Strategize Your LinkedIn Stories with SEO

When it comes to digital marketing, SEO in particular, LinkedIn is often overlooked. Whether you’ve recently hopped aboard the platform to augment an existing strategy, intend on bridging Facebook-related gaps or simply want to establish a social media presence, LinkedIn’s quality shouldn’t be passed up.

A Network of Professionals

LinkedIn’s digital marketing spark stems from its wide array of B2B opportunities. Because of its high domain authority ranking, search engines retrieve a healthy amount of results from it. As a SERP tool, particularly for businesses looking to acquire new clients, LinkedIn is the go-to resource pool. Today, it’s considered to be the best platform for client-building, commonly utilized to both establish firm networking foundations and elevated approaches to cross-market access alike.

LinkedIn and Keyword Linking

LinkedIn might be widely considered to be a B2B platform, but its potential for consumer-based SEO approaches is undeniable. In the same way, you can use website-based keywords to optimize any strategy, you can enhance your overall strategy by streamlining your use of LinkedIn.It’s important to remember, of course: LinkedIn, as a platform, does require a different approach than is traditionally used. At the end of the day, LinkedIn is a platform for business networking: If you don’t have many LinkedIn-centric connections, you’ll miss out on some great SERP opportunities.LinkedIn’s search algorithm is grounded in the same networks it establishes—making clients the most visible to those they share connections with. Similarly, those with overlapping professional networks can expect a longer reach across the board. LinkedIn’s difference from Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest, however, primarily stems from its approach to content—either in text or video form.

Sharing SEO-Enriched Articles

Long-form, text-based content is certainly an effective vehicle for SEO on Facebook—and it’s even an important resource to direct Instagram users to, within posted links. On LinkedIn, however, text-based content works a little differently.Sharing meaningful, interesting, and engaging content over LinkedIn, fortunately, isn’t as tough to do as it is on other platforms. By clicking on LinkedIn’s ‘Write an Article’ tab beneath your status update option, you can deliver platform-optimized content right from the get-go. This sidesteps many of the hurdles facing content marketers seeking big breaks on today’s biggest platforms—going so far as to assist with personal brand creation from the ground level.

Optimization and Modern Customers

While LinkedIn might be a powerhouse in terms of B2B networking options, its resources might not be readily optimized for B2C SEO engagements. Reportedly, 70 percent of B2C companies marketing via social media thank Facebook for their successful leads. In comparison, only 22 percent state they’ve acquired customers through LinkedIn.There are notable upsides to utilizing LinkedIn as your primary digital marketing hub, however. While smaller companies are more successful in generating customer leads through Facebook, medium-sized companies do, in fact, operate a little better on LinkedIn: findings derived from medium-sized business reports display a whopping 47 percent having sourced their leads through LinkedIn resources alone.Naturally, the roundup of LinkedIn-related digital marketing considerations brings LinkedIn’s utilities into question:Where should LinkedIn’s digital marketers invest their resources?

24 Hours of Spotlight: LinkedIn Stories

This brings us to LinkedIn Stories, one of the platform’s newest corners for displaying company insights, experiences, and community outreach implementations visually. Unique to LinkedIn Stories is its relatively exclusive approach to center-stage displays, despite being viewable by all, LinkedIn’s business-first slant definitely aligns its Stories features with cross-market entities looking for insights into a business’s culture.By and large, LinkedIn Stories work similarly to Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram stories. After creating a video with a length of up to 20 seconds, you upload it. It becomes available to viewers for one day, and then it’s removed. You can post as many Stories as you’d like, which makes it incredibly easy to hop in. But what makes LinkedIn stories so valuable to businesses?

Brands in the Age of Sharing

The more your brand shares, the bigger it becomes—and LinkedIn stories host a particularly unique environment for sharing brand-based content. In the words of LinkedIn’s own Senior Director of Product Management, Pete Davies, LinkedIn stories were created to kickstart conversations centric to LinkedIn’s core design. By nurturing the relationships responsible for its success, LinkedIn Stories can effectively boost the platform's 25-percent year-over-year engagement increase rate.This statistic shouldn’t be taken lightly, even when visual marketing powerhouses like Instagram Stories perceivably remain the go-to tool of visual customer outreach. LinkedIn has over 706 million users across 200 countries—and the marketing segment targeting capabilities of LinkedIn Stories make it much more effective as a business culture representation tool.Let’s dive into the best ways to create an SEO-centric marketing strategy using LinkedIn Stories. Some approaches might seem familiar—but they require some fine-tuning to achieve peak effectiveness on LinkedIn. As for the other strategies, we’ll explore some of the insights worth tracking to create SEO results you can see.

Strategy One: Become Story-Centric

The first tip is also the toughest to embrace. It’s about throwing caution to the wind—but it feels like throwing strategy out of the window.It’s the suggestion to prioritize LinkedIn Stories as your LinkedIn marketing approach tool in general. Even though LinkedIn currently has one of the most powerful long-form content resource foundations across every social media platform, its Stories tool is quickly becoming too useful to not double down on.The thing to consider, however, is this: LinkedIn’s updated look and widespread availability to LinkedIn Stories has arrived during a time where Instagram influencers are posting less often to their feeds. This isn’t necessarily driven by lower social media user activity, either, as we’re spending more time online than ever. It stands to reason that now, more than ever, LinkedIn Stories is capable of filling a space where professional, real-time human connections are needed to network.

Strategy Two: Relate to Followers

As with other live-post social media tools, LinkedIn Stories is most effective when user base connections are approached with relatable content. Even on LinkedIn, personality matters. Open up your brand for customers to see, focusing on its values, mission, and vision.At the same time, it’s a good idea to avoid being too casual. It’s easy to get caught up in the moment of live-feed business-coverage, especially when your LinkedIn Story will vanish within 24 hours. You should still prioritize your brand’s best face, however, as it’s the best angle for all who market over LinkedIn in general. More importantly: LinkedIn Stories is still the best tool around for B2B marketing connections.

Strategy Three: Host Live B2B Events

Even for SEO-based B2C marketers, the power of website-based keywords covering live B2B events can’t be ignored. 85 percent of marketers consider in-person gatherings vital to any strategy. Because LinkedIn stories give users instant insights into events on the ground floor, it’s possible to display your event’s best highlights to generate great commentary.Moreover, live streaming these events can boost your company’s SERP-related strategies when it comes to future events, too. Your LinkedIn Story might disappear after 24 hours, but content created after the fact—that which relays the ‘in-the-know’ snippets your followers need—will stick around for a while.

Strategy Four: Introduce Upcoming Products

This is where an effective LinkedIn Stories strategy begins to come full circle. Livestream events are the ideal location for product teases—as they’re inherently hype-based. Your most active Stories audience, of course, is also its most loyal. They’re the most likely to get excited about any news you have to offer, and they’ll absolutely send along this news after the 24-hour mark.A great way to approach this strategy, even as a fledgling brand with little LinkedIn Stories experience, is to make your live snippets first-person experiences. We live in the age of up-front-and-personal news coverage as it is, and your followers will best relate to content that keeps followers, as opposed to brand directors, behind the Stories steering wheel.

Strategy Five: Promote Other Content

While we recommend prioritizing LinkedIn Stories as your go-to marketing outreach tool, it’s still important to optimize your other content for peak accessibility. Due to the rapid consumption qualities of each Story, it’s never a bad idea to extend some link lines to your other content. This is doubly true when it comes to communicating important product leads and details about upcoming events.

Customer Stories: Showcasing Your Followers

At every turn, LinkedIn Stories carries incredible value in terms of consumer connectivity. It serves as a counterbalance to LinkedIn’s B2B-centric design, allowing businesses to showcase their culture in more relatable ways. In essence, it gives LinkedIn networkers a better foundation for consumer-centric content, wherein followers, as opposed to the brands they follow, get to take the spotlight.Maintaining a LinkedIn profile has always been an effective way to bridge cross-market communication gaps—but creating a fine-tuned Stories strategy can redefine a targeting strategy altogether.