout Social

An alternative to scheduling posts with LinkedIn’s native scheduler is to use a social media scheduling tool like Sprout Social. Here’s how to do it:

Create your LinkedIn post

The first step is to create your post. Before writing, be clear on the goal of the post and how it will benefit your audience. A good LinkedIn post starts with an attention-grabbing hook, which could be a question, a story, a compelling statement, or statistics.

On the Sprout dashboard, click the Compose icon to open up a new post. Input your post in the text box provided and format it for a better reading experience. You can also add emojis or product links. Use relevant hashtags if possible.

On the right side, you can preview changes to your posts to see the outcome on LinkedIn in real-time.

Add media to your post

Upload approved media content to your post to make it stand out. This could be an image, video, or document to enhance your post and make it stand out. After uploading, you can edit your images on Sprout with the integrated image editor tool or resize them using our social media resizer.

Here, you can crop the image size and add filters, frames, new texts, overlays, or stickers. Once you’re done, export the image to save your changes.

You can also add descriptive text to your image to provide additional context, information, or details to the viewer. Include relevant keywords related to your image or post to improve the searchability of your post and increase its visibility to a broader audience.

Preview and optimize your post

After editing your post, click the profile picker to select the LinkedIn profile for your post. Sprout Social allows you to manage multiple LinkedIn accounts at once and lets you post on a company or personal page.

Set up approval permissions for collaboration and approval of each post. This is useful for social media teams and marketers who need their clients’ or managers’ feedback on posts before they go live.

Finalize your post

After your content is optimized, you can finalize it for publishing. This includes submitting content for approval, saving it as a draft, or publishing your post immediately. Contents needing approval can be saved as drafts until all reviews are complete.

On Sprout’s calendar, you can view, share, and collaborate on your monthly scheduled content in a calendar view. You can add notes to each comment from another team member. And if you’re bulk scheduling your posts in Sprout, you can view all your scheduled posts at once and correct them accordingly.

Schedule your post for publishing

Once you’re all set, select when you want the post to go out. You can publish your post immediately, auto-schedule with Sprout Queue, or schedule it for later.

Pick a specific date and time to schedule your posts. Better still, take advantage of Sprout’s tool, ViralPost, to pick optimal times when your audience is most active on LinkedIn.

You can also auto-schedule your posts with Sprout Queue to fill engagement gaps and publish posts automatically throughout the day. You don’t need to input a time or day when the post will go live; Sprout Queue takes care of that for you.

5 Tips for Scheduling Your LinkedIn Posts

Ready to start scheduling your LinkedIn posts? Consider these five tips to help you effectively schedule your LinkedIn posts.

1. Know your audience

Before posting on LinkedIn, define who your ideal audience is. You need to know: who are you talking to? What do they do? What do they like? A generic response like “CEOs” or “marketers” won’t do. You must dive deeper and answer specific questions like:

• Location: get clear on your audience’s location so you can customize posting times to when they’re most active.
• Professional details: Find out what they do and their position.
• Buying power: Find out their role in the buying process. For example, content heads often suggest project management software for their team.
• Industry: What industry are they currently in? Do they use familiar lingo?
• Content type: Study the content types they engage with. Pay attention to the content that gets the most shares, likes, comments, and reposts. This will give you an idea of what topics and content types resonate with them.
• Online behavior: Pay attention to the type of content they engage with. Find out what content gets the most shares, likes, comments, and reposts. This will give you an idea of what topics and content types resonate with them.

With the social listening tool on Sprout Social, you can collect in-depth data about your audience. Research your audience by location, seniority, and job function to know who you’re reaching.

2. Monitor and optimize your posting timing

The best time to post on LinkedIn is during optimal hours, when your audience is most active and likely to engage with your post. Our research at Sprout Social found that the best times to post on LinkedIn could vary depending on the industry and demographics.

However, on average, the best time we found to post on LinkedIn is 10 a.m. on Tuesday. But don’t let this restrict your posting schedule to this time. Keep a close eye on your LinkedIn analytics to determine which posts perform well and adjust your posting schedule accordingly.

3. Experiment with different content types

The best post types on LinkedIn can differ depending on your industry. We studied 3,000 LinkedIn posts and found that long-form “how-tos” perform 31.5% better than every other content type. This is unsurprising, as LinkedIn is a community of professionals who share ideas and learn from one another.

However, we also found that posts with a single image perform 2x better than text-based posts and have a 98% higher comment rate, whereas posts with videos get 5x more engagement on LinkedIn. This means uploading video content from webinars or tutorials would perform well on LinkedIn.

In the content benchmark for 2023, we also researched content types that perform well on social media, not just LinkedIn.

Experiment with different post formats to find your audience’s sweet spot for engagement. Depending on the vibe, you could choose to alternate content types for each posting day. For example, posting a meme gives off a relaxed feeling, which fits into a weekend mood. Meanwhile, text-based posts, videos, or slides would fit well for other days.

But if you’re still clueless about what to post on your company’s page, check out this post on LinkedIn’s best practices for marketing professionals.

4. Take time to engage with your audience

Scheduling a post is one part of a successful LinkedIn strategy; the other is engaging with your audience. Engaging with your audience humanizes your brand and fosters a positive customer relationship. This helps you gain credibility, build authority, and increase brand loyalty.

Also, engaging with your audience increases your account’s visibility on the channel. Think of it this way: the more you show up in the comment section, the more people engage with you, which gets more eyeballs on your profile.

You can engage with your audience by:

• Leaving meaningful comments on people’s posts
• Reposting content that is meaningful and true to your brand
• Replying to comments on your posts
• Responding to questions, comments, and messages

5. Optimize your LinkedIn marketing strategy with data

At intervals, study your LinkedIn analytics to measure what’s working and what’s not, so that you can adjust your content accordingly. Sprout Social provides in-depth social media analytics and reporting features to help you measure your content performance, track your brand mentions, and monitor your competition.

Don’t just create multiple posts in advance without looking at past results. Leverage data to:

• Analyze your best-performing posts and how you can re-create them for more success.
• Break down your least-performing posts and list possible mistakes.
• Optimize your LinkedIn strategy to suit the audience’s needs.

Optimize your LinkedIn Strategy with Scheduled Posts

Scheduling your LinkedIn posts enables you to plan your content in advance to ensure more consistent follower engagement. Without it, you’ll have to manually post your content on LinkedIn, which can be time-consuming and insufficient.

Regardless of how good you think your LinkedIn content strategy is, it’s always best to schedule posts in advance so you can implement a consistent and strategic content calendar.

Want to start scheduling your LinkedIn posts? Sprout Social’s LinkedIn scheduler makes it easy to schedule posts on LinkedIn. Sign up for a free 30-day trial today!

The post How to schedule LinkedIn posts in 2023 appeared first on Sprout Social.

Four out of five LinkedIn members drive business decisions. And LinkedIn audiences have twice the buying power of the average online audience. Imagine the boost these community-centric Groups give to your LinkedIn marketing.

In this article, we’ll explain ways in which LinkedIn Groups can benefit brands. We will also walk you through how to join groups on LinkedIn as well as how to create a group on LinkedIn.

Table of contents:

• What are LinkedIn Groups?
• How to find and join groups on LinkedIn
• How to create a LinkedIn Group
• How are LinkedIn Groups helpful for Brands?
• Examples of successful LinkedIn Groups

What are LinkedIn Groups?

LinkedIn Groups provide an intensive space for members to engage in meaningful conversations around an industry or topic. By asking questions and sharing expertise, members can build deeper relationships with each other. This creates a robust community within LinkedIn.

How to find groups on LinkedIn

Method 1. Look for groups in the home search bar

Open the search bar and enter a query using keywords and phrases for the topics you’re interested in. Or, you can enter a specific group name, an industry, a company name or consumer group. Some queries will take you directly to Groups. For example, if you enter the query “Microsoft Excel,” you will find “Microsoft Excel Users” under Groups at the top of the search results.

Method 2. Use the search function on the Groups page

Click on the work grid on the top right of your homepage and then select Groups.

This will take you to your Groups page where you can view the groups you are a member of and those you have requested membership in.

Scroll down to “Search other trusted communities that share and support your goals,” and click on Search. This will bring up a list of groups for you to peruse.

Method 3. Choose from Groups suggested by LinkedIn

On the right side of your Groups Page you will find a section titled, “Groups you might be interested in.”

How to join a LinkedIn Group you’ve found

You can join by clicking this button from any search results, suggestions, or from a group’s Profile Page.

Before you join a group, you may want to know more about it. LinkedIn makes it easy to check the group out before you join. If you click on the group name, you will go to their Profile Page where you will discover how many of your connections are already in that group.

Next, below “About this group,” you will find “Member Highlights.” This section will show you information such as how many members of the group went to your University, how many live in your city and how many are in your specific industry.

You should read the group description and rules contained in the “About this group” section. This will give you a good sense of the group and what to expect.

Below “Member Highlights” you will see “Related Groups.” Each will show you how many of its members are in the group you are currently viewing. This is especially useful if you are already a member of any of the related groups listed.

In the top right-hand corner of the page, you will see the Admin section. This section will list the owner and any other managers of the group. Below that will be a list of suggested courses for that group.

Some groups will admit you right away, while others will have a process they go through before admitting you. You are free to join whichever groups you like, but keep in mind that each member is limited to joining 100 groups.

How to create a LinkedIn Group

Step 1. Go to your Groups homepage

Do this by clicking on the work grid and selecting groups as we did above. You will see the “Create Group” button in the top right corner of your Groups page.

Step 2. Click on the “Create Group” button

A form will pop up requiring you to fill out information on the group you wish to create.

Step 3. Fill out the information requested in the form

The pop-up form is shown in three parts below for ease of discussion.

Group name

This may be the most important part of the form. You need to hook your target audience with the name of your group. Use keywords for the topic or purpose of your group. Let people know relevant facts about your group in the title. For example, whether the group is regional like “B2B Marketing & Strategy Colombia/Latam,” shown in the earlier image. Keep in mind, you are limited to 100 characters for your title.

Description

You want your group’s description to be brief, but long enough to let potential members know what your group is about. You have 2,000 characters to write your description. But, only the first few lines will show up in the search results. So make sure you convey enough within those lines to grab your target audience’s attention.

Here’s a good example from Search Engine Land.

Industry

While this is optional, it may help you obtain the types of members you’re looking for. You may add up to three relevant industries.

Location

This is also optional but may be relevant depending on your industry. In the case of a group like “Writers & Authors,” shown above, a physical location may become a meeting place for local writers.

Rules

Rules will go within the “About this group” section once your group is created. Providing rules, regulations, and expectations for group activities is optional. But setting these is a good idea to make your group run smoothly. You have up to 4,000 characters to convey your group’s rules. Microsoft Excel Users has clear, concise rules of conduct. These include a requirement that you post to the group the details of any solutions to your queries that you receive via private message. Also, and this is listed in LinkedIn’s best practices, you should not post the same content in multiple groups. See Microsoft Excel Users’ complete rules.

Privacy

Under group type, you will choose Public or Private. The form is self-explanatory, but take care, Public is the default option.

Discoverability

If you choose to make your group Private, you may then select whether you want your group to be Listed or Unlisted. Again, the form is self-explanatory as to the effects of each choice. Clearly, you would want your group Listed so your target audience could find you in searches. They will also see your group when they are looking at your profile and those of other members.

Permissions

Here you would likely want to select both “allow members to invite their connections” and “require new posts to be reviewed by admins.” The first will improve your reach and grow your group with like-minded individuals. The second will allow you to keep your group on-topic and spam free.

Step 4. Upload your group logo

Click on the edit icon above the group name to upload your group logo. You should create a professional logo and cover image to represent your group. This will help attract the type of members you are looking for.

Step 5. Upload your cover image

Do this by clicking on the edit icon in the top right corner of the page.

Step 6. Create your group

Once you’ve completed all these steps, click the “Create” button on the bottom right of the form to complete your group creation.

You will then become the owner of the new group, and you can designate other members as additional owners or group managers.

How are LinkedIn Groups helpful for brands?

The ongoing process of creating and scheduling content designed to grow and nurture your audience is part of your social media management. LinkedIn Groups are a great place for brands to further this effort. Here’s why.

LinkedIn Groups promote engagement

LinkedIn Groups promote engagement in two major ways. Members who join a group, do so for the express purpose of consuming a particular type of content. Groups also foster community. This is because the questions posed and the insights shared spark conversations among the members of the group. Relationships form out of these conversations.

Responding to posts, questions and comments is a good way to stay engaged and to keep the conversations going and the connections forming. You may also recommend popular posts to other group members once a week. LinkedIn Groups are designed to boost engagement.

LinkedIn Groups help you learn your audience’s pain points

The preferred conversational, question and answer format of Groups lends itself well to discovering the challenges your audience faces. These will show up in their questions and their polls. And don’t underestimate the power of the “Create a Poll” post to engage your audience around a certain topic or question. You can provide up to four responses for poll respondents to choose from. Be sure to post the results, and then discuss them within the group. The insights you gain will be invaluable.

You can also ask direct, specific questions, or open-ended ones to ferret out the information you need. Remember, the members of the group are there because they’re already interested in the group’s topic or purpose. So, they are more likely to respond and create conversations around your questions. And you can keep those conversations going by providing thoughtful responses to their comments.

LinkedIn Groups expand your reach

Once you’ve created your group, you will invite your relevant connections to join. If you’ve done your job, your target audience will find your group and join too. Those audience members can then invite their connections to join, expanding your reach beyond your network. These new group members could well be an audience you wouldn’t have been able to reach on your own.

And when your content is among the top 10 performing posts, tagging is a smart way to give it additional reach.

The LinkedIn algorithm also plays a role here, rewarding reach to those with frequent interactions and engagement. And since LinkedIn Groups are all about engagement, the rewards can be significant.  This is especially true in large groups, such as Microsoft Excel Users which has over 417,000 members.

LinkedIn Groups help you form more meaningful relationships

Since LinkedIn Groups’ design promotes conversations between members interested in a specific topic or industry, it’s easier to form more personal connections. What develops is a community engaging with each other over sincere questions and helpful information.

And, as an owner of a group, you have the power to direct that interaction to a great extent. Groups analytics gives you the information you need so you can leverage the tools at your disposal to better reach your audience. When you comment, tag and post popular content types you build deeper relationships with your target audience.

LinkedIn Groups help establish you as a thought leader

Answer questions in a way that clearly showcases your expertise on the matter. Be thorough, but concise. Post relevant, high-quality content consistently. Comment on group members’ posts to start or continue discussions around areas of your expertise. Remember to pose your own provocative questions to get conversations going. Over time, other members will recognize you as a leader in your field.

And, by leveraging Groups analytics you can ensure that your content stays within the top-performing posts.

Note that LinkedIn frowns on using Groups “as a platform for promoting your product or service.” And they point to other resources for attracting talent, generating leads and building brand awareness. So the gist is, don’t use Groups for these purposes.

Examples of successful LinkedIn Groups

Search Engine Land

Search Engine Land is a private, listed group with over 107,000 members which claims to be a must-read hub for news and information about search engine marketing, SEO, PPC and how search engines work.

A closer look at the group shows that it provides expert news and analysis, guides and how-to’s as well as a free daily newsletter.

This is a thriving community, filled with questions, signified by #questionforthegroup. There are numerous polls as well as announcements of employment opportunities. Informative posts dot the feed. Even the simplest questions asked by new members quickly draw thoughtful responses.

And it is a community of diverse individuals including digital marketers, tech executives, web developers and even the occasional political candidate.

Microsoft Excel Users

This is a private, listed group of over 417,000 members dedicated to helping each other solve Microsoft Excel-related problems. It is also a marketplace for jobs inquiries and postings. The group has one owner and two additional managers.

In addition to the rules highlighted above, this group requires that you post the details of the solution to your problem if you solve your own query. And they forbid the posting of anything not relevant to Excel.

All posts require Admin approval before submission to the group. According to LinkedIn’s guidelines, if posts are not approved within the 14-day period allowed, they are automatically deleted.

Build a community with your target audience using LinkedIn Groups

LinkedIn Groups give you enormous opportunities to learn about your audience. Where else can you have such a concentration of people who have come specifically to consume your content and interact with you?

Now that you know all there is to know about LinkedIn Groups, go ahead and start making and joining groups today.

If you’re looking for more LinkedIn tips for your brand, check out our LinkedIn best practices for marketing professionals

The post The complete guide to using LinkedIn Groups appeared first on Sprout Social.

This content explosion isn’t imagined. According to LinkedIn, platform members viewed 22% more Feed updates in 2022, year over year. But ramping up your content and LinkedIn marketing strategy on the platform will inevitably lead to questions in the effort to get it right. And one of the biggest questions we’ve seen about LinkedIn content is whether or not you should put links in your posts, or in the first comment.

We were curious too: why put the link in comments on LinkedIn? So we designed an experiment to find out. Keep reading to see what we did, our results and learnings to bolster your strategy.

Why put the link in comments in LinkedIn posts? (And does it matter?)

Comments vs. post? Does it make a difference for engagement? Impressions?

As marketers rethink their LinkedIn content strategy, these questions are surfacing more and more. With bandwidth already thin for social teams, it pays to be sure the posts you push out on the platform are optimized for maximum social media engagement.

Our social team designed an experiment to answer this question. “I have seen an increasing volume of text-only posts on LinkedIn, which is why we wanted to do this experiment,” Sprout’s Social Media Strategist—and designer of this experiment—Greg Rokisky tells us. “I’ve seen a lot of carousel and document posts, and I’ve seen a lot of creativity being executed there. So it’s exciting to see how LinkedIn continues to adapt for various post types.”

How we tested adding links to content on LinkedIn

Social media is part art, part science. Conducting social media experiments is one of the best ways to evaluate what content your team should be spending more time on.

Here’s how we designed our experiment—and the variables we controlled for—to get the most accurate results possible.

The post content

Over the course of a month, we created 8 posts designed specifically for this experiment on LinkedIn. First, we picked four articles from our blog that:

• We wanted to post about in the upcoming weeks
• Had actionable, social-first lists and takeaways we could include in a post
• Shared similar takeaways

Then, we created two posts for each article: A post that would contain the link in the comments, like this one:

And another that would contain the link within the post itself, like this one:

That left us with four link-in-comments posts, four link-included posts.

The post design

The key here was ensuring that our 8 posts weren’t repetitive, and fit in with our normal flow of content.

To do this, we changed up the text and how information was presented in each post. The link-in-comments posts had a “social-first” design. That is, the post itself had enough value to be sharable and were designed to be:

• Engaging
• Long enough to show the “see more text” prompt
• Value-driven (i.e. included a list of takeaways that provided readers with insights, while also teasing the full article)

The link-included posts had shorter text overall. Where the link-in-comments post copy was designed to be social-first, this copy was geared towards getting readers to click through to the article.

The post frequency

We confined this experiment to a month to spread out and analyze the posts within our regular reporting period. We also published no more than two experiment posts within one week, alternating link-in-comments posts with the link-included ones to avoid redundant content.

Finally, as Greg explains, “We also scheduled using one of the top two of our Optimal Send Time recommendations in Sprout Social to ensure we were scheduling at peak recommended times as an added control.”

Result: Does putting the link in the comments improve performance?

Now comes the fun part. Without further ado, here are the two most impactful results. Drum roll please:

The link-in-comments posts performed better

As Greg explains, “In terms of overall performance and how these posts performed on LinkedIn, the link-in-comments posts performed better and had higher numbers from both an awareness and engagement perspective.”

Not only did these posts perform better than the link-included posts—they also performed well in the context of our larger strategy. In our testing month, two of the link-in-comments posts were among our top 10 performers across all platforms for awareness and engagement.

Here’s a better look at those numbers:

• Awareness results: Link-in-comments posts had a higher average of impressions per post—around 8,136. While the link-included posts had around 3,309 impressions on average—roughly a 3x difference.
• Engagement results: The link-in-comments posts had an average of 261 engagements per post, while the link-included posts fell to 141 average engagements.

To track our results, we tagged our experiment posts in Sprout. Tags helped us pull reports solely featuring our experiment results, which is an effective way to track specific post results, or campaigns. See the tags we used for this experiment below (in Sprout’s dark mode.)

Sprout’s Tag Performance Report gave us an overview of the experiment’s post performance. And we used the Profile and Post Performance reports to analyze how the experiment performed within our overall LinkedIn strategy, including if any were top performers within the month.

If you’re interested in trying these reports for yourself, start a free 30-day Sprout trial.

Posts that were “social-first” performed better

The link-in-comments posts had rich captions that contained takeaways from the link included in the comments. These posts were text-only and “social-first”—that is, designed to fit the platform and acted as a “foot-in-the-door” to lead interested readers in taking the next step to click the link in the comments.

And as mentioned earlier—several of the text-only, social-first posts were in our top 10 posts across all of our channels during our testing month.

These strong test results revealed the right formula for our LinkedIn link posts: a combination of the social-first approach, and putting links in the comments. Testing this post format has the potential to supercharge your post performance as well.

5 Takeaways to use in your LinkedIn strategy

Data is nothing if you don’t put it into action. And there are plenty of ways you can use this experiment to feed how you structure your LinkedIn content, and your LinkedIn best practices.

According to our 2023 Content Benchmarks Report, over half of marketers cite “changing content formats” as a challenge when planning and scheduling content. Use these five takeaways to alleviate some of that stress by knowing where to take your strategy next.

1. Design platform-first posts

Creating posts designed to look native to the platform you’re posting on is like “speaking the language” of the social channel. Not to mention, it works. As Greg puts it, “The posts that felt like they were designed for the channel, or ‘social-first,’ and native to it seemed to perform better overall.”

This also meets your audience with the content type they look for on the platform you’re publishing on. And this goes for any platform—not just LinkedIn. For example, you probably wouldn’t include the same framing or voice effects in a YouTube video that you would in a TikTok or YouTube Short video.

As Greg says, “I think this reinforced our strategy to create content catered to each individual platform.”

Our LinkedIn for Business Template will help you explore ways to make a bigger impact on this channel.

2. Lead with your goals

In this experiment, our goals were social-first—generating more organic engagement and awareness.

But your goal might be focused on other objectives and key results, like driving website visits or purchases. In this case, your social posts may have cross-team implications. Align with other teams on KPIs and the parameters of your experiment to get the data each contributor needs to make informed decisions, and ensure you have access to the necessary tools—Google Analytics data, for example.

For example, if your content team uses Google Analytics to track blog links, work with them to ensure you’re properly tracking your links with UTMs, and can access those results. We go deeper into link tracking in the next section.

3. Plan to track your links separately

One limitation we identified in this experiment was the ability to measure link clicks when the link was in the comments vs. in the post.

Sprout reports measure post link clicks for published posts. However, when the link is in the comments, there’s no way for social platforms to capture that information for the post in LinkedIn analytics.

The solution: To track how many people clicked on your comment link, use UTMs to track your URLs. A UTM is a basic code snippet added to the end of your URL. It tracks the performance of your links and helps you get deeper insights into how people interact with them.

To employ UTMs, use Google’s UTM builder. Or, when you use Sprout, our platform makes it easy for you to implement URL tracking within your publishing workflow, and to shorten your links before you publish.

4. Add the link to your comments to test it for yourself

LinkedIn is already the organic platform that B2B content marketers find the most effective. As you ramp up your posting strategy, try putting links in the comments to potentially kickstart your awareness and engagement.

And if you’re not ready to take the leap, strike a balance. Include your link in the post. But make your text social-first and designed to be engaging for LinkedIn readers. Think: teasing your content with a list of tips, key takeaways and more.

If you use a social media management platform to schedule and publish posts, just remember to comment with the link manually due to API limitations. You’re already engaging with your audience in the comments—which Sprout can also help streamline with our Smart Inbox. Add this step to your current comment and engagement strategy to keep it top of mind, or set reminders.

5. Try crafting platform-specific content experiments

The best way to truly know what makes an impact in you content strategy and what leads to the strongest ROI is to experiment.

Use this article as a guide and design a social media experiment to test different content types, designs and formats in your strategy.

The key is having controls—like how we controlled our posting time, frequency and themes to limit the number of variables we were testing at once. And, to know how you’re going to measure your posts ahead of time.

Having the right tools is crucial to running effective tests. As Greg put it, “When I used to be a social team of one, I ran social media experiments like this and had to lean on spreadsheets that lend to human error. So doing an experiment in a product like Sprout makes it much easier to look back on results, understand trends, dive deeper into posts and keep a controlled experiment.” The easier it is for you to compile your findings and analyze your results, the more motivated you’ll be to test.

Just ensure your test posts feel natural to your strategy. “Doing a social media experiment needs to feel authentic and natural for your audience and platform,” Greg explains.

For example, this is a regular, non-experimental post on our LinkedIn channel. Compare this to the experiment posts we shared above:

Test out what works for your strategy and audience

Social media is constantly in flux. The more content formats and audience preferences change, the more important it is to run experiments that assess what types of content your team should focus on.

The key to running an experiment that leads to actionable insights is organizing your process. Check out our social media testing worksheet to design and run personalized experiments that will fine-tune your strategy and leads to better business results.

The post Sprout Tested: The answer to why you put links in the comments on LinkedIn appeared first on Sprout Social.