Discover practical tips on how to optimize the engagement of your posts. We'll also uncover ways how you can calculate the engagement rate.
LinkedIn itself gives you no insights about the engagement rate of your posts. To find out how well your posts performs in this matter, you need to calculate the rate by yourself.
You can do this by simply dividing the number of engagements (links + comments + shares) by the impressions of a post. Take the result times 100 and you will get the engagement rate.
To find the right stats for the calculation of the formula go to your post summary page and choose the post you want to analyze:
However, you can’t find the amount of shares and clicks in this data view. To get the shares you have to use a third-party tool like inlytics.io.
Also if you want to track the Engagement Rate across multiple posts and accounts, then you might consider using inlytics.
The engagement rate indicates the percentage of people who have interacted with your content. Engagement plays a central role in optimizing your content performance. Especially for the LinkedIn algorithm!
There are still a lot of users on LinkedIn who focus their content creation mainly to achieve more reach. I think this way of acting is outdated. Ultimately, LinkedIn is about interaction and creating value. I recommend that you optimize for engagement instead.
To get going here are the best tips I know to boost your engagement on LinkedIn:
💡 Make Your Content Easy To Consume
Popular posts are usually concise and have many line breaks. They use little complicated jargon and are easy to read. If you're not sure if your content is difficult to read, you can test your writing here: https://app.readable.com/text/?demo
💡 Help People To Interact With Your Content
You can help readers to interact with your content by asking questions and addressing the reader directly. Pro tip: Choose questions that many readers can answer and share their opinions. If you choose polarizing topics, you will probably get even more answers and discussions.
Hashtags are a great way to gain additional reach for your post. A certain number of followers of a hashtag will see your post and, if your hashtag is relevant, will most likely react to it. To learn more about this topic, I have written a guide for using hashtags on LinkedIn.
I think the biggest influence on your post engagement has to do with the relationship you cultivate with your network over time.
A relationship does not build overnight, but takes consistent work and effort.
One thing that has proven to be very effective for me, is to write to new contacts after the connection confirmation.
Something like that happens a lot:
A call to action can help to dramatically increase the interaction rate on your post. Depending on what your goal is, you can customize the call to action.
I have obtained that many engagement rich posts ask for comment in trade-off so the creators will send a link to a valuable resource (as seen in the photo example). Often the resource get’s spoiled by adding a picture or video.
Through the analysis of several hundred LinkedIn accounts, I have found that text-based posts usually have above-average engagement.
It has to be said that the rules are slightly different for everyone. I've also seen accounts where videos have performed far better.
So I recommend you test for yourself and see what works best for you. To speed up your research you can also use inlytics.io for this purpose.
If you respond quickly to questions or comments, you show your counterpart that the interaction is important to you.
People appreciate that.
It will also strengthen the relationship with your network. Also, it’s important to notice that early engagement will most likely boost your posts reach.
If you are a professional on LinkedIn, this tip is almost a must-have. While you can manually calculate your engagement rate every time you publish a post, it's ineffective and time-consuming.
Also, you need to make notes of the results somewhere.
For this purpose, we have build inlytics: a tool that lets you visualize all your statistics in a live dashboard.
You see at a glance all your posts and how your engagement has changed over time. Also you find in depth informations on how to optimize your profile appearance by giving you action able recommendations.
Start now optimizing your LinkedIn Engagement Rate by creating a free inlytics account.