With nearly a billion users worldwide, LinkedIn is one of the biggest professional networks in the world. But if you’re just using it to connect with professionals, you’re not using this platform to its full potential. Content is king on today’s social networks, and if you’re an executive or entrepreneur, you need to leverage this tool to craft your personal brand, expand your audience, and generate leads. Let’s look at one of the most important content distribution tools for leaders on LinkedIn: the Newsletter.
Newsletters: Your Ticket to Top-of-Mind
Newsletters definitely have an edge over other LinkedIn content like articles. When you publish an article, it goes to your timeline. This means that your connections only see this content when scrolling through their feed.
In contrast, every time you publish a newsletter, all of your subscribers receive a notification. This means that newsletters have a higher chance of actually reaching your intended audience.
In fact, LinkedIn newsletters have an open rate of 20%. That’s in stark contrast to the article open rate, which ranges from 2% to 3.5%.
Designing Your Newsletters: First Impressions Count
They say that the human attention span only lasts around 8 seconds these days. In reality, it’s a little bit longer than that, but this illustrates an important fact of digital communication. You need to catch an audience’s attention quickly, or they’re not going to read what you wrote. A catchy title or a banner image that really pops can quickly engage audiences. Make sure your banner images are 1920x1080 pixels.
If you’re familiar with content writing, you understand that your newsletter’s structure plays a huge role in its effectiveness. Avoid walls of text — this will only make a reader zone out. Short sentences can help keep readers engaged, too.
You should also use detailed subheadings. Subheadings help to break information into more digestible chunks, and search engines like them, too.
Finally, bulleted lists are a great way to communicate ideas quickly. Bullets have several advantages:
Bullet points draw attention to important information.
Bulleted lists boost the scannability of your newsletters, improving audience experience.
Bullets succinctly convey information.
Standout Newsletter Content in Simple Steps
Building an audience for your LinkedIn Newsletter is like establishing anything else: you need to understand what your audience wants. Typically, you want to create content that educates, entertains, and informs. Is your audience looking for insider industry insights? A piece of wisdom based on your personal expertise? You can even include personal anecdotes in your newsletter, provided they’re useful to your audience.
Finally, one of the most important aspects of your newsletter doesn’t even have anything to do with the content itself. Your newsletter’s frequency is one of the unexpected factors that can make or break your content campaign. You need to strike a balance. Don’t post too frequently, or your readers will become desensitized and ignore your newsletter. But if you post too rarely, your readers will lose interest. Weekly newsletter postings are optimal on LinkedIn.
Engaging With Your Readers
Your newsletter should be more than just reading material for your audience. It should also stimulate them to engage with your content. You can help boost your readers’ engagement by leveraging storytelling techniques throughout your newsletter. Then, hook them with a short, concise, direct call-to-action at the end of your newsletter.
You can also use creative ways to boost engagement. Consider crowdsourcing a question or using polls to do this.
Speaking of engagement, you also need to engage with your audience. If a reader takes the time to leave a comment on your newsletter with feedback, you need to respond to it. This is one of the best ways to drive engagement with your content.
Promotion and Expansion
Building an audience is hard, and sometimes it takes a little help. Find other LinkedIn users who work in similar industries or share a role with you. Collaborate with these other users (and maybe even enlist the help of an influencer) with shoutouts and content trades.
Your content doesn’t need to be limited to just one social network, though. By sharing your newsletter in posts on other social media, you can amplify your message’s reach. If you have a personal website, post your newsletter there, too.
Analytics: Understanding and Iterating
Everyone is familiar with Google’s Analytics platform. But did you know that LinkedIn also has ways to track your profile’s KPIs? Page analytics include:
Content: How effective your content is at driving engagement.
Followers: Demographics and origin of your page’s followers.
Visitors: Demographics and origin of your page’s visitors.
Leads: Discover which LinkedIn members filled out a lead generation form for your page in the last 3 months.
Competitors: See how your engagement measures up against your competitors’.
Employee Advocacy: Whether employees engage in content recommended to them.
Employer Brand: Engagement with career pages.
The Proof is in the Pudding
Don’t just rely on my perspective about the power of LinkedIn Newsletters. Simply look at the top business minds on LinkedIn and see how they’ve transformed their success into becoming thought leaders in their domains:
As the significance of executive branding continues to grow in the upcoming years, this is the very moment to refine your online presence. Ready to dominate on LinkedIn and elevate your executive profile like never before? Reach out to me at ik@innakuts.com.