A lot of marketing success on LinkedIn can be gained absolutely free of cost. I’ve assembled a list of our best tips to make the most out of your efforts.

I’m not a LinkedIn marketing consultant. My strength and the strength of my agency, RankPower ltd, is around Search Engine Marketing, Analytics and Business Performance. Here’s my LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/perrybernard/. The tips I share below are based on what we have learned from experts, and from doing in practice.

Complete your profile in full and utilise all of the content sections available.

Think carefully about what visitors to your profile might want to know about you to be able to make an informed choice of working with you. Keep it smart and professional.

Add a good profile and background image.

Your profile image should be a recent quality close-up picture of you clearly portraying you as your ‘authentic self’.

Your background header image is an opportunity to share an idea or a message – beware of how the format changes between a desktop display and that as shown within the LinkedIn app. Optimising your background image for the app is probably best.

Verify your Profile.

This is a relatively new LinkedIn feature and allows you to display a small shield next to your name as a verified person, adding to the trust you can build with your audience.

Enable ‘Creator Mode’.

This function provides access to more features and stats.

Write a strong and memorable message as your profile intro.

Other than your name, this is the first piece of text that people may read from your profile. If you fail to make an impact here, or say something that just doesn’t sound right, people might not engage.

Select your 5 personal hashtags.

The hashtags you set on your own profile header should represent the core things you will also write content about. Whenever you write posts and articles, use the hastags (or closely related ones) that you also have on your profile header. This means that the content you produce ought to be aligned with your profile topics most, if not all, of the time.

This feaure is not longer available, but by noting your Skills in your profile and limiting the number of Skills you list to just the ones that are relevant for now, you are effectively doing the same thing as what setting the hashtags used to do.

Choose the Skills (names of skills) as if they were search keywords for your profile.

Add a link to the header of your profile.

The LinkedIn profile header supports the addition of a link. You can link to your website here, with a call to action saying “visit my website” or you can set a custom link with custom text.

Connect with people that matter.

When you set out to find connections on LinkedIn, make sure you try to connect with the kind of people that will matter to you and to your business growth. It’s more about quality than quantity. Great connections are ones that might also engage in your content.

Ask for Recommendations.

Just like Google Reviews, recommendations provide independent evidence from others. Try to do this regularly to build up a track record of consistent effort and attitude to work.

Post content as you.

If you created a company page as well as having your own personal profile, post more often as yourself. People like people more than they like companies. It better to earn trust at a personal level, and harder to build a relationship with a Company name.

Post about your topic of expertise and the reason why you are organic marketing.

If your expertise and target audience falls within a certain niche, then just post about that. By posting about many different things, you will dilute your effort to reach the audience that matters most to you.

Posts should have a great first line.

Posts all show just the first line or two and then a “show more” link. So if your hook isn’t in those first words then you might not be able to attract the readers you hope to get.

Posts should be short, clear and straight to the point.

Unfortunately, people are time poor. It means that if your post looks like it’s going to take more time than they have spare, then they might not bother reading. By making your post easy to read, flow well, and be straight to the point, you might get more people reading to the end and understanding your message.

While you could write as many as 3000 characters in a post, less may be better.

Videos and Images should be shared as 1:1 shape for biggest coverage.

Not critical, but consider the screen space it takes up, which is greater than 16:9 or 5:4.

Videos should be less than 1min.

Avoid long videos, short and to the point is best, and include captions as many people watch video with the sound off, especially in corporate environments.

If you want to write more content, use the Article or Newsletter formats.

Those will allow as much as 10,000 characters. Articles can be written by anyone, but Newsletters have a few more steps to be able to activate them, but once in use, you can start getting ‘subscribers’.

Avoid giving a link in a post.

This is because outbound links take people away from LinkedIn. But LinkedIn’s revenue is won from ads on their platform. So any link you share makes it harder for LinkedIn to make money. As a result, they penalise the post’s performance if it has an outbound link in it. You can however link to other content in LinkedIn without a problem.

If you need to provide a link, share it in the first comment and say in your Post that you shared the link in the comments.

Try adding a Call to Action at the end of your post.

Find a way to ask people to engage even further, via comments, or shares or otherwise that makes sense for them. If you can show a way that they benefit, it’s more likely to happen.

The time of day that you post isn’t as important as what happens next.

Worry less about getting the timing just right. It doesn’t matter if you post at 8am or 4pm or 10pm. The time isn’t the biggest factor. What matters is that people need to engage on your post within the first couple of hours after publishing to make it more successful. Within this is a hint about how to make your posts work better for you: Get a group of people prepared to comment and engage. See the next few tips below for more info.

Aim to get 10+ comments and reactions on your posts within the first 2 hours.

It’s not easy to achieve this 100% organically unless you’re already quite popular and followed by lots of people. So to get the post started it’s OK to ask people you know (a group collective) to come and comment on your post at the right time.

Contact us to get tips on how to create a group collective: info@rankpower.com

Ask people to comment with engagement.

A comment that says “good post” is not engagement. It might even go against you. Good comments are ones that express the person’s view about what you said in the post. That’s why using a Call to Action in your post is a good idea, because you can ask commenters for their opinion about something.

Always reply to a comment with equal engagement.

When you get a great comment expressing a viewpoint about your post, negative or positive to you own views, thank the person for their comment and reflect on it, add further thoughts, or ask for more detail. This cascading engagement will help boost your post’s performance.

Avoid tagging people in your post unless they will engage too.

When you tag a person, make sure they know about it and are prepared to comment on your post. Tagged people who don’t engage on your post may make LinkedIn think you’re just name-dropping.

Engage in other people’s content too.

If you expect to get engagement on your content, you need to be prepared to engage on other people’s just the same. So download the LinkedIn app, and use it regularly. React and comment, and stay active.

Limit your hashtags to just three.

It’s because the first three hashtags for part of your post’s URL. Adding a fourth one doesn’t fit in the URL. This is a sign to show that LinkedIn considers 3 to be the max limit suitable, even though technically you can add many more. Any of you who have done SEO work for Google probably already appreciate the power of keywords in a URL, therefore your hashtags should also be considered as your primary keywords and should align with all of your other activity on LinkedIn. Avoid hashtags that are not relevant for what you are doing or what you are talking about in the post.

Contribute to LinkedIn Articles.

Once you become active and more well-connected on LinkedIn, they will begin inviting you to contribute content and comments to Community Articles in the topics of your expertise (you personal hashtags). If you end up in the top 5% of Community Article contributors your profile may be awared with the LinkedIn “top voice” badge, which adds further weight to your authority in your industry.

Create your Business Page.

Set up a business page and ask your employees or co-workers to add their current work positions with a reference to your Business. When a LinkedIn user creates thier profile entry for their current position, they select the business they work for from existing business pages and the all employees become linked to the business. If your business page doesn’t exist, then the employees remain unlinked. This linking process is a key part of marketing your company and entire team.

Re-share your content on your Business page if appropriate.

It’s good to write articles or posts about your viewpoint, but only share that on your Business profile if it also represents your business’ views. Don’t forget, if you have employees, they may be affected by what’s posted on your business profile. Share it there after you have shared it personally, maybe a week or two later, not at the same time, but you can experiment with this. The tips shared above for engagement work the same, so the same post shared at the same time in two places may halve the engagement you get on each.