Sometimes, clients ask writers to draft social copy to accompany the post that will link to this article. These days, it’s usually for LinkedIn. (If they don’t, ask if they want it! Since you’re already in the context, it’ll take just a few minutes.)
Compared to any other social platforms you may have used or written for, LI has some very particular dynamics. I’ll start with the ones we can influence, then bigger strategic pointers that maybe you’ll be able to tell the client (or at least learn for your own purposes).
What you can do
Optimize what’s above the break
When you’re scrolling the feed, you only see the first two or three lines. If someone doesn’t click “…more,” the rest of the post may as well not exist. Focus most of your effort on making that first sentence stop the scroll (as they say) and get someone to click. There are several approaches — contrarian takes, controversial statements, clever wordplay, money quote, unusual use of emoji, and many more. Play with it.
Write for engagement
The more people interact with a post, the more it’ll be shown. Clicking more, reacting (with a like or otherwise), clicking a link in the post or comments, commenting, and sharing all count. Comments are particularly valuable, because someone’s comment might be shown in the feed of people in their network even if they don’t follow the person or company that originally posted. Accordingly, think of how you might get your audience to want to leave a comment—you can use controversy, tap into people’s egos, give people a reason to tag a friend, etc.
Avoid preaching to the choir
Especially if your post is going on a company’s account, you can figure that the majority of people following will already be fans and have a decent idea of what the company does. Don’t say things that’ll feel true enough to them; either challenge their views on something, or assert a truth so powerfully that they’ll feel you’re a kindred spirit.
Make it skimmable
Shorter, punchier posts work better. Make paragraphs short, consider bullet lists (bonus points for emoji in place of dashes or stars), shake up sentence length.
Mention others
Mentions (when you type @ and it fills in someone’s name with a link) serve two purposes: they make it quite likely that the person or company mentioned will engage, and also that your post will show up on the feeds of their contacts/followers. This won’t make sense for everything, but if you’re ghostwriting on behalf of an author you can have them tagged; case studies are natural for tagging too, both the company and the people profiled.
Image in post, link in comments
Conventional wisdom says not to put the link to an external page in the body of your post, because LinkedIn wants to keep traffic on the site. Instead, you should put the link in comments, and instead put an image in the post to capture more feed space.
I’m not super confident this is 100% true because I’ve seen plenty of posts with links in the body do just fine. However, recently LinkedIn has shrunk the thumbnails of links from full-width images to tiny little things, so no matter what, you’ll get more vertical space in the feed if you use an image.
You’ll have to communicate with the client if you recommend this, and they may not take you up on it anyway.
Don’t bother with hashtags
They don’t matter on LinkedIn. Nobody follows them and few people use them. If a client asks for them, gently push back, but in the end it’s their call.
Strategic pointers
People over companies
The algorithm clearly biases individual accounts over companies, because it wants the latter to pay to have posts seen. That’s why you see so many posts from leaders who’ve taken on a sort of bizfluencer (is that word?) role on their company’s behalf. (Spoiler, a lot of those are ghostwritten.)
While broader LinkedIn strategy is typically beyond our scope, we can recommend that companies have authors or leaders originate the post, and then have the company re-share that post. It’ll probably get quite a bit more exposure. The challenge is then the post copy needs to sound like the person, and not necessarily the company’s voice. (See, you might be one of those ghostwriters now!)
Engage, don’t just post
LinkedIn wants conversations. If all you do is post without engaging with other people’s posts, your own posts won’t get as much visibility. It’s also smart to comment on other posts, because you’re likely to be seen by a bunch of people who don’t know you (yet). If you say something particularly clever, you might even get new followers.
Address a consistent audience
The algorithm is continually sussing out what’s in common with the people whose behavior indicates that your content is valuable to them. If it can pin them as being in a certain industry, geography, or other category (I think it can get quite esoteric), it’s a lot more likely to show your content to those folks. The upshot is, speaking on certain subjects consistently will get you more exposure than if you’re scattershot and the system can’t figure out your crowd.
Hit the right cadence — or don’t
There’s all sorts of advice out there on how often to post. The two things I know for sure are:
Don’t post super frequently (like, multiple times a day) or your overall engagement will drop
Counterintuitively, if you post rather infrequently, like a few times a year, the system gives you a big boost because it wants you to feel the love and motivation to post again. (So don’t feel bad if you’re not a steady poster on your personal account!)