How To Write a LinkedIn Post That Sparks Engagement

What’s the difference between an average LinkedIn post and a top-performing LinkedIn post that earns hundreds of likes and comments?

If you analyze the most successful creators on LinkedIn, you’ll notice that most of their posts share similar characteristics that the average LinkedIn post lacks. 

This article outlines how anyone can write an outstanding LinkedIn post that generates high engagement and helps you earn more followers. 

1. Understand How Your Audience Experiences A Pain Point

Most LinkedIn creators know the general pain points their target audience faces.

While the average LinkedIn post provides generic advice on general pain points, an excellent LinkedIn post is more specific.

For example, earning backlinks is a general problem in SEO. 

A basic LinkedIn post might provide best practice advice like this:

There’s nothing wrong with these tips. Each is a commonly accepted link building tactic. 

Yet most people who try these link building tactics fail to earn backlinks.

To provide helpful content, you must understand how most people try to execute these tips and why they fail.

Here’s an example of a much more compelling LinkedIn post.

It addresses what happens when people try these tactics (e.g., they try guest posting and get a low response rate), why their current strategy is failing, and then provides an alternative, more effective solution.

To understand your audience’s deeper pain points, ask:

1. What is the problem they’re currently facing?
2. How are they trying to solve the problem, and why isn’t their current strategy working?

Once you know the answer to those two questions, you’ll find that:

1. You never have to think of content ideas again, because the audience’s pain points are the best content ideas.
2. Your LinkedIn posts will be more compelling if you can articulate what people are doing that isn’t working.

So how do you learn about these deeper pain points?

Talk to your audience. 

Here are three strategies to talk to your target audience:

• Participate in Slack groups and forums and take note of common pain points mentioned. You can even ask the group about their biggest challenges. Or, read through threads like the one below to learn how people are currently trying to solve their problems. You can join in the conversation and ask about other things they’ve tried that failed:

• Attend conferences and ask people about what they’re struggling with. If you can’t afford to attend conferences, apply to participate as a volunteer.
• Set up automated DMs to message anyone who comments on your post. Ask them what they’re struggling with. If they reply, don’t send an automated response. Respond with a real message from you personally and ask how they’ve been trying to solve that problem and why it isn’t working. 

Create a document and track the pain points your audience mentions and how they’re currently trying to solve those problems. 

Action Items

• Talk to your audience to learn about their pain points by participating in forums/Slack groups, attending conferences, and setting up automated DMs. Specifically, learn about their current strategy and why it’s failing.
• Create a document with their responses and use it as your content idea bank.

2. Packaging The Right Content Idea

In the previous step, you identified your target audience’s pain points, so you now have a list of excellent topics.

However, there’s probably already plenty of advice on each of those topics. So how do you make your content unique?  

Here are five frameworks you can use to ensure your content provides a unique perspective on any topic.

• Case Study: Explain the problem, how you solved it, and lessons learned. The best part is that it doesn’t have to be your own case study. The post below is a great example of how you can interview someone else and use their case study to build your audience. The creator in this example is a B2B SaaS marketing consultant, so he wrote a case study of how another B2B SaaS company went public with a lean marketing team:

• Research: Look at the common problems people face within your niche and create research on the best solution to that problem. For example, the ideal target audience for this SEO consultant is a marketer investing in SEO, and a pain point his ideal customer might feel is confusion around Google’s recent updates. So instead of just providing generic advice on how to optimize your website given Google’s recent updates, they did a research study and provided data on what’s working:

• Failures: Reflect on your own personal failures. For example, this person’s ideal target audience struggles with generating leads, so he wrote a post about everything he did wrong when trying to generate leads.

Source

• Personal experiences: Write about a time when you struggled with the exact pain point your audience is currently facing. 

• Contrarian opinion: Is there an industry-accepted best practice that you disagree with? Below is an excellent example. One of the common marketing best practices is to test everything. This marketer created a contrarian opinion post disagreeing with this best practice:

While these are a handful of frameworks you can use to create compelling LinkedIn posts, they aren’t the only effective frameworks.

If you have an original idea you want to share, post it! For example, this post generated over 230 comments and is an interesting idea even though it doesn’t fall into the categories above.

Source

These frameworks are just guidelines you can use if you’re struggling to think of original content ideas.

Action Items

Instead of writing generic advice to solve a problem, use one of these five frameworks to package it into something more interesting. 

• Case study
• Research
• Failures
• Personal experiences
• Contrarian opinion

3. Use An Attention Grabbing Hook And Visual

There are two ways you can get people to stop scrolling on LinkedIn:

• The copywriting of your first line
• Your visual (graphic, image, video)

First, let’s talk about copywriting.

The LinkedIn algorithm tracks the number of people who click “See More” and considers this a positive signal that your content is helpful.

Therefore, the trick to getting people to click that “See More” button is to create a curiosity gap.

A curiosity gap is an incomplete thought that raises a question in the audience’s mind. 

This post creates a curiosity gap, as it causes you to ask the question, “What’s the ugly truth?”

She also uses arrow signs to encourage people to click “See More.”

Source

Codie Sanchez is a master at creating hooks that create a curiosity gap, and here are a few of her best examples:

Question it Raises: Who will I never be as good as?

Question it Raises: How did this $40 million business have a startup cost of just $120k?

Question it Raises: This question is vague. What does Codie mean by saying that I’m hard to kill?

Question it Raises: How do you unlock free money?

When writing the text itself, limit the paragraphs/sentences to three lines. If it’s any longer, people will become overwhelmed and keep scrolling. This post is a great example of how to space out your written text: 

Including an image or video in your post will also help the post grab a scroller’s attention. 

Here are a few different styles of images you can use to capture attention:

• Twitter screenshots
• Graphics
• Personality images (of yourself)
• Videos (bonus if you add captions)

Here’s a great example of how you can use graphics to catch someone’s attention:

Alex Hormozi is well known for creating shorts with large, legible captions:

Action Items

• Use a captivating hook and incorporate arrow emojis to encourage people to click “see more.” 
• Add a visual, like a graphic, video, screenshot, or image.

4. Incorporate Hashtags

One of the biggest challenges with social media platforms, including LinkedIn, is that it’s difficult for new people to discover your content.

However, if people follow a specific hashtag, posts that include that hashtag can show up in their feed. 

To find popular hashtags to add to your post, you can start by typing a hashtag in the search bar:

However, there are two challenges with this method:

1. It often only shows a handful of hashtags.
2. You have to start typing a word, so unless you already have a general idea of the beginning of the hashtag, it can be difficult to discover new hashtags.

Another way to find hashtags is to look at other influencers in your niche and track their most commonly used hashtags. This hashtag discovery method requires a lot of time scrolling through their content, but it can unearth some great hashtags.

There are also free tools that generate hashtag ideas, like this one from Mention.

You can type in the topic, and it will give you hashtag suggestions:

Unfortunately, it doesn’t provide any analytics, so pair it with a Chrome extension, like this free one from Hashtag Analytics.

You can use the extension to see any hashtag’s total followers. 

Unlike Instagram, LinkedIn recommends users include just 2-5 hashtags per post and use a mix of general and more specific hashtags.  

Here’s a great example of a post that effectively uses a mix of general and more niche hashtags:

Action Items

• Find popular hashtags with a free hashtag tool or manually search for hashtags on LinkedIn. Then use this hashtag analytics Chrome extension to see which ones are most popular.
• Use 2-5 hashtags per post and mix general and niche hashtags.

5. Encourage Comments 

Comments are a very positive signal to the LinkedIn algorithm and can help your post attain more organic reach, so include a CTA that encourages people to leave a comment.

Most people include CTAs at the bottom of their posts. Here are some examples of CTAs that invite comments:

• Do you have an opinion on (topic mentioned in the post)? I’d love to hear it in the comments.
• Have you ever experienced (topic)? Tell me about it in the comments.
• What has been your experience with (topic)? Tell me in the comments.
• Do you have any other tips to add? Leave them in the comments.

You can also experiment with including the CTA at the beginning of the post.

Why?

Most LinkedIn users preach advice or share their success, so it’s rare (and refreshing) to see people actively ask others about their experiences and start a genuine conversation. After all, LinkedIn is still a social media platform, and a social interaction is a two-way conversation.

So consider trying some posts that begin with a sentence like this:

• Have you ever struggled with this before, and how did you overcome it? This is what happened to me/us.
• Do you have a strong opinion on (topic)? Here’s the story:
• What’s your best strategy for (topic)? We’ve experimented with several different solutions for (topic), and here’s what happened:
• How do you deal with (topic)? I’m experimenting with a few different strategies and here’s what’s worked so far.

People love to share their experiences and opinions.

So opening your post with a question can increase the percentage of people that click “See More” to read your full post, and the percentage of people who comment. 

However, three things have a major impact on the percentage of people who will comment on your post:

• Content Quality: The quality of the idea/helpfulness of the content has a major impact on how many people will comment on it. Even a major influencer will likely comment on a post published by someone with zero followers if the content is truly exceptional.
• Responding to Comments: People who know you’ll engage with them are more likely to comment on future posts.
• Building Genuine Relationships: Your friends will organically support your content, especially if it’s exceptional quality. You can build genuine relationships by attending conferences, hosting meetups, commenting on other people’s posts, and even speaking at online or live events. 

Action Items

• Encourage comments by adding a CTA at the beginning or end of your post that asks the audience for their opinion or experiences.
• Respond to all comments and build genuine relationships with people.

6. Tag And Collaborate With Influencers

Even if you write a perfectly optimized LinkedIn post with amazing copywriting, your follower count will limit its organic reach. 

However, if an influencer shares your post, your content immediately reaches a new audience, which can help you earn more followers (if the content is insightful and helpful).

There are two main ways you can get influencers to share your content:

• Tagging them: Tagging influencers is easy, but doesn’t always work. The best way to encourage a LinkedIn influencer to reshare a post you tag them in is by making the post about their work or ideas. Here’s a great example of how someone repurposed content from an SEO influencer and tagged them for more exposure:

• Collaboration with them: You’re much more likely to get an influencer to reshare your post if you collaborate by interviewing them personally, or receiving a quote from them. This strategy works because they’ve invested effort into your content and will want it to perform well. Here’s a great example where a content marketer sent a DM to an influencer, she posted a screenshot of influencer’s response, and then the influencer reposted her post:

To increase the likelihood of an influencer sharing your content, only reach out to or tag influencers who historically share other people’s content.

Action Items

• Browse influencers in your network that often reshare posts.
• Then, ask them to collaborate with you (if they frequently do content collaborations) or write a post about what you’ve learned from them.

7. Use Qualitative and Quantitative Analytics For Future Post Ideas

Most people track the posts that earn the most likes and engagement, but how should you use that data to improve future posts? 

When you have a post that received high engagement, track:

• The topic 
• The hook
• The structure (list, story, graphic, etc.)
• The style (tone of voice)

Then, reapply those elements to future posts. For example, try the same topic, a similar style of hook, or a similar structure.

In addition to tracking quantitative analytics, such as likes and comments, track qualitative data as well. 

Is it your ideal customer commenting on the posts? 

What’s the reaction in the comments (inspired, outraged, etc.)? 

Not all engagement is equally valuable so give more credit to posts that solicit positive reactions from your ideal customers.

Action Items 

• Identify your top performing posts and take note of the topic, hook, structure, and style of those posts.
• Use that data to create future posts.

Examples of Great LinkedIn Posts

Here are some excellent examples of LinkedIn posts that you can use as inspiration in your own content strategy.

Example #1: Adam Robinson

Adam Robinson has grown an impressive personal brand on LinkedIn, and here are a few things this post did particularly well:

• Hook: Opening with a failure with significant numbers. 
• Storytelling: The dialogue makes the post feel more like a story.
• The Content Idea: Using a story from his ideal target audience is a great way to ensure the pain point is relevant to your audience.

You’ll also notice that he engages with the audience in the comments.

Takeaway

Speak with your audience about their failures/pain points, and then use a specific conversation (anonymized) to create a LinkedIn post.  

Example #2: Nicolas Cole

Nicolas Cole has a ghostwriting academy, and his LinkedIn posts are designed to attract freelance writers.

This post does a few things very well:

• The Hook: He effectively pulls in the ideal target audience (people struggling to succeed as writers).
• The Visual: He uses a video with large, bright captions to capture the scroller’s attention.
• The Idea: He used a failure from his own personal experience as a writer.

Takeaway 

Look at your own personal failures to use as inspiration for your LinkedIn posts. Then, craft it into a lesson and package it in a short video with captions.

Example #3: Oren Greenberg

Oren Greenberg is a B2B SaaS marketer, and this post performed particularly well for a few reasons:

• The Hook/Content Idea: Most B2B SaaS marketers rely heavily on attribution, so opening with a bold contrarian statement immediately captures his ideal audience’s attention.
• The Visual: The Twitter graphic helps capture a scroller’s attention.
• Responding To Comments: He responds to every comment with a thoughtful reply.

Takeaway

Think about the best practices in your industry that don’t actually work very well. Then, highlight the problems with them and why they’re problematic.

Example #4: Justin Rowe

Justin Rowe is a LinkedIn consultant with plenty of examples of well written LinkedIn posts, including this one.

Here are a few reasons why this is a well-written LinkedIn post:

• The Hook: He uses his own personal learning experience. If this thing surprised him – a LinkedIn ads expert – it will probably be interesting to the scroller as well.
• Storytelling: He uses his personal story to make the content more interesting.
• Use of Hashtags: He includes a variety of relevant hashtags at the bottom of the post.
• The Visual: He includes a video explaining what he stated in the written text. The video is also captioned and branded to capture their attention.
• Comments: He responds to every person in the comments with something insightful.

Takeaway

Write about something you learned recently that surprised you and then package the experience and lesson into a story. Create a branded video with captions to make it even more attention grabbing.

Example #5: Leila Hormozi

Leila Hormozi has grown an impressive following on LinkedIn over the past year. While part of it is due to her impressive experience, she has also mastered the art of writing a great LinkedIn post.

Here’s some analysis of one of her outstanding LinkedIn posts:

• The Hook: The first two lines immediately capture your attention by playing into drama. What happens after losing $20,000? The hook is also very short, so it’s easy to catch when you’re scrolling on mobile or desktop.
• The Image: She posted a high quality image of herself, which captures your attention by taking up more real estate in your feed.
• Storytelling: Instead of telling advice, she uses quotes to make it into a story and play into the drama. She only reveals the lesson at the very end of the post.
• The CTA: She encourages comments in the CTA by asking others how they would have handled the situation.

Takeaway

Think of an experience you’ve had a contrarian reaction to and what you learned from it. Also, consider using real quotes from people in your copywriting to make it more entertaining and feel like a story. 

Get More Help Writing LinkedIn Posts  

The best way to improve your skills as a LinkedIn writer is by practicing. So start posting content today.

Once you start publishing content on LinkedIn, ask your friends for feedback to improve your writing.

If you’re struggling to find people in your network to give you writing feedback, consider joining the Copyblogger Academy.

It’s a community of creators building their personal brands on social media and is led by seven figure entrepreneurs and personal branding experts Charles Miller and Tim Stoddart. You can ask questions in the community and you’ll also have access to nine courses on various marketing topics from copywriting and email marketing to SEO and content marketing. 

Join before we raise prices later this year.