Joe Gannon x Pragya from Shield
In this article, we address the frequently asked question:
“How often should I post on LinkedIn?”
To give you the answer straight away, we believe that you should seek to post as often as you can at a frequency that is sustainable for you. There is no point posting daily content to only burn out after 2 weeks and then not show up for months.
You have to enjoy the process and you need a target of where things may go so that you are intrinsically motivated to show up and create content for LinkedIn. This is, of course, the same for your team who need to know the direction they are going in and to feel excited about the prospect of achieving results on LinkedIn.
So how often should you post content on LinkedIn?
Be Realistic
Don’t be deceived by accounts churning out content five times a day. Gary Vaynerchuk, Steven Bartlett and other large creators are primarily businessmen! They have large businesses to run, but as they know the benefits of content marketing, and to post on LinkedIn, they have dedicated teams who can turn their ideas, new concepts and snippets of their lives into content. It’s a win-win for their audience because they have access to the minds of their favourite thought leaders whilst enjoying a higher production of content than they would be able to produce on their own.
Yes, these people do respond to their audiences on certain platforms (for example Gary Vaynerchuk replies a lot to comments on his Instagram posts), but we have to remember that CEOs of large organizations do not edit their videos and make them look pretty for socials. They are involved in the content process, but it is far more efficient for them to have a team to help them with this. The point here is that it is important to be realistic about the frequency of content you can post and sustain.
As a business owner wanting to create organic content on LinkedIn, be realistic with how often your team can post content every week. By breaking down the process and the required tasks, you can successfully build an efficient system for posting high-volume content. Focus on increasing your posting quantity and quality will naturally increase over time. The more you post on personal profiles and across your employees’ accounts, the larger dataset you will build, revealing insights over what works and what doesn’t work with your target audience.
How often to post
As we have discussed, start with what you can sustain and then go from there. A solid post frequency that will get results over time for lone content creators and businesses posting on Company Pages would be to post 3 times a week. We currently recommend posting on weekdays. Although, as less people do show up on weekends, there is an argument that there is less competition and your posts will be more visible. Test what works best for your objectives and then evaluate your content strategy using SHIELD.
If you can post five times a week and show up Monday – Friday with a varied mix of content, you will see great results from your organic posts. The more you post, the more information you are sharing with your audience which is educating them around your product or service. With LinkedIn’s organic reach, you’ll see very clearly in your SHIELD dashboard the benefits of posting more, where you can evaluate how each post is performing on average by toggling ‘Show Averages’ in the Report section.
How to post more content
THE 3 C MODEL (CAPTURE – CURATE – CREATE)
We’ll talk about this model more in a future article about how to build a system for creating content. We like to recommend a model following the three C’s of capturing your ideas, curating resources and creating new original content.
You need to have a centralized hub to store all of the ideas that you have, and the ideas from your team from brainstorming sessions and inspiration throughout the week. Ideas for content rarely come to us when we are sat at our desks staring at an empty content schedule. The more people you have working on content, the easier this becomes. Keep all ideas in one place using workspace tools like Notion, Trello and Asana.
RE-PURPOSING
It’s important to look over the content you have already posted. This is particularly important if you are producing high volumes of content. Use pattern-matching to re-read your posted content, simply put, when we look over our articles and posts this puts us back in the frame of mind for creating content. This will help you to come up with new ideas and to efficiently write new posts in your usual format and style.
When we go over our content, we’ll see this content with fresh eyes which can lead to new, original ideas. Also, if a post performed significantly well for you then the demand is clear. Re-purpose this content a few months down the line so that new people can see it. Don’t forget, newsfeeds are noisy and your audience do not see every single post that you upload. This is one of the main reasons why you should post more content as not every piece of content that you create is being consumed by your audience.
FOCUS ON PILLAR CONTENT
Pillar content can be defined as long-form pieces, such as blog articles, podcasts and videos. When you put time and energy into this type of content, it feels so fruitful because you can make so much different kinds of content from it.
For example, if you focus on producing video you can transcribe the videos to obtain the text of what was said to have as the copy for the post. Or, every video you post on LinkedIn as content can also double up as a future text post via this method. If you produce longer videos, such as an interview with your CEO or recording conversations between your team, why not transcribe this into text too and upload it as a LinkedIn article?
How can you implement this with your workflow? Perhaps you don’t produce video content but you could instead write articles as your pillar content which you then chop up into smaller text posts?
Once you have nailed the frequency of posting you can then start to solely focus on improving the quality of the information you share. Remember, a content audit is the best way to know for sure if posting more will produce proportional results.
Joe Gannon x Pragya from Shield
