29 Jan The Solution to Your Organic Reach Woes May be LinkedIn

It’s no secret that organic reach is in the gutter across many major social networks.  Facebook was to go-to option for cheap and effective for marketers for a long time, but that’s changed in the last year.  The famous shift to “meaningful personal interactions” changed the game, and lots of people still haven’t quite figured out the appropriate way to fill that gap.  It just might be that the answer isn’t a new platform, but one that you’ve been on for years – LinkedIn.

Less Bickering, More Learning

If you follow Gary Vee, you probably saw him evangelizing for LinkedIn video as part of a sound strategy for 2019.  He compared the organic reach results you can get on LinkedIn today to the results you may have been getting on Facebook five or six years ago.

The professional networking site may not be the first thing that comes to mind when you think about marketing your business.  For some people, LinkedIn is a place you only visit when you want to hunt for a new job.  But more and more, it’s becoming a place where people go to consume content that’s relevant to their work.

Because of the way you build a network on LinkedIn, your connections there are generally tied to your job.  And because of the way people post there, the content is generally more business-oriented and less personal.  That means less fighting about politics and more real discussions about how to get work done.

The Life of the Party

Think about the atmosphere at a conference in your industry.  Better yet, think about the after party at a conference.  Now, think about the people you want to connect with there, and the types of conversations you have at those events.  These are the types of conversations that you can (and should) be having on LinkedIn.

It might be less about posting from brand pages, and more about the people in your organization posting from their own pages about things they know about.  Just like the cocktail party conversation can drive engagement and influence for the individual and your brand, the LinkedIn video can do the same.

Real Value and Real Views

The best part – you can actually deliver some value this way.  LinkedIn’s research shows that 80% of users are happy to watch a video between 30 seconds and 2 minutes on the platform.  If you’ve looked at your Facebook analytics recently, the idea of people sticking around for 120 seconds probably excites you.

These numbers hold true to the C-Suite as well, with 53% saying they like videos of 1-2 minutes in length.  The catch?  The content has to be relevant.  It also doesn’t hurt if it’s coming from someone they respect (like another executive) in an accessible, authentic format.

View count also matters less to would-be watchers on LinkedIn.  The two factors that survey respondents ID’ed as mattering least in their decision to watch a video were number of likes and number of content.  Props to LinkedIn users for being independent thinkers!