LinkedIn is a business-minded social network at its core, but it has become much more than a place to connect with coworkers and build your professional network. 

Thanks to its publishing tools, audience segmentation and analytics capabilities, and user base of around one billion professionals, it’s also an incredibly powerful content platform. The right LinkedIn content strategy can be a major growth engine for companies and individual employees. 

As a result, LinkedIn has become a primary focus for marketers, lead generation, PR professionals, and communications teams, according to PRWeek. Thought-leadership content is one of the most popular avenues of connecting with new audiences, as it can drive sales and partnerships, build your brand, and attract new talent to your company. 

Ultimately, your LinkedIn content strategy should be both organized and personal: The individual voices throughout your organization will make your content more varied and compelling, and the way those voices work together will paint a vivid picture of your brand and its values.   

First, Set Your Goals 

Just like any major initiative, the first step is to determine your goals and KPIs. What do you seek to accomplish with your LinkedIn content strategy? Is the main objective to boost brand followers, attract new talent to your company, or forge new business partnerships with like-minded brands and solutions providers? 

The answer may be “all of the above,” and that’s perfectly OK. Your LinkedIn strategy can make use of many “voices” to work toward those goals. 

Once you define your goals and key value propositions, it’s best to create a LinkedIn spokesperson matrix for your leadership team. Think of those spokespeople as an editorial team; each one has its own specialty area and unique readership. 

In addition to posting their own content in their own voice, everyone in that matrix should engage with, cross-post, and comment on LinkedIn content by other members of the team. This will help boost awareness and reach within their own personal networks – and it will also paint a picture of a collaborative and supportive work environment.  

Lean Into What Makes You Unique 

We’ve all seen LinkedIn turn into a bit of an echo chamber at times. If there’s a hot topic in the news, you may see hundreds of LinkedIn posts about the same subject: If everyone is posting about blockchain, AI, and return-to-office plans, you might feel a need to weigh in on those topics as well. 

There’s nothing wrong with posting about relevant, timely, or trending topics – in fact, it’s a great way to grow your audience and content visibility. However, you’ll need to make sure you’re doing it the right way, and that means bringing a new angle, perspective, or piece of insight to the same topic. 

Focus on offering unique commentary on those topics, using proprietary data to provide further insight, sharing real-world stories about how your team has overcome similar challenges, and explaining how your brand provides a one-of-a-kind unique solution.  

When you write about how your brand and its leaders tackle common topics in an unexpected and compelling way, it will likely attract unique followers and candidates that also think outside the box.  

Don’t Concentrate Solely on Success 

From new product announcements to key milestones to big promotions, you should certainly celebrate your team’s successes on LinkedIn. However, posting only about success can come across as overly self-promotional and unrelatable.  

After all, it’s hard to connect with an individual or a brand that “never makes mistakes.”  

Odds are, the road to every brand success and individual accomplishment meant overcoming significant challenges, learning from missteps, and approaching things from different perspectives. These are teachable moments that inspire great content, and they also make your brand and its leaders more human, inspiring, and relatable. 

Ultimately, sharing stories of the challenges you’ve faced on the path to success shows that your brand values understanding, teamwork, empathy, and support. Without writing about your brand values and culture explicitly, it can help convey the fact that your company is an enriching and rewarding place to work. 

Share the Love 

Many brands treat social networks – not just LinkedIn, but also Facebook, Twitter/X, and Instagram – as one-way publishing platforms. After all, they’re a powerful way to reach audiences – but they’re an even more powerful way to engage with them. 

Social networks are the primary touchpoint between your brand and younger audiences, and engagement outside of your posts is as important as the posts themselves. Your activity and interaction with other users – likes, comments, reposts, and connection requests – should be aligned with your overall goals. 

It’s important to extend beyond the “comfort zone” of your colleagues and your existing network, as it’s the only way your reach and your audience can grow. Be active about sharing your thoughts about other peoples’ posts and reposting interesting pieces of content from others. 

Audience engagement can also be a crucial part of your ongoing content strategy. Remain open to new content ideas inspired by questions and comments on your own content, and think about posting polls to ask your followers what they’d like you to write about next. 

Use LinkedIn Analytics to Refine Your Strategy 

LinkedIn has deeper readership analytics than most social networks, and you can use it to your advantage when honing your content strategy. Those analytics go well beyond how many likes and comments you get on each piece of content.  

By drilling into the LinkedIn analytics for your posts, you can identify specific industries to speak to in future posts, regions and locations to focus on for new business, and individuals that are actively engaging with your content. 

Over time, these metrics will help you discover or create industry-specific and location-specific LinkedIn groups that can further help your posts gain targeted readership and new followers. 

It’s important to remember that these analytics shouldn’t inform everything about your content strategy. Think of it this way: If you only serve hamburgers because hamburgers have traditionally sold well, you may be missing out on additional menu items that can draw a crowd. 

In other words, it’s crucial to post a balance of “tried and true” topics and new topics that will help you branch out into new audience segments and readers. This keeps your content mix fresh and varied, and it opens the door to additional topics and themes that may prove popular. 

Optimize the Most Important Part of Your Content Strategy 

In today’s world, your LinkedIn strategy may actually be the most important part of your overall content strategy. The user base is massive and business-focused, the platform has built-in tools and metrics that can help you target your content with precision, and you’re able to see (and connect and communicate with) the individuals and organizations that are reading your content. 

Developing a content strategy and calendar, drafting and scheduling your posts, measuring progress against your KPIs, and diving into post analytics to further refine your game plan is more than a full-time job. Furthermore, the spokespeople who can make your strategy a success are scattered throughout your organization, and you’ll need help streamlining and optimizing their efforts. 

You’ll need a seasoned strategic partner to orchestrate all those variables, and Airfoil has led effective social media strategy and content strategy programs for hundreds of clients in the B2B and B2C sectors. Contact us, and let’s talk about how we can make your LinkedIn content strategy shine – and elevate the impact of your entire integrated marketing pipeline.