Learning from LinkedIn’s Most Influential Brands
We’ve just released the 2015 ranking of the most influential brands on LinkedIn, which uses our unique Content Marketing Score to calculate which brands generate most influence through the content they share. It’s a fascinating list – and just as fascinating as the brands on it are the strategies that have helped to put them there. There are eight principles that the most successful and influential content brands have in common – and they’re principles well worth learning from.
Scroll down for our ranking of the top ten most influential brands for the UK, France, Germany, Spain and The Netherlands. But before you do, take a look at these fundamentals of content strategy that are common to pretty much all of them. I think this consistency of approach is interesting in itself. The brands dominating content on LinkedIn today seem to have a lot more in common than those who filled out our top ten a year ago. They may come from a broad range of categories and sectors, but across those sectors we’re seeing the emergence of a clear winning formula for content marketing:
It’s interesting that a lot of the brands at the very top of the rankings have taken principled or campaigning stands on issues, which they can then build their content strategy around. EY (Number 1 in the UK) has focused on gender parity in the workplace. Hays (the UK’s Number 2) roots all of its content back to the mission of ‘powering the world of work’. For IBM, one of many tech companies in our global top ten, it’s all about ‘building a smarter planet’.
There’s a reason why brands like The Financial Times, The Economist and McKinsey & Company feature so prominently in the rankings (all in the UK top ten). It’s that audiences on LinkedIn show a marked appetite for high-quality, long-form content. It’s what they value, what they engage with and what they share. It requires investment – but that investment is worth it.
Current affairs and financial news are the content topics that resonate most with audiences on LinkedIn, followed by content around leadership, productivity and professional development, with industry trends in third. Our most successful content brands have built editorial calendars aligned with these subject areas, and many of them have used the LinkedIn Trending Content tool to zero in on the issues that are front-of-mind for their sector.
All of our most influential brands regularly share updates on their company page. This is the bedrock of an effective LinkedIn content strategy, and it’s all the more effective when those updates are optimised for our platform: short headlines, effective use of visuals, mobile friendly elements and different iterations for different audiences.
Every single one of our most influential brands also uses their employees as influencers, sharing updates across their networks. And the vast majority (97.6% to be precise) have employees issuing their own posts. If there’s one strategic shift that can make a huge difference to how influential your content is, it’s this.
Almost three quarters (73%) of the most influential brands globally make regular use of sponsored updates to maximise the reach of their best performing content. Backing good content with a budget can make a huge difference to how far it travels, and how influential it is.
There’s often a debate about the best frequency for content marketing – but the statistics for this year’s most influential brands appear to settle it pretty firmly. On average our most influential brands publish 12.6 updates per week. That’s close to two per day, including weekends. Does this mean that publishing more often will automatically make your content strategy more effective? No. But if you have all of the other elements in place, then it will help to ensure you maintain momentum – and take full advantage of the potential influence you’ve built up.
Now scroll down to find the full list of brands making effective use of these content strategies on LinkedIn:
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