B2B Content Marketing on LinkedIn Just Got Harder: Now What?

Most B2B companies do some form of content marketing. And they’re using social media as an important tool to push that content to their target audience. For many B2B marketers, LinkedIn is an extremely important social media channel.

One of the principles of posting content on LinkedIn is that it needs to provide useful information and not be blatantly self promotional. However, the bar concerning what is considered useful information recently got a lot higher.

Blog Posts Going to Promotion Oblivion

For example, I’ve been posting blog links to LinkedIn for several years. I’ve always strived to provide useful content, including many how-to pieces. For a recent post, “What I learned about Social Media from Teenagers,” I went outside the box with the intention of drawing lessons that B2B marketers could use. In every group where I posted this piece to the Discussion section, LinkedIn moved it to the Promotion bin. Clicks plummeted by two thirds. Sending a post to the Promotions section is like exiling it to Siberia.

Naturally, I wanted to find out what was going on. I started with LinkedIn support, which told me that group owners and managers decide where content winds up. So I emailed the owners and managers of my groups. Some groups have very strict policies on what they consider a discussion. Others had no idea what happened. Still others admitted that they had glanced at my post and put it in the Promotions section. Most of these owners/managers agreed that my post was well written and provided valuable content and agreed to move it back to the discussion forum. One person even made my post a manager’s choice.

LinkedIn Groups New Discussion-Posts Algorithm

Next, I did some online research and found a post by Stephanie Sammons, who, as a LinkedIn group manager, also encountered this problem. Sammons discovered that LinkedIn is using a new algorithm that filters out posts by keywords that have any sort of promotional context, although she says LinkedIn wouldn’t provide specifics. Because this is now the default setting, posts are much more likely to be bumped to Promotions unless LinkedIn group managers pay attention to their settings.

How to Share Links to LinkedIn Groups

Sammons provides a number of technical suggestions for ways to address this problem, such as posting content manually to each group. I already do this, so that trick wasn’t the entire answer. As a content specialist, I was most interested in what the new rules meant for the type of content I should be posting and how I should introduce my posts.  Here are three suggestions:

1. Create content that’s helpful and not self promotional. This recommendation is not new. And while it remains necessary, it’s clearly not sufficient to keep content in the Discussion section.
2. Don’t just post a link, introduce it with a question that will engage group members in a discussion. This was one key issue with my failed post. Although I had included a brief introduction, I hadn’t introduced the post in a way that would provoke a meaningful discussion. 
3. Another suggestion from John McTigue at Kuno Creative is to make your blog post part of the commentary within an existing discussion rather than simply posting a link to your blog post to start a discussion. John suggests that you post the central theme of your blog post as a question or comment and include the link to your blog posts in the comments you make related to an existing discussion. 

I welcome your thoughts about ways to create a win-win for posters—who spend a lot of time and effort creating valuable content and want it to be seen by the widest possible audience —and group members who want to participate in meaningful discussions.