LinkedIn Marketing Trends for 2023 | Tips #14 – #18
January 5, 2023 - 14 minutes read - LinkedIn, LinkedIn Tips, Social Media Marketing2023 LinkedIn Marketing Trends
#14: LinkedIn Creator and Influencer User Base Grows
LinkedIn has been using the localized Creator Accelerator Program to grow its creator user base, essentially encouraging people with personal profiles to build a following. When Creator Mode is turned on, your profile prompt switches from Connect to Follow; a personal profile can have up to 30,000 connections but limitless followers.
Could 2023 be the year LinkedIn joins YouTube and Facebook in paying creators and allowing them to monetize their presence and content?
The number of creators and influencers on LinkedIn will also be fueled by the exodus of brands of businesses from Twitter. LinkedIn seems poised to make this influx of users welcome with Twitter-like features such as the ability to decide who can comment on your posts (anyone, connections only, or no one).
There also appears to be a growing focus on SEO. LinkedIn already has a new tool to optimize your new and existing articles; time will tell if using these tools will help people find your older articles.
Next up, many small businesses and entrepreneurs are desperate to move their communities off of Facebook, but they don’t want to move to Slack or Discord. Thankfully, I see positive signs that LinkedIn will finally take groups seriously. Posts can be recommended, automatic welcome messages can be set up, and when you publish a post or article, LinkedIn now prompts you to share it with a group you belong to.
Finally, LinkedIn will become more prevalent in the new year, and I predict more people will learn how to regularly create and share video content. Current restrictions on LinkedIn mean that video uploads should be under 10 minutes long. Look for short video content to become more visible on the platform.
Louise Brogan is an international speaker and LinkedIn coach with more than 10 years’ experience supporting small businesses. Her podcast is called LinkedIn with Louise.
#15: LinkedIn Video Is Seen Less
LinkedIn added almost 100 new features in 2022. Looking at how people use the platform and what is and isn’t working, we can understand how to maximize the platform’s effectiveness.
Shorter posts will continue to perform well. As a result of more content being created and our shortening attention spans, shorter-form content is clearly performing better on LinkedIn than longer form. Newsletters were rolled out to most users in 2021. Initially, these had a high engagement rate. However, toward the end of 2022, it’s clear that newsletters are getting less engagement than before. My advice is to keep your posts short—anything from 150 to around 1,200 characters is ideal.
Videos will be seen less. Interestingly, video seems to be performing less well than it ever has! LinkedIn has recently added auto-captions to videos and introduced the capacity for the viewer to switch to high contrast for better visibility. Despite these new features, video is being seen by far fewer people. My advice: test and measure repeatedly so you can keep a close eye on what’s working and what isn’t doing so well. As with written content, keep your videos shorter too—30-90 seconds is ideal.
Still images will help a post get higher engagement. It seems that LinkedIn audiences do want pictures! Posts with images are performing better than those without. As always, what works will depend on your audience, but overall, it seems that people like to see pictures and particularly faces, on LinkedIn. I have seen a huge increase in the number of document posts with a combination of text and images. My advice: add between one and four pictures to your posts, use portraits when you can and use document posts for instructional purposes, testimonials, and, if you have them, displaying products.
Personal content will continue to succeed. Since 2019, we’ve noticed a significant increase in personal content on the platform. As business trends continue to change in favor of creating more personal relationships in the working environment, the same will inevitably happen on the largest online platform for B2B marketing. My advice: create personal content as a part of your marketing strategy but don’t let it dominate. Try to relate any personal content back to the work environment.
Current thinking is that more personal content will lead to a reduction in the amount of ‘salesy’ content. People are increasingly aware of the need to build relationships to do business and convert leads. Unfortunately, there’ll always be salesy and spammy messaging in our inboxes. But there are many conversations on the platform complaining about this and asking LinkedIn to step in to stop it from happening. Will LinkedIn listen? I hope so.
Sarah Clay is a LinkedIn coach and trainer. She teaches business owners how to increase reach and attract their ideal clients.
#16: LinkedIn Favors More External Content
Judi Fox’s top 2023 predictions for marketing on LinkedIn is that the platform will roll out more business tools that support company pages generating leads and visibility growth tools for the creator economy.
LinkedIn announced they are rolling out the ability to boost individual personal profile content. Businesses that empower employees and leadership to create content on their profiles and then leverage the new company page boost features to amplify that content will succeed better than those who don’t. The new scheduling features will make it easier for companies and their employees to publish and promote their content.
Marketers and business owners should also add audio events to their 2023 strategy. LinkedIn has launched beta access to company page audio events, and I predict we may soon be able to create and monetize private audio events.
Finally, LinkedIn will add more ways to embed non-LinkedIn content into the platform’s Newsletter product, effectively improving social selling and converting activities.
Judi Fox is a LinkedIn strategist who helps small business marketers generate more sales. She’s also a regular correspondent on the Social Media Marketing Talk Show. Her course is called LinkedIn Business Accelerator.
#17: Personal Brands Will Support Company LinkedIn Marketing Goals
Source: Hootsuite
People don’t want to be sold to; they want their problems solved by people who actually care. In 2023, this will resonate more than ever, especially on LinkedIn.
People are tired of canned LinkedIn messages and boring content. The most successful sales and marketing professionals on LinkedIn know this better than anyone.
Companies in 2023 will invest more in their team members’ personal brands to connect with prospects on a deeper level and stand out from the competition.
Not only do B2B buyers expect personalized attention but they also expect brands to do better. Spend a bit more time posting valuable, engaging content and less fluff. LinkedIn Events and LinkedIn Live will be adopted by more brands that want to engage with their communities in real time.
LinkedIn will continue emphasizing engagement by rewarding accounts that actively participate in the conversation. Company pages and individual profiles that leave meaningful comments on relevant posts will continue to dominate the platform. Companies willing to push the creative envelope with LinkedIn content will come out on top.
Mandy McEwen is a LinkedIn expert and founder of Mod Girl Marketing, a consultancy that helps marketing teams increase their exposure on LinkedIn. She’s the top B2B marketer according to LinkedIn.
#18: Businesses Double Down on LinkedIn for Business Audience Development
LinkedIn Ads continues to add new features at an increased rate, which is exciting. Costs also continue to rise, which is a challenge to advertisers on a platform that has always historically charged a high premium.
Positively, this means more marketers are finding value in the platform and continuing to increase budget and spend. I expect it’s also a consequence of marketers simply accepting the default bidding method (maximum delivery), which allows the platform to bid extremely aggressively for impressions and bids competition up exponentially quickly.
LinkedIn has released some incredible retargeting methods for advertisers recently. We’re now able to retarget anyone who has interacted with a single image sponsored content ad, as well as those who watch at least 25% of a video ad, those who visit your company page, and several others.
I expect this trajectory to continue since these audiences are very simple for LinkedIn to track because each member is known (logged in) and they’re all actions that LinkedIn can see happening on its own platform. I hope to see the ability to retarget those who’ve interacted (or failed to interact) with sponsored messaging in 2023.
My wish list for new features includes the ability to target/bid by device type, as well as allowing accounts to report in our own time zone, rather than just UTC time. I’m also asking Santa to remove the defaulted behavior of a campaign to automatically tick the box to “Enable Audience Expansion.” I don’t expect we’ll actually see these in 2023.
At LinkedIn’s recent event in San Francisco called B2Believe, though, Gyanda Sachdeva, head of product at LinkedIn Marketing Solutions, presented many actual future releases on the roadmap for 2023. My most anticipated releases are:
- Promoting profile posts. Up to this point, we’ve only been able to promote company page posts. We know that company posts don’t get the same level of interaction as personal posts, so I expect this to be a boon to those companies whose executives are actively sharing great content on the platform.
- Click to message ads. We currently have conversation ads, which mimic conversation in a LinkedIn message by displaying pre-scripted messages and possible calls to action for the user to interact with. This has left companies wishing they could have a human able to respond to those messages to carry on an organic conversation. This ad type should allow much more unscripted and natural conversation and relationship-building.
- Revenue attribution report. The single biggest challenge that LinkedIn advertisers face when deciding to dedicate additional budget is seeing the impact all the way into the sales cycle. LinkedIn has already released offline conversions where advertisers can load a list of closed deals into the platform, and it can attempt to figure out the impact LinkedIn had on that closed deal by attributing the impressions/clicks/conversions that were shown to that prospect. The revenue attribution report should take this to the next level for B2B advertisers, who traditionally face challenges of visibility over long sales cycles, decided by committees rather than a single decision maker.
Despite a predicted recession in 2023, I still expect to see continued growth of the platform since there is no available substitute for the access to such specific business audiences available on LinkedIn Ads.
AJ Wilcox is the world’s leading LinkedIn Ads expert. He’s the founder and CEO of B2Linked and the host of the LinkedIn Ads Show podcast.
