So much of our experience on an online platform has to do with how frequently and how effectively we engage with it. Look at it this way – an expensive piece of home gym equipment is far more likely to get the results you want if you actually use it.

The same goes for a platform like LinkedIn – although it may not be the first port of call for your customers or the go-to for sales and contact details, it truly is what you make of it. Your “LinkedIn Personal Brand” as a business comes down to your content strategy – what you put into the site and how you position yourself.

Most of the major brands in the world have some sort of LinkedIn presence, but not all of them utilise the publishing and content creation opportunities that LinkedIn offers.

In Part 1 of this series, we discussed the ways LinkedIn can boost your business efforts, and depending on which function appeals most to you, this will inform how you work your content strategy.

Let’s check out the different content opportunities on LinkedIn, and what the options are for making them part of your LinkedIn content strategy.

Short-form updates

Scrolling through your LinkedIn feed, you’ll spot plenty of updates from your network – everything from job change updates to video and still image sharing, polls, comments, replies and more. 

A great way to ease into LinkedIn and to start putting your own original business content out there is to use the “Profile Status Update” or “Post” function. Up until recently, the character count for this type of post was just 1300 (around 250 words or so), meaning you’d want your more “short and sweet” copy to be featured here.

Now, LinkedIn has given this a leg-up (as increasingly, users are prioritising shorter-form content creation for everyday activity and presence) to 3000 characters.

With this kind of post, look to share something that’s timely and relevant – perhaps you’ve found a news article that features your business or brings up some interesting discussion points about your industry. You can link to this article and add your commentary above – say around 400 words or so. Or, open up the conversation with a poll within your post, or ask a thought-provoking question and encourage answers in the comments.

For your average business, start with a goal of 1-2 posts on LinkedIn a week, and just like your social media plan, map them out ahead of time as part of your LinkedIn content strategy even if you don’t have the exact copy planned. Importantly, keep the content voiced with a business/corporate/professional audience in mind – this isn’t the place to promote your Black Friday deal! As the business owner, you want your leadership, business acumen and brand ethos to drive the conversation. 

Long-form articles

For a business owner who has more to share and a knack for the written word, you might find yourself drawn to a LinkedIn content strategy that utilises the “article” function.

Articles on LinkedIn offer you a spacious 110,000 character count, which is much like writing a blog. Headlines, photos, captions – you can really go to town within an article to tell your story, to deep-dive into a business issue that you’re passionate about or even to share research or insights that you’ve generated yourself.

Don’t be tempted to write an article that’s just a few paragraphs long (leave that for your posts), and make a realistic goal (perhaps 1-3 long-form articles a month) – this kind of writing can be time consuming, but if you’re a business owner that has the time and space to author them, you can establish a respected presence on LinkedIn by flexing your writing skills.

Photos & videos

Whether you’re looking to attach a report or PDF, share a video or a static diagram, LinkedIn makes it pretty easy to upload the type of content you like. Always ensure you caption and tag appropriately, and stick to the upload specs for high-quality video and image content.

Photos and videos bring both articles and shorter posts alive – it’s best practice to have some kind of image, resource or website with every post to make it stand out in the feeds of your network, and also to offer some additional branding opportunity with watermarked images/logos etc.

In Part 3 of this series, we’ll work through the most effective networking strategies on LinkedIn, and how to avoid sending or receiving the dreaded “copy and paste” introduction.