With 500 million members in 200 countries, determining the best time to post on LinkedIn can be tricky. Here’s what to do.
Creating and sharing free, valuable content that helps a niche audience solve some of their biggest professional problems is how you set yourself apart from the competition on LinkedIn.
It’s is the price you must pay to get in front of your ideal audience and demonstrate your worth as opposed to those who just claim it.
So what exactly is the best way to capture the time, interest and attention of your audience on the worlds largest network for professionals
While there is no one-size-fits-all answer, LinkedIn recently shared some advice on how to determine the best time to publish your content.
This advice, along with a few other best practices will help give your content the best chance at helping you win new business on LinkedIn.
Analyze Your Audience
According to LinkedIn, “Peak activity windows on LinkedIn is strongly correlated with behavioral routines throughout the day.”
This means you need to use Google Analytics to determine your audience’s location, and then account for the time zones in which your audience is online.
“Most LinkedIn users visit the platform when they have time to engage with content. Our own in-house analytics show that user activity increases in the morning before work, again around lunchtime, and also in the early evenings when the work day has ended and the day’s rhythms begin to slow,” LinkedIn shared.
LinkedIn recommends testing content throughout the day and see what performs better.
In my experience, publishing your LinkedIn blog posts during the middle of the week and during regular business hours is best.
The Riches are in the Niches
Your LinkedIn content should be hyper-focused on a targeted, niche audience, to the point of including their job title or industry name in the headline of your blog posts and articles.
Say, for example, that you want to sell online video marketing services. And that one of your target markets is business coaches. So, while you can do online video marketing for anyone, you want to make sure that on LinkedIn, at least, you make it clear that you specialize in helping business coaches use online video to get new clients.
For instance, when you publish a blog post titled, “3 Ways Business Coaches Can Leverage Online Video To Land New Clients,” you include why online video works so well, how it helps business coaches land new patients and show examples of videos you’ve made for business coaches.
I’ve posted elsewhere about how to leverage LinkedIn’s Advance Search techniques to find and connect with your ideal audience. In this case, once you’ve begun connecting with and talking to business coaches on LinkedIn, you can “earn” more of their time and attention by sharing free content, tips and examples of your videos with them.
On LinkedIn, Headlines Matter
Now, you can create the greatest piece of content in the world and post it at the perfect time, but if the headline is confusing, boring or uninspiring, nobody will consume it.
Over on LinkedIn, the ideal headline formula for your content should be: “Target Audience Name + Your Service + Benefit They Want”
Here’s that example headline: “3 Ways Business Coaches Can Leverage Online Videos To Land New Clients!”
Business Coaches = Target Audience
Online Videos = Your Service
New Clients = Benefit They Want
Note: Your content should not be written like a sales letter or advertisement, but rather as an informative, helpful and strategic guide of how this target audience could use the service you’re talking about to achieve one of the benefits they want.
Success in Content Marketing
LinkedIn makes it easy to create a personalized, 1-on-1 marketing approach in any niche you can imagine.
Along with responding as quickly as possible to the likes, shares and comments your articles receive, you can also use other social media channels and your email list to drive traffic to your posts.
Using your content as the context for these conversations, you can begin to earn the trust of your connections and develop the relationships that lead to winning new business on LinkedIn!