By: Chelsea Schmitz

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Social media has been wild the last few years… 

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TikTok emerged as one of the most popular social media platforms. 

Twitter became X, and engagement appears to have decreased (or at least we think). 

Meta launched Threads, which had many users sign up, but seems to have lost steam.

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Amidst all the changes, we find ourselves reflecting on the one platform that has remained steady: LinkedIn. As of June 2023, the platform has 930 million members, up from about 870 million in 2022. 

Although it’s difficult to make predictions on social media, LinkedIn seems on the rise. This past year, we’ve spent a lot of time working with clients on how to scale their LinkedIn channels. Here are a few of my tips: 

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1. Develop, scale and invest in a thoughtful thought leadership program. 

Consistently, we’ve seen better engagement with an individual user’s content over a brand’s content. If your LinkedIn strategy only involves the brand posting on its channel, you’ll likely be unable to maximize the value of LinkedIn for your business. 

Many executives don’t have time to manage their LinkedIn presence effectively. This is where the communications team can step in. We recommend identifying the persona or voice your executive wants to take on and building out a year-long strategy for developing compelling content. 

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2. Test and experiment with new features on LinkedIn. 

LinkedIn has launched many new content types and publishing options in the last several years. We recommend testing and experimenting to see what works with your audience. For example, we are leaning toward PDF-style content for publishing since we see the highest engagement with this content type. We also recently started publishing our S9 newsletter directly on LinkedIn. After only two editions, we have 290 subscribers. 

We often see a correlation between a new feature and a push from LinkedIn for higher engagement. In this case, it sometimes helps to be the first to the party. 

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3. Recognize and understand the value of LinkedIn as an internal communications tool. 

Although you may not reach as wide of an audience when you post natively from your brand’s LinkedIn channel, you will likely reach a very important audience: your employees. We recommend looking at your audience demographics to understand what portion of your audience are your employees. We’ve found for many clients, the majority of our engagement with brand content comes from employees. Given this finding, we’ve adjusted our social media content strategy to showcase culture and feature our people. 

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LinkedIn appears to be here to stay. Now, more than ever, it’s important to develop a strategy that focuses on creating relevant, engaging and interesting content for your audience. 

Check out our recent case study to learn how we developed and launched a thought leadership program for a manufacturing company.