Sales Professionals Need Social Best-Practices Based on Data, Not Anecdotes
Any Google search for “How to post effectively on LinkedIn” or “LinkedIn best-practices” will provide hundreds of results – but how do you know which of those reports are actually trustworthy?
The leadership at Agorapulse, a social media scheduling tool, dedicated to allocate a significant portion of its monthly budget to run data-driven social media experiments through what they’re calling “The Social Media Lab.” Scott leads that team in carrying out all kinds of tests.
Their experiments and trials are based on this pattern:
Problem -> hypothesis -> research -> findings
With the help of an actual data scientist who is on staff at Agorapulse, the team is seeking to uncover best-practices and publish them publicly for anyone to learn from. For this podcast, I asked Scott to elaborate on the findings from a recent SML experiment about the kind of LinkedIn posts that perform best – and you may find the results surprising.
Text-Only Posts on LinkedIn Are Viewed Massively More Than Others
One of the principles you hear touted about using social media effectively is that it’s a visual medium, and as such, posts which include images, GIFs, videos, etc. are generally more effective. Scott wanted to test that hypothesis, especially as it has to do with LinkedIn. His team at the Social Media Lab used three accounts with large followings to test the following the hypothesis that text-only posts would garner the lowest amount of views.
The team posted a variety of content types over a specified period of time, and tracked the engagement for each.
So what were the results?
“Text-only posts on LinkedIn had an increase of 1,069% views.”
That’s the type of data that helps those of us in sales and marketing understand how to garner better engagement for the sake of establishing relationships and uncovering needs. Listen to this podcast to hear more about how posting on LinkedIn create more sales conversations.
How Effective Are Hashtags on LinkedIn?
It hasn’t been around for long, but LinkedIn now supports the use of hashtags. It’s easy to forget that the functionality even exists on LinkedIn, but those who are utilizing hashtags are seeing great results – and the data Scott and his team have been able to compile from their experiments prove it’s not just anecdotal.
Source: www.socialmediatoday.com
