7 Prompts For Your Next LinkedIn Post to Boost Engagement

Content marketing is all about attracting your ideal audience with engaging, relevant content. When you’re creating LinkedIn posts, your audience includes over 310 million active monthly users in over 200 countries around the world.

Your competition, on the other hand, is only 3 million people – that’s how many users share content at least once a week on the platform. Now, that’s not a lot of competition compared to social media sites like Facebook or Instagram, where it’s easy to be drowned out even in your own niche.

Still, we’re in the business of marketing, which means we’re in the business of optimizing how things get done. Not every bit of content moves the needle, and that’s where your advantage comes in. By honing in on a few best practices and emerging trends, you can take your LinkedIn posts to the next level and start engaging your audience in meaningful ways.

Today, we’re bringing you seven engaging prompts to help you produce engaging, high-quality content with every LinkedIn post.

1. Question-Led Posts

Content marketing has always been helpful for search engine optimization (SEO). The principle follows that people in your audience go online to look up their problems and find solutions within your content. The more relevant your posts are to their problems (and solutions), the better you will rank on Google’s results page.

This looks a little different on LinkedIn, but the principle is the same. A post built around answering an important question engages directly with your audience and gives them a source for free solutions.

Question-led posts don’t just speak to your existing audience, either. They’re a great way to get in front of new users who are looking for the exact answers that your content provides.

2. Data Perspective Posts

Here are some interesting statistics about LinkedIn:

• Content shared on LinkedIn rose by 50% in the third quarter of 2020.

• On average, the best time to post on LinkedIn is at 9:00 a.m. on Tuesdays and Wednesdays.

You can create an engaging blog post around any of these statistics, but the key word there is you. Users aren’t interested in long datasheets – they’re interested in what data means for them. Knowing how to take data and contextualize it for your audience is an excellent way to build authority while producing engaging content.

How effective is this? An Edelman-LinkedIn survey reported that 58% of respondents read an hour or more of thought leadership content per week. 47% of C-suite level respondents said they shared their contact information as a result of reading someone’s thought leadership content.

3. How-To Posts

This one is simple enough, but that’s why it’s powerful. When people want to know how to do something, they turn to tutorials. If part of your knowledge is skill-based – and you share that skill with your audience – then you have the expertise to create engaging content.

Again, you’re offering valuable information for free, while establishing your authority on topics that interest your audience.

4. List Articles (Listicles)

This post is technically a listicle. More than any other type of content, listicles are defined by their headline and structure. As the name suggests, these posts are built around a list.

Unlike how-to posts, the points aren’t listed in a step-by-step order. Listicles can be a collection of points in random order or they can be used to rank those points linearly. Either way, the structure is what makes them so appealing.

Listicles break down topics into bite-sized, often actionable, information. They also make information modular, meaning someone can take a piece they need while leaving what doesn’t apply to them. You can even have fun with the title.

5. Infotainment Posts

One thing people forget about marketing is that you’re allowed to make your content fun. We see humor incorporated into advertising all the time, particularly in video ads, but your content can benefit from it, too.

Infotainment strikes a fine balance between informative and evocative. You’re eliciting a positive reaction from your audience with your style while offering value they can take away with the content of your posts.

Infotainment doesn’t necessarily mean humor (that comes next), so don’t feel pressured to make your content funny. Entertainment means different things to different audiences. Audiences can be entertained by interesting insights, a unique and intriguing voice, and even by the media you pair your information with.

6. Humor Post

Now, if you do want to use humor to capture your audience on LinkedIn, there is a way to do it. Established LinkedIn users like Corporate Bro use humor as the primary way of presenting their content to thousands of users.

The main difference between humor and infotainment is that, for the former, laughter is the point. It’s about being relatable and entertaining, which can require a level of skill or vulnerability. One reason why is that humor works especially well with video content, where tone and delivery aren’t lost in plain text.

Humor posts also demand more personality from you before they can resonate with your audience. Building that skillset is worth the effort. Humor makes content more memorable, so you engage people long after they move on. It also helps to time any impactful information you do have. Ideally, it should appear just after the punch line, as this is the moment where your audience is most engaged.

7. FAQ Post

This last prompt is a bit of a hybrid, but it gets the best of both worlds. We’ve established that questions are engaging central topics and that listicles have a particularly accessible structure, so why not combine them?

Rather than hone in on one question, compile a list of your audience’s most pressing questions. If you can answer them in a listicle format, you can create a resource hub through your content. If it’s all on one post, that also means more engagement, even if people are only interested in a couple of your answers.

Build Engagements With Your LinkedIn Posts

At Vervology, we’re in the business of helping small businesses. Our expert team is here to help you turn your marketing department into one of your strongest assets. We work with you to design and execute digital marketing strategies that make a difference. Book a free consultation today; we can’t wait to hear from you!