by Caroline Leach | Aug 20, 2017 | Social Media
You get a big compliment every time someone reshares your LinkedIn article with their connections.
Each reshare is a valuable endorsement of your content, and it reaches a broader audience.
This creates a perfect opportunity to boost engagement with your LinkedIn articles. It’s yet another strategy for social media savvy.
(This where I remind readers that opinions expressed in this blog are my own.)
What’s a good way to respond?
For starters, you have to go looking.
Most of the time when you get a compliment, you know about it right away. You’re there. You’re present.
In the case of LinkedIn reshares right now, someone may compliment you and you might not know immediately.
You’ll know about a reshare if one of three things happens. First, if someone @mentions you in their update, you’ll receive a notification. Second, you can actively look at the article analytics. And third, you’ll see them in a weekly LinkedIn publishing digest email.
Here’s a simple process for engaging with people who reshare your articles.
Access the article analytics each day and click on the “reshares” link. There you’ll see who has shared your article, if they included an update message with it and what that update message says.
See if each person is in your network or not. Visit each profile to identify common interests and mutual connections. Look at each person’s own articles and updates.
“Like” the reshare and leave a comment. Thank the person for sharing your article. Personalize your message by relating it to their update message, if they included one. Add information of value in the comment for both the person who reshared and for their network.
Mention the person in your comment. By mentioning the person’s name, they will receive a notification that you posted a comment. This increases the likelihood that they will actually see your comment.
“Like” and comment on one of the person’s articles or updates. Choose a recent one that is most closely aligned with your own content strategy. Social media is all about reciprocity, and this is a perfect scenario to reciprocate. Consider resharing it if it’s especially pertinent to the type of content you usually share.
The most important thing I’ve learned here is to be proactive in looking at reshares – they won’t find you. You have to find them. And take action.
This exercise made me realize it’s time to re-activate my analytics spreadsheet. I created one during my month-long experiment of posting content on LinkedIn every weekday for a month.
Now that I’ve been posting one LinkedIn article each week, I can’t wait to dig into the data. I’ll share learnings in future posts.
In the meantime, how do you engage with people who reshare your articles?
by Caroline Leach | Jun 5, 2017 | Social Media
What happens when you post daily to LinkedIn?
In the month of May, I found out. I did an experiment. I posted every weekday to see what I would learn.
Why every weekday?
It takes about “20 LinkedIn posts every month to reach 60 percent of your audience,” according to a data point that Carly Okyle cited in an Entrepreneur article about LinkedIn profiles.
And because LinkedIn is a social media platform for professionals, most content views are during the work week.
To make it (relatively) easy to post daily, I set up a weekly calendar:
Mondays – a Social Circle employer advocacy program post (note: opinions I share in social media and in this blog are my own)
Tuesdays – content from one of my favorite business publications, like Harvard Business Review, The Economist, or Inc.
Wednesdays – an article, based on a previous post from this blog
Thursdays – a Social Circle employer advocacy program post
Fridays – sharing a post from a colleague, an alma mater, a professional association, a favorite publication or new content based on a holiday or other milestone.
With this content calendar framework in mind, it wasn’t as difficult as I thought to post every weekday. During early morning hours, it took about 10 minutes for most posts and 30 minutes for articles.
So, what did I learn?
Engagement increased each week. How did I measure engagement? By the number of total views each week.
By week 2, views were up 25%. By week 3, up 166% over the previous week. By week 4, up 88% over the previous week.
At the end of week 4, I also noticed my profile views were up by 45% over the previous week.
Week 5 was an anomaly. Views and profile views went down. However, I posted only 4 days that week because I skipped Memorial Day. And views may have been down because some people were on vacation after the long weekend.
Content re-shared by others got more engagement. When my 1st degree connections re-shared my content with their networks, I got the highest engagement as measured by views and likes.
Analytics came in handy, as I could see whether a post got more engagement from my 1st or 2nd degree network. What was harder to know was when my content was re-shared and who shared it.
Views are measured differently for posts and articles. Articles got fewer views than posts, but generated more likes. A view of a post means that “someone saw your post in their LinkedIn homepage feed.”
The bar is higher for a view of an article. Here it means “someone has clicked into and opened your article in their browser or on the LinkedIn mobile app.”
Understanding this, it now makes sense that while views to my articles were lower than for posts, articles generated more likes. People had actually opened the link for articles.
Hashtags are important to make content discoverable. In my zeal to post frequently, I often forgot to include hashtags. That limited broader discovery of my content.
Posts on Tuesdays and Wednesdays got the most engagement. This is consistent with data showing it’s best to post in the middle of the week.
An exception to the learning above? If a post reached my 2nd degree network, then the day of the week didn’t matter. And that’s the most important thing I learned – the power of content that is re-shared.
If content is engaging enough for connections to share it with their networks, it reaches a much broader audience. It exposes your ideas to more people. And it creates opportunities to connect with more people who share common interests.
Most engagement was for posts about how to be a better leader and professional. This is consistent with LinkedIn being a social media platform for professionals in business. These posts were more likely to be positive and upbeat in nature.
And that’s consistent with a study by 2 professors whose research supported the finding that, “Content is more likely to become viral the more positive it is.”
The least engagement was for topics that could be viewed as bad news. This aligns with the analysis I did of my least engaging posts.
They had to do with what could be perceived as bad news – dealing with the death of a family member, thinking about dramatic change, and being reminded of goals we haven’t achieved.
The big question this leaves me with? How to make my content more compelling and more likely to be shared by my connections? Here’s how I’ll approach that.
- Like, comment and share others’ content. I’ll move content sharing to two days a week instead of one, and I’ll mention the person who initially posted it.
- Use hashtags so people can more easily discover content of interest. In my haste to post daily, I often forgot this important action.
- Mention people in posts and figure out if the mention feature works when sharing an article.
- Share every article to Twitter and Facebook using the convenient LinkedIn feature that pops up in the posting and sharing process.
- Study and practice how to write more compelling headlines and summaries. Experiment with what grabs people’s attention.
As I take these actions in the weeks and months ahead, I’ll keep tracking engagement with my content.
In particular, I’ll look at ways to better track when my posts and articles are shared, and by whom.
If the sharer mentioned me, that shows up in my LinkedIn notifications. Sometimes LinkedIn sends an analytics summary. But shares do not (yet) appear in the LinkedIn analytics for posts and articles.
Better capturing these analytics will help me understand which content is shared the most, so I can create a hypothesis about why.
In the meantime, what motivates you to re-share a post or article with your network?
by Caroline Leach | May 6, 2017 | Social Media
Do you want to attract more views, likes, comments and shares of your LinkedIn posts? Do you want to increase your engagement with your network and beyond?
Of course you do. And to do that, you need to know what’s working and what’s not. Then you can create a hypothesis about why, and test it.
You can check out the analytics for your posts, also known as sharing an update, to see what content is resonating with your network.
There you’ll see the number of views, along with your viewers’ main employers, predominant titles and geographic locations.
Being a week into my month-long experiment of posting to LinkedIn every weekday, I turned to the analytics to see what I could learn.
Defining engagement broadly as a combination of views, likes, comments and shares, three types of posts rise to the top.
A view of a post is defined as someone seeing your post in their LinkedIn homepage feed. (Views are defined differently for articles, which will be a future blog post topic.)
Career strategies. My most-viewed posts were links to articles with career advice – including the biggest predictor of career success and LinkedIn profile updates for every career stage.
Given this blog’s focus on social media savvy for corporate professionals, I’ll keep an eye out for articles with career strategies that make use of social media.
Big news about the company. My fellow colleagues were understandably as proud as I was to see our company named to Fortune’s 100 Best Companies to Work For in 2017, as well as being named the #1 telecom globally in Fortune’s most admired companies.
(This is where I remind readers that opinions expressed here are my own.)
For upcoming posts, I’ll keep my eye out for milestone news and events to share about my employer. This is where an employee advocacy program is incredibly valuable.
Leadership quotes and eye-catching photos for major holidays. This one surprised me. On Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, New Year’s Day and Thanksgiving, I posted a beautiful picture from iStockPhoto along with a related leadership quote.
These turned out to be some of my most engaging posts. I’ll definitely add more of these to my editorial calendar. If I hadn’t looked at the analytics, this would have been a missed opportunity.
One thing I haven’t yet found in LinkedIn or through my research is an aggregated set of analytics. I’m creating an Excel spreadsheet to consolidate the analytics for this month’s posts.
It will include:
- Post title
- Post or article
- Content type
- Date
- Day of the week
- Time of day
- Views
- Likes
- Comments
- Shares
- Employers
- Titles
- Geographic locations
- First- or second-degree networks
- Hypothesis about performance
- Action indicated by the hypothesis
Then I’ll have greater insight at the end of the month to see how to develop and execute an editorial calendar going forward.
What posts get the greatest engagement with your network?
And how do you use analytics to amp up engagement with your posts?
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