How to WIN on LinkedIn!

Here at Content Club, we talk about LinkedIn a lot. And the last couple of blogs and videos I've made on LinkedIn have focused on things like, how do you create content that asks people questions and creates conversations.

But for this post I want to go a little bit deeper into what makes LinkedIn unique as a platform and how you can use it differently amongst the other social platforms you might be using.

To start, let’s break down using LinkedIn into three objectives; Visibility, Trust and Conversations. These are your three magic metrics that you want to be creating content for, when you're working with LinkedIn.

So let's look at visibility. The reason why LinkedIn is particularly useful for visibility is because it has quite basic algorithms in place at the moment. Every time someone engages with your content, it then puts your content in their feed, then showing it to their followers too. Most people on LinkedIn now have around 800-1200 connections (at a guess!), so that's a really great opportunity to be getting your content into other people's feeds. This is level of visibility you can't get from other platforms right now. And because of that LinkedIn is pretty much the most amazing platform right now, if you want to organically get great visibility on your profile. You want to build your reputation and your visibility as a content creator, and whether that improves the brand, or for you personally, that's up to you.

One important thing to note here, is that a lot of people try and create content from their brand on LinkedIn. This doesn't work. It has to come from you, personally. People have one-to-one connections on LinkedIn, that's what they like and trust. So being able to create content that encourages your network to share, like, and engage is going to propel YOU into other people's networks as well your content, which it's great for visibility.


The second objective is trust. If you've ever come to any Content Club workshops, or events, you would have heard me say over and over again…

"The purpose of content is to build trust."

…and trust comes from one-to-one interactions. Replicating those great human face-to-face interactions that you have by creating content online, is how you build trust at scale. LinkedIn is really good for that because you can easily use videos and photos of you or your team either as or alongside your content. Then by leveraging the very ‘one-to-one’ nature of LinkedIn (which you don't always get with things like Facebook and Instagram, particularly when they're coming from a branded profile) you have a really great opportunity to build familiarity and trust.

And even if it's someone that you've never met before, they get to see you for who you are and how you present yourself and your work. They can click through from the content through to your profile and have a look at what you've done, or take look at what other people are saying about you. It's a great tool for building trust with people one-to-one. Even when you're not there physically doing it, just through the content you create.


The third objective is Conversation. Like I said, a lot of the content we've made about LinkedIn so far is focused on creating and nurturing conversation. Every piece of content you create, the purpose of that has to be to create a conversation with someone. So, you want to ensure that readers/viewers feel like that your content is an invitation to interact. Whether it's answering a question, contributing an opinion, send you a direct message, give you some information or answer a question. It can be big and obvious or small and subtle, but if you miss the opportunity to turn content interactions into conversations… you also missing out the opportunity to turn those interactions into SALES!

When you can use these ideas together, LinkedIn is a method to gain visibility, an opportunity to build trust, and a mechanism to create conversations. And when you try and create content that does all of those three things, for example; a video that's addressing your LinkedIn audience directly, sharing an opinion, or a thought, or an idea. That then creates an invitation for them to share their version of that idea, or provide that feedback on that idea in the comments. And then every time someone comments, this pushes YOUR content into THEIR feeds this is a big fat WIN!