Unlike some social media sites, LinkedIn is starving for authentic content.
Which means your personal organic posts will get up to 10x more views, comments, and likes than a company’s post.
10x is a huge difference—and can change the ROI of your ad spend.
So how do you combine these ideas of getting more interaction on organic posts… while using advertising dollars to reach more people?
AJ Wilcox, Host of The LinkedIn Ads Show, shares his favorite method in this clip from B2B Forum 2023.
For AJ’s secret, watch the video or read the transcript below.
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We have always had ads on LinkedIn that represented The Company.
When I post something as my Company, versus I post something as me, on LinkedIn—this is just organically—even if we had the same number of followers on each of those profiles, The Company gets one-tenth the engagement.
So I am literally like, “okay, if I post the same thing from me personally, I’m going to get 10 times the engagement. Why would I even post as my Company?”
So then you think about it from an ads perspective. Advertising as The Company is the only thing we’ve ever had! And we wonder why our ads never get likes and comments.
And it seems like, when you do get one comment on your ads, all of a sudden a few come through, because no one wants to be the first commenter [for a company’s post.]
When you comment… on a company’s post, you’re going to say, “I don’t know if anyone is even on the other end of this. It’s a faceless organization. They don’t care what I think…I just won’t [comment].”
But on LinkedIn, organically, it is the easiest network in the world to go viral on.
This is all driven by comments, LinkedIn specifically.
They don’t have enough stuff being created, like Meta does. Meta has all kinds of content being created. And they’re trying to weed stuff out of the algorithm.
But on LinkedIn?
Everyone’s a little bit hesitant to post.
If I post something, am I going to look stupid in front of my boss? Or screw up a future business opportunity?
So, because of that, only—the last stat I saw, I’m sure this has increased by now—but the last stat was from 2018.
And it was, only 4% of LinkedIn members post.
But if you ask people on Meta, I’m sure it’s like, oh yeah, a hundred percent of people on Meta are willing to post.
So, because LinkedIn doesn’t have as much competition in the newsfeed, they are looking for posts that get commented on.
Because if someone is commenting and it’s starting a conversation, that’s engagement that [LinkedIn] cares about.
That’s real conversation.
They want to show that in more people’s feeds.
So we have thought leader ads that allow you to boost an individual’s posts now.
And so that means you could take your CEO, your head of marketing, your head of sales—you even—and take one of the posts that you’ve created, and then sponsor it as the company.
It’s a little bit cumbersome to do still, but you can.
And it comes from a person.
And so, all of a sudden, you have this person show up in your newsfeed.
It looks very natural.
There is a little sentence that says, “promoted by” and then it says the company name. But otherwise, it looks like it’s just a person that you follow in your newsfeed.
You are so much more likely to like, and comment, and interact.
They’re limited—you can’t stick a lead gen form on ’em or anything like that—but how cool is this?
Just from a theoretical perspective, now your ads are actually being engaged with at potentially 10x what your company posts were.
Published March 6, 2024
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