The Future: What is going to be the next big Growth Hack for LinkedIn?
This article is the last in a three-part series on LinkedIn Growth Hacks. In the past blogs, I talked with you about the Best LinkedIn Growth Hacks that work right now, and the Worst Growth Hacks for LinkedIn that will actually work against you in time.
Today we’re going to talk about three things that could be the next big wave of growth on the LinkedIn platform. If you want to stay ahead, read on!
How do I predict the next amazing growth hack?
Well, obviously there isn’t a guaranteed tactic that’ll help you find a growth hack that will work. Actually, that’s what growth hacking is all about: a repetitive process to find new growth hacks to help your business.
For this blog, I’ve relied on experience (where I’ve noticed a pattern in growth hacks for social media platforms). One of those patterns is that platforms like these are often pushing their latest features, because they want users to adopt a new feature rapidly and they use that promotional power to entice influencers to use the feature.
On the other hand, that’s also how several of the ‘bad growth hacks’ from the previous blog in this series came up: LinkedIn will first do its best to boost a certain strategy until its fully adopted and after that, they don’t have a real incentive to boost that feature and its algorithmic power will weaken.
Some superficial LinkedIn marketers will then still promote it as a great growth hack and those tactics actually start to harm your efforts.
Anyway, let’s get started on the next best LinkedIn tactics for 2020 and beyond!
LinkedIn Events
LinkedIn Events is one of the top new features that LinkedIn has been working on. At this precise moment, they’re gradually rolling out this feature to all users.
LinkedIn hopes that this will be a replacement for all business events that are now being promoted on Facebook Events, Meetup and Eventbrite.
Why is this so interesting? This study shows that nearly 80% of all LinkedIn users feel like in-person events are beneficial to your career opportunities and success, and the rise of smaller meetups and networking events in the past few years confirms that this is a growing strategy among companies.
But how does this benefit me?
This new feature allows you to become the centre of your industry, you’ll get a lot more leverage of other thought leaders since you have all the power over the event and it’s a great way to attract new leads (a value-packed event is much more interesting than another whitepaper).
I think this opportunity is so big because LinkedIn has to compete with major competitors like Meetup and Facebook events.Therefore, I expect that LinkedIn will really start to push hard on this new feature and they will heavily promote your events if you’re one of the first events on LinkedIn Events.
Educational Content like Instagram
At this moment, Instagram is starting to see a big uprise in influencers who bring educational content to the native images.These are swipeable carousels where you try to bring value to your followers based on sharing knowledge.
It has really taken off in the design community (that is already getting sick of it since it’s used so much), but the power is immense: it’s easy to consume, high on value and easily shareable.
This Instagram post titled “How to sell with carousel” by @davetalas explains how he uses the AIDA format for swipeable carousels. This content is very valuable for a lot of people and this builds relationships with his followers. These kind of educational posts are very easy to consume and really help you to show your knowledge to your network.
I expect to see this tactic soon on LinkedIn since LinkedIn has recently rolled out the feature for these swipeable images.
(Hint: Upload it as a PDF! If you upload it as images to LinkedIn, it just becomes a weird bunch of single images under your post.)
Be quick if you want to be first with this!
LinkedIn Newsletters
About two months ago, I noticed a LinkedIn push notification that one of the official LinkedIn influencers had started his own newsletter on LinkedIn.
I was instantly triggered since I hadn’t seen this feature before and I could immediately see the value of this tactic:
- It’s a great alternative to email newsletters:Your email inbox is flooded, but on LinkedIn, it’s new and therefore much more interesting.
- It’s a shortcut to get around the algorithm:Your posts are fully depending on the LinkedIn algorithm boosting the post or not.
- It’s a perfect hook to really build relationships: You can tell longer stories to your network. Before you had to tell a full story within one post, because you never know if they would see the next post, but when they subscribe to your newsletter, they’re bound to see your next article.
Again, this tactic is being rolled out at the moment and yet only visible for top influencers who requested this format.
Also, this tactic might only have a short lifespan…😔
When more and more people start to send newsletters through LinkedIn, LinkedIn will start to filter your notifications to not overwhelm its users with all those newsletters. Therefore, it will have the same ending as an email marketing strategy…
Hopefully, you now see the value of LinkedIn newsletters and are able to jump on it when it goes live to you!
That’s it: The end of this blog series 😔
I hope you’ve learned a lot from these articles and that you’ve been inspired to turn around your LinkedIn marketing strategy.
For now, I wish you a very pleasant day and hopefully, we will meet again in the future! (Maybe at a LinkedIn Event, who knows!)
Feel free to send me a LinkedIn invite and it would make my day if you could share your opinion on this blog series within the invite. See you soon! www.linkedin.com/in/wardvangasteren/
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About the Author: Ward van Gasteren
Ward is one of the first Growth Hackers in Europe. He works as a Growth Hacking Coach, coaching startups, scale-ups and corporates on implementing growth hacking into their business. Showing them what is holding them back, changing their culture and training their employees on the latest skills. In his spare time, he loves to share his knowledge on his growth hacking blog to bring growth hacking to the masses.
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