Why Hootsuite Recommends Boosting Your LinkedIn Organic Content

With more than half a billion members, LinkedIn is the largest and most powerful professional community on the planet. So when you see your LinkedIn Page organic posts getting positive engagement, you should think about sharing your message to a new audience— taking your content, sales strategy and talent acquisition to a whole new level.

As CMO of Hootsuite, I know just how beneficial it can be to boost content on LinkedIn. Sponsored Content allows you to distribute your posts to targeted LinkedIn members outside your regular visitors and followers, maximising your reach by promoting your posts to members with similar attributes to your existing followers. Just like the traditional newsfeed, the posts are interactive, which means likes, comments, and shares are all available to help boost its engagement, power and continuing reach. 

Today Hootsuite is proud to announce a deeper collaboration with LinkedIn.  We have worked closely with LinkedIn to provide customers with the ability to promote their best organic LinkedIn content directly from Hootsuite.  Click here to learn more about how you can manage your LinkedIn Page in Hootsuite.

At Hootsuite, we’ve done a lot of testing to find out what works for our brand and business when promoting content on LinkedIn. Here are some of our top tips.

1. Determine Clear Objectives 

Ask yourself, what do you want to achieve through Sponsored Content? Is it to position your organization as an expert? Promoting thought leadership demonstrates your industry knowledge and creates awareness. However, If lead generation is your goal, you’ll want to promote gated content with a lead capture component, like webinars, white papers and how-to guides. You can also include blog posts or other content that is ungated, but include a strong call to action. If your objectives are around talent acquisition, your approach will be to target the right audience, letting them know you have open positions.

_{Protip: Make sure your content is providing value for your audience directly within the feed. Combined with a clear CTA, this will ensure your target audience resonates with your content.}

2. Be Selective

The organic performance of your content is really the best indicator of what will potentially resonate with a larger audience. Essentially, you should start with what’s already working, and then streamline what you will promote based on your business objectives. At Hootsuite we promote organic content that is, to put it simply, popular with our followers. We also promote organic posts about product launches and campaigns to ensure we reach a new, and specific audience. As detailed in a previous guest blog, by creating highly targeted ads, we increase our engagement during key campaign periods and experience higher conversions. We also get a stronger ROI on our campaigns, meaning we can stretch our ad budget further. 

_{Protip: Save time by viewing the performance of your organic content in Hootsuite and quickly promote the high performing posts as ads in the same dashboard.}

3. Take a Targeted Approach

To maximize the potential for success, you should also have a specific target in mind. Have an idea of your ideal audience, the more detail the better.  

Remember, because LinkedIn is a business focused channel, it has a different targeted audience than your other social channels. LinkedIn is the only social network where you can target by job title, so take advantage of this unique capability when running ads. And you can target a new LinkedIn audience based on their location, interests or details related to their profession, including company, company size, job title, years of experience and education. 

_{Protip: Learn what content performs best for each target audience by clearly defining them in advance and testing different variations of content, copy and images to help inform future campaigns.}  

4. Be Visual

Also be aware Sponsored Content has a limited opportunity and time window to capture people’s attention, so strengthen its impact with your most compelling assets. Use an eye-catching visual. According to LinkedIn, larger visuals (not a thumbnail) have up to a 38% higher click through rate. Keep the text short and to the point, and the call to action front and center.

_{Protip: Create visuals that enhance the audiences’ understanding of the piece of content. For example, try testing a title card, statistic card, or graphics card.  By testing different visuals, you can then determine which had a higher conversion rate.} 
 

To learn more about how you can manage your organic and paid content in Hootsuite, click here.