LinkedIn Basics: Understanding Engagement
-Soubhagya Daspattanayak, Word Wizard at Noob Community. Creatives by Bandita Deka.
Understanding your engagement can be tough (no, this is not a pun on marriages); And as a creator, engagement is the way that determines how well you are doing on this journey of unlocking your full creative potential. To decode how your audience interacts with you and how you can crack the recipe for creating viral content on LinkedIn, we have compiled a set of 2 lists where we discuss what you need to know to be a successful content creator! To begin with understanding engagement on LinkedIn, here are a few beginner-friendly tips:-
Is it a post? Is it research work? Is this a post about someone’s research?: To come off as unnatural with your tone while making posts on any social media can reduce engagement significantly. It pressurizes your audience to maintain the same tone while commenting on your content and you may also come off as someone who equates big words with intellect (unless you majored in languages). Maintaining a conversation-like tone while posting can drastically improve your engagement by making your content seem easier to approach. Being a content creator is also about assimilating information across people of all backgrounds, and not everyone is a native English speaker! To be inclusive, and more than that, to create engaging content, we recommend using easy to understand sentences. To improve the overall readability of a text, we recommend using the HemingWayApp.
A house without a structure might collapse, and so can your engagement!: Not structuring your posts on LinkedIn may result in poorer engagement. Not everyone has the time to go through a 500-word long essay on what you’re grateful for today (yes, people on LinkedIn are people like us). Break your content down into small chunks and it enables people to get what you’re trying to say, faster! You also eliminate the possibility of people getting bored mid-way and not commenting on your post/liking it! Understanding how this works can be tricky, but we recommend learning more about whitespace.
Links link to everything except engagement (see what I did there?): Posting content on LinkedIn with reference links embedded into the post itself drastically reduces engagement too! In fact, it has been found that posts without links get 70% more engagement than those with them, at least on LinkedIn. Posting a link can trigger your user to skip your content, or worse, drift away into a rabbit hole! However, we do get that reference links are important (that’s why we used them here too), and to fix that issue, we recommend using the comment section as your space to post the reference, as the first comment! It makes your audience open the comment section and can reinforce the idea to engage with your content.
Ended abruptly? I know. Check out part 2 here.
