LinkedIn Content Strategy: A Step-by-Step Guide

Hi, I'm Alex. I've generated around ~$9M of revenue from LinkedIn alone, and that number rises every year. To explain how I do this, I'd like to share the LinkedIn content strategy that I've followed for years, with you. This will be different from what you've likely heard in the past.

First: unlike the other articles you'll read on this topic, there is no point setting a 'goal' of how much reach you want to get on social media. The algorithms just don't work that way. You'll get 1k views on one post, and 100k on another. Don't bother. Just keep building and doing your best as you ramp up your influence and account size.

1. Engage, comment, and make friends.

You want at least a few handfuls of people who are active on social, to be cheering you on. Later, this should be 50+ people who you have had some sort of relationship with, who are active on social, who support you and you support them.

To do this: set up 10-min engagement blocks (2x/week for LI, 1x/week for either Twitter or Substack if you can), try to write 100-200 comments per month or more. Build an engagement feed directly on LinkedIn, and it should make your commenting a lot easier. More on that here.

Also try to meet more people offline, 1-1, to help them with their job or business. You're not here to "build relationships first" before talking business: you're here to build relationships via talking business. Be helpful to others in a professional sense, using your own experience and skills.

If this doesn't seem to you like it fits into a guide about 'content strategy', well: I'm here to tell you that it does. It's the bedrock of your strategy, no less! If you don't have this, your social presence won't go anywhere.

2. Develop a core point of view.

Using the analytics on your posts and the content creation workflow in DemandBird, review your overall 'content pillars' and see if something jumps out at you. What you're looking for here, is something like "My Unique Point Of View On {MyIndustry}". That should be different from the conventional point of view, as you see it.

For example, with DemandBird, my really-boiled-down core message is something like this:

"To make an impact on your market in B2B through social, you need a system, not just a scheduler. The system has to be time-efficient, it has to help you reach at least half a million people per year, and it must help you distribute a message that ChatGPT couldn't have come up with. Most social media tools miss this: they focus on 'click here to generate a post' AI tools, which miss the mark and damage your reputation; or, they're just schedulers without an opinion, that don't guide you toward success on social media. DemandBird is the answer: we actually help you analyze your content, develop a strategy, generate good ideas to prompt you, and then we also schedule, publish, repurpose, and help you analyze your content to create a feedback loop. Plus, our support team is expert-level: we know how to help you when you get stuck, not just with the product, but with growing on social. You won't get that anywhere else."

See how that's different from "buy our social media tool"? Find your version of this. Of course, DemandBird can help you do that, so hit the button in the top right of this screen to start a free trial today.

3. Share that same core message across multiple angles.

This is where the tactics come into play. All the stuff you see on LinkedIn about how to design carousels, or refine your hooks, and so forth? This is where it belongs. You can get creative with post angles, emotion-driven hooks, copywriting, imagery, all of that tactical stuff. Again, DemandBird will also help you with this — the content studio workflow feature will offer up some example angles that you may not have thought of, different variations of your past posts, and example hooks.

The point is not for you to copy the AI draft, but rather to 'react to it' and use it as inspiration for your own content. In a pinch, you can use the AI copy and it'll do reasonably well, but get in the habit of doing your own writing!

4. Publish to new platforms.

DemandBird doesn't just work on LinkedIn: it's also a cross-platform scheduler, solving the problem of having to manage publishing to multiple platforms at once. If you're only doing LinkedIn, this isn't a huge pain point for you, but it's still helpful to have a way to visualize your content schedule in a calendar view:

For me, this is much easier to see what I have scheduled, for when, and on which platforms, than using the native LinkedIn scheduler or just calendar reminders, both of which I've tried extensively in the past and it was painstaking.

5. Repurpose your best posts.

When a post does well, revisit it every several months. DemandBird will try to remind you to do this once we have a library of posts for you on file, as you use the product more or if you upload your historical post data archive to jumpstart the process — e.g. we'll say "hey, this worked well last September, can we rework it and publish it again in early June?"

6. Introduce new media formats.

Text is great. People read quickly... much faster than they can watch video or listen to audio. But sometimes, imagery, visuals, and video, can deepen the relationship your followers have with your message. I wrote a whole article here on LinkedIn Post Types, but this is an example of a text post that I felt should become a Carousel:

I've posted this same carousel angle several times, with tens of thousands of impressions across all of the reposts. It's great.

Social media is not a video game :)

Here's what I mean by that: most people naturally gravitate toward thinking about social media as trying to 'hack the algorithm'. This is not the way to view it. View it as a digital expression of your and your company's reputation. I would much rather you had 100 friends who were giving you feedback on your posts and were always supporting you publicly, than for you to have 'the perfect hook'. The world of burned-out LinkedIn marketers and creators is full of people who sat behind their computers, perfecting their hooks for days, but didn't watch the fundamentals.

In short: put the social back in social media. If you layer the core tenets of content strategy on top of that? You'll do just fine.

By the way, if you need help with your content strategy, sign up for a DemandBird account today and give us a shout! We're happy to help.