I was just reading a report from LinkedIn that says that members engage with over 1 and A2 million pieces of content every single minute on the platform with this in mind what are you going to do to stand out for your brand and your business on LinkedIn in 2025 in today's episode we're going to go into planning mode so if you're responsible for the LinkedIn strategy for your business you're going to love it good day listeners it's coach Michelle J Raymond and I hope you're having an awesome week wherever in the world you are and
I know that it's only September and you might be sitting there thinking we can't really be talking about 2025 as yet but the fact is it's going to be here in no time and the work that we do now just like we've been doing every other week on this podcast will really set you up for success in 2025 planning is not a word that rolls off my tongue very easily it's almost like a SW word and that's because in my mind I've always been the person that loves to fly by the seat of their pants
and I like to wake up in the morning and see what do I feel like today and that's great but it's not great when you're trying to grow a business it's not great when you're trying to align a LinkedIn strategy to a business strategy and it's certainly not great when you want to maximize the ROI from your time on LinkedIn for many business owners or marketing managers if you're out there and you're responsible for your LinkedIn strategy we're going to have a look at three key areas in today's episode that I think are really going
to make the most difference in 2025 so the three key strategies that we're going to be looking at the power of building Community content Trends and we're also going to be looking at engagement tactics before we go into those key areas I just want to drop a quick word from our pod sponsors metrial today listeners I want to talk about metrial premium and if you don't already know what metrial is it's your all-in-one social media management platform that I personally use for my business and I think it's a musthave tool in the marketing space and
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safe to say as we go into 2025 that posting content alone is not enough we know that as the platform gets crowded it gets overrun with content especially low quality content that we have to do different things to stand out and building a community is going to be way up the top of our priority list as marketers going into 20 2 building Community whether we're talking about individuals building their own personal Community whether we're talking about Pages going from just collecting followers to really becoming an industry Hub either way it is not a game that
you can play alone it is super hard a shout out to all of the small businesses especially Consultants that are out there trying to win at LinkedIn you might feel like you're up against it and to a certain degree I probably think that's true I've been there myself but what I recognized early on is that one of the greatest ways that I could grow my profile on LinkedIn was to start looking at collaborations those collaborations started just because I was commenting thoughtfully on post and expressing my own point of view and I was was consistently
challenging those Norms I had something different to what other people were saying and I think that's really important I remember for my own journey I started guesting on other people's podcasts if you haven't ever been a guest on a podcast I highly encourage you to do things like that it is such a great way to borrow other people's already built communities and that's essentially what you're doing when you're commenting as well that person has built up their follow is that content that you're creating in the comments is then seen by their community and hopefully you're
attracting the right kinds of people another way that I have built up my collaborations and you can do this as well is think about who you could partner with on things like LinkedIn audio rooms or LinkedIn lives and that could be other people within your business it could be a brand partnership there are so many different ways that you can keep it an eye out on LinkedIn for collaborations if I go back to the episode that I did on page advocacy one of the things that I was very adamant about was getting your company page
as well to not just sit on the sideline and post content I want it to get in the game and start to build its own community and it's going to do that by liking people's post including employees it is going to be out there reposting perhaps it's a key supplier or a partner that your business works with and it can also highlight other companies in the content that you do who else do you work with in your industry like businesses don't operate in a standalone environment and this is why page advocacy is a great way
to build up your collaborations as well so get out there and support other people and this is why it's so important this is why I've been talking about it when it comes to LinkedIn I get it content is really important what's the kind of content that will work on LinkedIn in 2025 the first one that we're talking about and I have been a huge advocate for this from the very beginning and that is LinkedIn newsletters why do I love them because there's been so much research by LinkedIn so go back to the Edelman thought leadership
report yes I'm banging on about that it was commissioned by LinkedIn that basically says buyers B2B buyers are Looking For Thought leadership content that helps support their decision making LinkedIn newsletters are the best way that we can create long form content on LinkedIn and when you think about it there's no other social platform that incorporates long form articles and newsletters like LinkedIn does besides the fact that you can go into a lot more detail the other reason that I love it is you build subscribers so as the home feed gets more and more competitive the
good news is when you put out a new addition all of your subscribers to the newsletter are notified right so there's no more of that competition that hustle and bustle of the home feed you go around it and go directly to who you want to talk to what else am I definitely backing that I think you should really plan into your 2025 LinkedIn marketing strategy besides long form newsletters it's almost contradictory to be honest cuz what I'm about to say is video and especially short form video LinkedIn are reporting that video content is the most
popular format of content that is growing on the platform so 34% year on Year from their latest report and when it comes to video and it comes to the trend I I don't think it's going away it's not my personal preference I I don't particularly enjoy scrolling and you know hoping and praying that I find a bit of content that I like but there is no doubt with the popularity of Tik Tock of shorts of reals that linkedin's going to want a piece of that pie now we've seen what happens when they try and copy
them LinkedIn had stories a couple of years ago rest in peace stories I really missed stories I love the idea of having a space for Content that doesn't live forever why I'm a little bit hesitant on this this one is sometimes LinkedIn goes out hard and with a brand new feature they can often take it away or it doesn't appear in the same way that I'm talking about it here today what I can see we've gone from having video buttons to video carousels where you can go into these different feeds I don't think that they
exactly know what they want to do with this just yet so I'm backing the power of video I love it cuz you can build your personal brand your company brand and it can't be replicated by AI unless you're driving the Deep fakes you know it's not to say that there aren't tools out there that would do it but you have to be involved in generating that in some way there's some people that have tried video content for the first time recently after one of my LinkedIn posts encouraging them to do it honestly I felt more
connected to them cuz all of a sudden it was little things I was like I didn't know you sounded like that the there was a different level of energy that came across and that I think is going to be important in 2025 whether it's the brands creating the videos or whether it's the individuals or employees creating the videos I think more of the humanness is going to come out and I think more of that authenticity and I'm hoping that striving for Perfection when it comes to videos goes out the window I really I wish that
was a trend going in 20 2 where we just kind of threw caution to the wind and we just put ourselves out there in all our glory for other people to see if I was going to answer the question that a lot of people ask where should I put the priority I actually think that the idea is make sure that you mix things up I I think that there isn't one form of content that will dominate over another in your community so focus on what will make the biggest difference to the people in that community
that you've built how can you create content that serves them best and knowing that we all learn a little bit differently I think that's why it's important to mix things up if you are planning your content strategy for 2025 I would say to you that you need to incorporate a strategy for employee generated content find a way to support the people within the business to be themselves and talk about what they do this does not need to be a full-on production it can be but it doesn't need to be sometimes I think the more real
it is the more people trust that kind of content and I think it's the kind of content that money can't buy I especially hope that in 2025 I get to see a lot of the younger creators putting content out on LinkedIn as employees and marketing managers if you are from a different generation like I am support them let them experiment let them get creative you just never know what's going to work and letting someone have a go is not going to break your brand who should be creating the video content within your business pretty much
anyone it doesn't have to be the CEO or founder you might actually find that you've got an amazing Video Creator that is used to creating content over on reals or Tik toks and you can bring their skills across onto the platform okay we're into the third section of what I would be focusing on for your LinkedIn marketing strategy in 2025 and that is planning around how are you going to boost your LinkedIn engagement and thought leadership on the platform if you think about the strategy that we've built out while we've been planning in this episode
is that we've looked at community building and we've looked at content so of course we want to build out our engagement now when it comes to LinkedIn and building engagement there are some types of content which I think you need to include in the mix that I haven't spoken about already and they are interactive content Styles what's an interactive content style very glad you asked me what they are is the kind of content that gets your community involved and it could be as simple as a poll ask them for their feedback ask them to answer
a question so polls is an easy way to get your audience to engage now one thing but probably the next level up from that is having your own LinkedIn audio rooms or your LinkedIn live streams these are going to drive engagements in real time having that engagement allows you to get realtime Market intelligence instant feedback and you build not only your audience engagement but the thought leadership as well all in one half an hour lot what's cool about LinkedIn audios and Linkedin lives is that not only are you building communities because it is an engaging
type of content because people can come up on stage in the audio events and add their thoughts because in a LinkedIn live they can type the comments and respond to shoutouts that you put out and questions that you ask also positioning yourself as a thought leader leading those conversations and building your community that way so don't forget about intera inter active content next thing we're going to have a look at kind of Builds on collaborations that we were talking about earlier and I think we're going to see the rise of brand Partnerships and think about
the rise of the LinkedIn influencer and I don't mean it in the cringy way I mean it in those Niche areas where there are people that have built a powerful following and a community just like we've been talking about here today that are seen and positioned as thought leaders in the industry I think we're going to see a lot more collaborations and I'm encouraging you to think how can we work with someone else in the industry that's already built up that perception around their personal brand and Linkedin themselves have thrown money towards this you can
see that they have things now where you can flag a post to say it's been a Brand partnership and there's a brand that's had a huge amount of success with this and it's Lyft l yft t so they're similar to Uber if you don't have it in your country and they have a company page that has about 300,000 followers and it's been cool that company page has been actively commenting out and around on the platform and supporting people that have had new roles and saying hey why don't you grab yourself a lift on your way
to work so it's less stressful on your first day but more importantly they've partnered our up on the platform with influencers on LinkedIn to share the message about their product and it's the first time that they've ever tried it normally it's a b Toc play that they would do on other platforms this has been so cool to see what they've done on LinkedIn but you know myself I kind of think about it I've built a significant following that I talk to B2B marketers to business owners I am somebody that's respected and thank you to all
of you podcast listeners that are a part of that but that's something as I head overseas on what I'm calling my world domination tour next year in March which is where I'm speaking uplift live and then social media marketing world in the same trip and I'm thinking about ideas right now around the brands that i' would love to partner with that will sponsor that trip or parts of it or parts of my presentation like who can I work with I kind of think well who are the Brands out there that are aligned to my values
and we're going to see a lot of this coming from both ways requests from influencers requests from Brands to partner and that's something I'm super excited about I also think when it comes to boosting your LinkedIn engagement and thought leadership as we plann that out for 2025 you have to start thinking how can we create content that's Authority building so coming back to that thought leadership piece and this is going to definitely come back to quality over quantity can't say it enough there's so much rubbish out there especially AIG generated rubbish go team it's time
to get some quality back how can you do that by generating your own insights and stats and really showing people that you know your industry by creating your own insights you become the authority and again we want to position your brand or you as an individual as a thought leader so be the person that generates these insights that other people look to so boosting your LinkedIn engagement and thought leadership there are a couple of ways that I think are going to be important in 2025 beyond the everyday activities that we all need to do I
can't be certain of many things in this world especially when it comes to LinkedIn but I am absolutely certain that if we don't take the time to plan out our strategies for 2025 we don't adapt and evolve to the changing platform and our competitors do they are going to leave you in their dust and you're going to get left behind and that costs your business opportunities and growth and I never want that for you listeners now is the time to formulate the strategies for building a community thinking about some of those content trends that I
spoke about and really thinking about how can you level up your engagement tactics there you have it listeners your LinkedIn B2B marketing guide for 2025 to help your business build a community and drive growth until next week cheers [Music]
