Joe Gannon x Pragya from Shield
If you've been following our content on LinkedIn, you’ll know by now that we’re advocates for posting sustainably. Whether you’re new to creating content on LinkedIn, or a seasoned pro, how often you should be posting will lead to a different answer. We've put together a three-step process so that you can stay committed to posting consistently on LinkedIn.
Identify your posting frequency
Build a repeatable system to post
Evaluate the time you spend
Identify your posting frequency
A common question from people who haven't started posting yet is:
“How often should I post?
There is no right answer that works for everyone. We at Shield always say, post at a frequency you can sustain.
There is no single blog article that will tell you the exact number of posts you should be producing on a weekly and a monthly basis because there are so many varying factors at play that are unique to your own situation.
So firstly you need to reflect on few things:
Are you creating content for an organization or as an individual?
Are you looking to drive revenue or to build a personal brand?
Are you creating content for the very first time?
It’s important to consider these questions as each of them will lead to a different answer. For instance, a business looking to generate revenue using LinkedIn as a part of a wider strategy will have a different posting frequency to an individual looking to grow their personal brand for the very first time producing content.
In both circumstances, though, you should really be identifying the metrics of interest and tripling down on what works and what doesn't. It shouldn’t be the case that only businesses and organizations are covering this important step. Without this information you’ll simply be shooting from the hip and hoping for the best, which is a sure-fire way to delay the results that you will see from your content marketing efforts.
But most of all, when it comes to posting content on Linkedin our advice to you as fellow creators is to start with what you can. Posting content for the first time is the first step towards a long journey of content creation. But thankfully putting yourself out there, learning from and networking with other people is enjoyable and what keeps momentum going in the long term.
Build a repeatable system to post
So now we've covered how to identify how often you should be posting, let’s look at how you can build a system to post content consistently on LinkedIn. At Shield we recommend that you follow the three C’s method, which you may have heard of from our other blogs. The three C’s are to capture content, to curate content and to create content.
Capture
To post consistently on LinkedIn it's essential to plan ahead. You don’t want to be reactively trying to match your desired frequency of posting. When you sit down to create the content, you want to have done the majority of the heavy lifting already, which is the idea generation part of creating content and what we like to call the “capture” stage. Getting into the habit of capturing your ideas on your phone or in a workspace tool is the most important thing you can do if you’re a new creator as it will mean you’ll never be stuck for ideas.
Curate
Alongside capturing content, curating content is a great way to share content consistently, whether you’re posting daily, original thoughts, or whether you’re posting three to five times a week from content that you’ve created from scratch, you can still add in curated content that other people can benefit from.This is compiling useful resources or information, and sharing it to your audience who you are carefully refining and crafting to include the personas of your target audience.
There are great tools for both capturing and curating content, such as the Google Chrome extension, Save to Pocket and a favourite in the Shield team, the Notion Web Clipper to use with the workspace tool Notion. These tools allow you to drop links to resources that you've come across straight into your content calendar, which allows you to compile a list of curated content.
Once you have the capture and the curating processes in place for your LinkedIn content, you can move on to the creation stage.
Create
To post consistently on LinkedIn, you also want to be creating original content. Original content can be simply sharing with the world your thoughts, opinions and experiences - which, to our own shortcomings, we usually forget are of interest to other people. It’s far easier to spot expertise and insight for knowledge in other people than it is in ourselves and usually we don't give ourselves enough credit that we can produce meaningful content.
The creating aspect of content creation is usually the most time consuming for both individuals and organizations. Usually this involves padding out an idea, creating media or packaging information in a way that is tangible and easier to digest. Thankfully if you have captured and curated information, then the majority of the heavy lifting would have been done for you, but an unavoidable aspect of content marketing is that you will need to put the time aside to create content.
Evaluate the time you spend
One of the most important consideration for your content creation efforts is to seriously evaluate how much time can you spend on creating content. If you don’t have much time and are creating content along with your day-job you might want to block some time on your calendar for this. You could also look at which content types come naturally to you, and double down on those. This might be text content, polls, or sharing images that you’ve found online. This content can still be high performing and you should consider optimizing how you write your posts to have the greatest impact.
If you have more time and resources to create content, then you can be producing carousel decks, branded images and visuals or you can even take the time to produce video content.
Overall, use the three C’s model of creating content on LinkedIn to divide and conquer your content marketing. Throughout the week, capture what you come across, have your content creation hat on, curate interesting resources to your audience, and be realistic with what you can create on a weekly basis to consistently achieve the desired frequency of posting.
Creating content requires a long-term mindset, but if you can successfully post consistently on LinkedIn, that's where you will reap the benefits over time.
Have you read the amazing story of how Justin Welsh became a consistent content creator on LinkedIn? Read it here.
See you!
Joe Gannon x Pragya from Shield
