7 Essential LinkedIn Marketing Stats: When to Post, What to Post and How to Improve

It might be a surprise to many people but LinkedIn is the third fastest growing social media network.

LinkedIn is one of the best ways to get referrals to your website. Using a combination of great content sharing and updates you can use LinkedIn as your number one source for referrals to your website from social media. The interest and appeal of LinkedIn continues to grow, now the question is how to best take advantage of this.

In this post I’ll analyse some key ways that you can use LinkedIn to build the profile of your website and turn it into a referral machine.

1. LinkedIn sends nearly four times more people to your homepage than Twitter and Facebook

LinkedIn is by far the number one referral source for direct traffic to your site compared to Facebook or Twitter. Whilst Twitter and Facebook are great for sharing blog posts, stories, and visual media, LinkedIn trumps them both in terms of referrals.

In fact a recent study has even found that LinkedIn accounts for nearly two thirds of all social referrals to corporate homepages, beating both Facebook and Twitter.

• LinkedIn: 64% of social referrals to corporate homepage

• Facebook: 17%

• Twitter: 14%

What this means:

This means that LinkedIn traffic is far more likely to be headed to your homepage rather than a satellite page like a blog post or a resource page. Keeping this in mind you can optimise your profile with consistent messaging that leads a user from LinkedIn to your corporate homepage.

2. The most in-demand content is industry insights

Numbers from LinkedIn show that 6 out of every 10 users are interested in industry insights, the most demanded type of content among LinkedIn members. Insights are quite popular among users and company news comes in at second, appealing to 53% of LinkedIn members.

What this means:

You need to share your expertise. When sharing your expertise you need to be helpful and transparent to the majority of your audience. Your content should consist primarily of industry and company insights. People follow companies on LinkedIn because they help them with their expertise so all of your content should feel relevant and actionable to your followers.

3. Avoid evenings, late afternoons, and weekends

If you want your content to get noticed then you need to publish at the right times. LinkedIn has found that the best times to post are between morning and midday, Monday through to Friday. Specific times don’t particularly matter, just as long as you do so during business hours.

What this means:

This means your posts need to be synchronised to LinkedIn’s ideal times for posting content. Even if you curate your content in evenings you can schedule your posts using a tool such as Hootsuite to go live the following day at anytime you choose.

4. Post at least 20 times per month

LinkedIn has found that posting 20 times per month can help you reach 60% of you audience.

The more you post, the more likely you are to reach a larger percentage of your audience. However, there naturally comes a point of diminishing returns where it will be impossible to reach everyone in your audience. By posting 20 updates per month you will be able to reach at least 60% of your audience.

Some people post more than this and do well, however, as a general guideline posting 20 updates per month is a great rule to follow if you want your content to get noticed by your audience.

What this means:

Start with the 20 posts per month and from there you can determine whether or not you should scale it up from there. Easiest way to hit this mark is to post one update per day during the suggested times Monday to Friday, skipping the weekends, and you’ll hit 20 posts per month.

5. A single status update reaches 20 percent of your followers

With each single post you are reaching up to 20% of your followers.

What this means:

20% might not sound like a lot but it depends on the size of your follower list as to how big an impact this will make. However, it is far more valuable to have a consistent posting schedule that you stick to rather than a one off post. Bottom line is that you will reach more of your audience and extend your reach the more you post.

6. Help your employees help you (they’re the most engaged)

Engagement tends to be bigger by employees rather than your typical user. They are often your greatest asset to helping build engagement on your profile.

What this means:

You should make it easy for your employees to engage with your content. By sending links and notifications every time you post you are making it easy for your employees to get involved and this is the best way to increase engagement by employees.

7. Learn and optimise from your engagement percentage

One of the most important things you can do is study the engagement percentage in your LinkedIn Analytics. This is a feature all company page admins can access. This page can be accessed by logged in admins by clicking the dropdown menu from the blue Edit button in the top right of your company profile.

The insights page is incredibly helpful because it will tell you demographics about the people who view your profile. This is great way to determine what kind of people are most interested in your business, and also the times that they visit your profile. Knowing the times they visit your profile can be extremely beneficial because you can then determine what time zones to sync your updates.

Engagement percentage is a stat that you should pay close attention to because it measures the total number of interactions, clicks, and followers acquired for each update you post to your account. This is useful for determining which kind of updates get the best response from users.

What this means:

Studying your engagement analytics will tell you where you can improve and where you are already performing well. What this does is allow you to optimise the kind of content you post in the future and this is going to be beneficial for your users and your business.

In Conclusion

Social media is an incredibly effective way to build your business through referrals and LinkedIn is by far the most effective source of social media referrals. Following these 7 essential tips you’ll be able to provide value to your audience and in turn build up referrals to your business page.

How have you found using LinkedIn to generate referrals and traffic to your site? Do you have any other tips to share?

Christian Michaels

#linkedinmarketingsolutions #socialmediamarketing #digitalmarketing