Language Matters!
6 Lessons for LinkedIn Marketers
- Inclusive Language Ups Engagement by 26%
- Your People are Experts!
- Break your Findings into Interesting Morsels
- Answer Questions, Don’t Ask Them
- Don’t Tell People What to Do
- Don’t Waste a Holiday or an Announcement
Inclusive Language Ups Engagement by 26%
Inclusive language, such as ‘we’, ‘our’ and ‘us’, was the highest determinant of engagement. Posts that use this form of language had on made-up 59% of posts and had 26% higher engagement per 1000 followers. This result was consistent across all major sectors. For the two largest, financial services and software development, the gap was even larger at 55% and 56%, respectively. Inclusive language had higher engagement regardless of the type of post. They also received 57% more comments. Inclusive language allows your audience to connect on a more personal level with your brand. It helps people to see the people that make up your company rather than a faceless corporation.
These posts cover a range of industries and media types. What they share is a focus on the people behind the company and how those people are solving problems with knowledge and insights.
Your People Are Experts
Posts that contain language about expertise and knowledge outperform other posts by around 13%. Overall, posts focused on expertise boosted comments by over 50%. This effect is particularly strong for smaller companies. Companies with fewer than 50,000 followers saw an average increase in engagement of 23%. In contrast, companies with larger followings saw marginally lower engagement. These results show that for smaller companies, either in an industry niche or at an early stage of development, there is real value in positioning the people in your company as experts.
There are many ways this can be done, from focusing on building personal brands to participating in media and events. A great way is to actively interact with your customers, suppliers and industry partners, in-person and online. It helps to position your company and people as operating at the heart of the industry, shaping the future rather than passive bystanders.
Break your Findings into Interesting Morsels
Thought leadership and insights reports are a key part of the B2B content marketer’s toolkit, but on average they get 15% lower engagement than other posts. The challenge for many B2B companies is that their products and services are important, but not inherently exciting. Try as we might it's hard to get excited by corporate insurance. Instead, B2B marketing revolves around solutions it’s part of the reason expertise is such a strong, positive factor. Research and insights are powerful proof points, showing that you understand your customers and their industry. For motivated customers, they can be great lead-generation tools. Unfortunately, they are often dry and academic. We forget that in the battle for attention, we need to not only inform but also entertain. This means breaking the findings into easily digestible image-based posts and making it clear that your team (+17%) of experts (+9%) produced this research.
Answer Questions, Don’t Ask Them
Asking questions of your audience seems like a natural way to increase engagement with your posts. Unfortunately, they have the opposite effect, reducing engagement by 17%. Comments, which we might expect to be higher, are 9% lower on these types of posts. The problem is sincerity. Your audience can tell when a question is genuine and when it is just an attempt to generate engagement. Engaging content with a strong, interesting point of view will naturally generate higher engagement. Another issue is that asking questions suggests that you don’t have the answers. As experts and industry leaders, you need to show that you have answers to your customer’s problems.
Don’t Tell People What To Do
What’s the quickest way to turn off your audience? Tell them what to do. Directives, such as ‘should’, ‘need’ or ‘must’ are the most harmful form of language when it comes to engagement. These posts can easily come across as lecturing or judgmental. Your audience wants to feel that you are working with them to develop and deliver solutions to the challenges they face. You can suggest solutions but always leave them with agency. If you are going to use directives, it is wise to use them collectively (‘we should’. Directives that are directed at the audience (‘you must’) or at general third parties (‘businesses need’) are by far the worst-performing posts. They have almost 40% less engagement than posts that use inclusive language.
Don’t Waste a Holiday or an Announcement
By far the most popular posts on LinkedIn are holiday messages and announcements. This could be about a new hire, moving to a new office or an award. The perfect post shows that you care about your people and their achievements. These posts also tend to have the furthest organic reach as they leverage your employee’s networks. Whilst announcement and holiday posts don’t necessarily contribute to your overall brand messaging, they are valuable tools for increasing name recognition and demonstrating the human side of your business.
Methodology
Current Asia has a strong track record in delivering campaigns for clients in the financial services, technology and professional services sectors. The profile of active LinkedIn users makes it a vital channel for brand building, awareness and lead generation for B2B marketers. Current Asia’s B2B content marketing and data science teams worked together to build a custom tool that uses natural language processing (NLP) to analyse the content of LinkedIn posts, the type of media and the level of engagement. We analysed over 45,000 posts from more than 300 financial services, technology and professional services companies. We only included companies with more than 5,000 followers. The companies were chosen programmatically based on LinkedIn’s similar page features.
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