LinkedIn has added new job titles, including “stay-at-home mom” or “stay-at-home dad.”
How cool is that?!
However, this platform is all about making professional connections and building solid and purposeful communications. That is why nonprofits grow on LinkedIn and scale with speed in terms of building meaningful relationships with donors. LinkedIn members leverage this platform to find their community because of its trusted and professional nature compared to other social sites. Therefore, it only makes more sense to consider it as part of your marketing mix. This blog will uncover the platform’s new features that your team should leverage to maximize benefits. It will help you dive deeper into understanding this social media network and stimulate new ideas for your nonprofit’s LinkedIn marketing strategy.
Why should you include LinkedIn as part of your social media strategy?
Despite mixed arguments about LinkedIn’s organic reach going down, data reflects that it continues to see ‘record engagement.’ The overall sessions have gone up by 29%, as per Microsoft’s latest performance update report (The platform’s parent company). The social site is also witnessing steady growth in ad sales, alongside usage trends.
Focusing on a content strategy to include original and valuable posts can undoubtedly help your nonprofit seek LinkedIn algorithm’s attention (keep reading to learn more). And since LinkedIn is one of the best channels for content distribution – thought-provoking discussions, polls, informative blogs are all significant to get better visibility in its feed. Besides this, you can leverage some of its new features to boost organic reach.
Get record engagement with Live Videos
Video is a huge part of Salesforce’s marketing strategy. To drive organic traffic to their 11-part web series and other live-streaming initiatives, Salesforce tested the LinkedIn Live feature. The company drew more than 600,000 organic viewers, with a 3% engagement rate for the 11-part series, and in Marissa Kraines’s own words (Senior Director of Social & Content Marketing for Salesforce), “For the first episode, we actually saw over 83,000 views of the episode, with no drop-off of viewership during the full event. These are numbers you don’t usually see without paid media.” (Source)
LinkedIn Live allows you to build deeper connections and drive more engagement with the world’s largest professional community. Live videos get, on average, 7x more reactions and 24x more comments than native videos produced by the same broadcasters.
Once your LinkedIn page gains more than 150 followers, it can steadily scale to gain more followers and greater engagement. However, to access the Live Video feature, you need to submit an application form that the LinkedIn team will review. You will also need a third-party steaming tool to host your live event. But once this is done, this new feature will boost your community-building and brand awareness efforts exponentially.
Know LinkedIn’s new algorithm update – Dwell Time
The LinkedIn user base is growing at the speed of 3 members per second. How could your post get more eyeballs in such a competitive scenario? Marketers need to focus on LinkedIn’s new algorithm update – Dwell Time. The algorithm considers the amount of time people spend on posts.
According to LinkedIn,
“At a high level, each update viewed on the feed generates two types of dwell time. First, “on the feed,” which starts measuring when at least half of a feed update is visible as a member scrolls through their feed. Second, there is dwell time “after the click.” which is the time spent on content after clicking on an update in the feed.”
A series of tests helped LinkedIn engineers determine that dwell time is a reliable metric to gauge if a user is likely to engage with post content or not. For charity marketers, that means you have to create stories that get more attention and hold your supporters’ attention for an extended time. Here are some tips for doing so.
1. Write short posts with line breaks – they do exceedingly well in the algorithm
2. Spacing content prompts people to click ‘read more’, which plays a big role in the algorithm
3. Combine this style with storytelling techniques to help your content perform well
Conclusion
LinkedIn is rated as the top social network for lead generation. There is no way you want to kibosh this huge opportunity of finding more potential donors to build a sustainable fundraising strategy. And just before we end this, here’s some food for thought! What is your LinkedIn marketing goal?
a. To gain more donation leads
b. To boost audience engagement
c. Never thought about it this way
Whatever your answer is, we recommend you explore this brilliant social networking site and its newest features. It’s worth it! See you next week!