If you were on LinkedIn just seven years ago, you might remember a pre-feed time, when people simply logged on to post career updates.
That's hard to imagine now, considering how central the feed is to B2B relationships today—and how it continues to grow in popularity. In some conversations I've had with the LinkedIn team, they've indicated that feed traffic was doubling year over year!
Basically, if you're a B2B marketer serious about boosting brand visibility and viability, LinkedIn is the one place you need to be now.
If you aren't posting regularly and connecting with folks via DMs, you're missing out on not only valuable professional relationships but also lucrative revenue and growth opportunities.
Why LinkedIn Reigns Supreme for B2B Marketers
Fully 82% of B2B marketers say they've seen the greatest success reaching customers on LinkedIn vs. other social platforms.
Moreover, according to LinkedIn, its users also have twice the buying power of the typical online audience, making it an essential channel for B2B brands dealing with complex, lengthy buying cycles.
In my own experience, LinkedIn has been the antidote to the challenges of connecting with others in a virtual-first industry. Meeting people in person and getting attendees to show up for events, particularly in-person events, can be tough.
Most marketers these days no longer have a straightforward, natural path to engage with people. Instead, LinkedIn has become that path. I regularly message new leads to understand what they're looking for or why they're trialing our products. That approach leads to a lot of fruitful conversations that I wouldn't be able to have any other way; plus, I get lots of honest, firsthand feedback from people about our product.
The overall goal when posting isn't necessarily to directly sell to customers; instead, you're building mindshare with your audience, ensuring that you're top of mind when they are ready to buy.
Building a Personal Brand on LinkedIn
Companies need leaders to invest in their personal LinkedIn accounts. A study by Refine Labs found that sharing info via a personal LinkedIn page leads to 2.75x more impressions and 5x more engagement than company profiles—even if the personal page has fewer followers!
The data is clear: Your brand needs you to be active on LinkedIn. We've actually seen competitors who don't have any individual contributors lose traction with customers because they aren't doing the work to connect with them on a personal level.
For the past quarter, I've been posting almost daily on LinkedIn in an effort to build my personal brand. Although that is obviously an undertaking, I've seen a lot of engagement as a result. For example, I wrote a post recently about how leaders should be involved in the small details of the work, and a lot of people reached out and thanked me for saying it out loud, sparking new conversations with various leaders and marketers.
Even if posting daily isn't something you want to do (which I totally understand), I encourage you to think about how you can post more often. You're likely already talking about certain topics with your team, day in and day out—it's just about making it a practice to share those valuable points of view on LinkedIn, as well.
How to Start Gaining Traction on LinkedIn
Here are my four best tactical tips for LinkedIn:
- Add a ton of people to grow your network. Standard accounts cap out at 80 requests a week; if you have LinkedIn Sales Navigator, that goes up to 100 a week. Take advantage of it. (Note: If you're spamming people, you'll quickly be restricted, so use this feature ethically.)
- DM away. I don't message people along with my connection request, but I do send a message afterward to try to open up a conversation. Being active in DMs has the added benefit of boosting your content in the feed because the algorithm recognizes you're a real person.
- Interact with people in your feed. Like people's posts, comment when you have things to say, and reshare content when it's relevant and you can add something of value to your reshare.
- Start a regular posting cadence, ideally using video content. Focus on solving problems or discussing hot topics, rather than selling. You can post a variety of multimodal content, such as blogs with embedded videos, infographics with video snippets, live event clips, and more.
On that last point—why video? There's been a lot of talk about whether LinkedIn is prioritizing video, and many creators have boosted impressions with video content.
LinkedIn just made its stance on video crystal clear. At its first-ever NewFronts, the company spotlighted video as the future of B2B marketing, unveiling new native video ad formats and doubling-down on the importance of thought leadership clips and expert-driven content in long sales cycles.
If you're not already investing in video, now's the time to start—because the platform is building around it.
Focusing on LinkedIn Can Lead to Unexpected Payoffs
I'll close with another firsthand example of the power of LinkedIn. I posted an entertaining meme a while back to promote our new AI search function in our Content Lab: The gist of it was that AI search can help you optimize content marketing.
Afterward, a chief business officer reached out. This person is CBO at a tradeshow company that does four small-ish but regular niche tradeshows each year. We started talking, and I realized that tradeshows are sitting on so much content they don't know what to do with—a perfect target audience for our product! We'd never focused on tradeshow client personas before, but they're actually a fitting market for Content Lab, and that discovery has led to several other conversations with potential tradeshow clients.
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That is the beauty of LinkedIn. Building a brand for yourself on the platform is not self-centered and performative; this work can lead to real insights, strategic shifts, and new opportunities.
Plus, you're building mindshare, leading to future B2B deals months (or even years) down the line when folks are ready to purchase.
