17 LinkedIn content ideas that you can post

If reaching professionals is a goal of your digital marketing efforts, offering diverse content on LinkedIn is a crucial tactic to explore.

LinkedIn now has more than 1.3 billion members worldwide, calling itself "the world's largest professional network."

But the type of content that a LinkedIn audience of professionals would best engage with is not necessarily the same as what's popular on other social media platforms. The most popular content types on LinkedIn are:

• Long-form content (such as native articles and blog posts)
• Third-party content
• Native video
• Text only
• Photos and illustrations

But these are just content types. If you're hitting a wall while brainstorming content ideas for LinkedIn, you're in the right place. The following are 17 LinkedIn content ideas (categorized by content type) to help you mix up your content and connect with your target audience.

Long-form content ideas for LinkedIn

One of the best ways you can hit your goals with your content on LinkedIn is to offer value. Creating native articles on LinkedIn itself and/or sharing blog posts is a great opportunity to dive deeper into topics that relate to your industry, showcase your expertise and matter to your audience. Here are four ideas that you can run with:

1. Detailed whitepapers
2. How-to guides
3. Research reports
4. Case studies

The goal isn't the length of the content. Make sure that every word engages your audience, and consider repackaging your best-performing long-form pieces into a document carousel as well, since that format is currently earning some of the strongest engagement on the platform.

Third-party content ideas for LinkedIn

LinkedIn is an excellent platform to share relevant content from other sources. In other words, you don't have to create everything yourself. With curated content, the sky is the limit. Just make sure you're pulling from trustworthy sources. Here are three ideas for you to seek out and share:

1. Adjacent-industry content, where the topic isn't directly related to your industry but is still relevant. For example, you could be in the retail industry, but news articles about supply chains and shipping logistics still make sense and matter to your audience in the realm of retail.
2. Expert opinions, where you're sharing the thoughts and opinions of experts in your industry.
3. Tips, tricks and life hacks, where you're helping your audience with everyday problems that they encounter.

Check out our four tips for finding what to share on social media, as well as 12 tools that can help.

Native video content ideas for LinkedIn

Video content must be part of your digital marketing strategy, not just on LinkedIn but in general. LinkedIn video views grew about 36 percent year-over-year, and video content creation is growing roughly twice as fast as other formats on the platform. Fortunately, LinkedIn now has the ability for you to upload videos natively into the platform. Here are four video content ideas that you can play with:

1. Short clips from webinars to show your expertise first-hand.
2. Spotlight your team. The more you can share their professional journeys and expertise, the more your audience can relate to your brand and the people behind your brand.
3. Spotlight your customers in testimonials where they share their experience with your product and/or company.
4. Behind-the-scenes videos that showcase your company culture.

Just make sure to include subtitles on your videos whenever relevant since a majority of users watch videos on mute, and videos with subtitles see about 29 percent higher engagement and 32 percent longer watch time than those without. Vertical, mobile-first video is also increasingly outperforming traditional square-format video on the platform.

Text-only content ideas for LinkedIn

Just because long-form content gives you the opportunity to dive deeper into topics that can provide value to your followers doesn't mean that you should ignore the opportunity of short text-only posts. Here are three ideas to help you be as engaging as possible without the "icing" of other types of content:

1. Tips and how-to's are great for this content type if you can keep them short and sweet.
2. Quick company updates
3. Product and other announcements

The key is to be as short and impactful as possible. Every word counts.

Photo and illustration content ideas for LinkedIn

Getting visual on LinkedIn is just as important as visuals on any other social media platform. A photo (or graphic illustration) is worth a thousand words. And possibly even more than that because it can help catch the eye of your target audience as they're scrolling. Here are three ideas that you can try:

1. Data illustrations because everyone loves data, but everyone loves a visual representation of data (so that they can understand it) even more.
2. Celebrate achievements, such as industry awards, company growth, anniversaries and more. A simple graphic illustration of these milestones can be very eye-catching.
3. User-generated content, where you can leverage the photos shared by customers and employees (with proper credit, of course).

You don't have to be a graphic designer to create compelling illustrations. Check out these 11 free graphic design tools for the non-designer.

Conclusion

Don't overthink your LinkedIn content. Keep your target audience in mind and keep experimenting. Engage wherever it makes sense on the platform. And remember, you can always repurpose your evergreen content so that it's new again in the eyes of your followers, including turning it into the document-style carousels that are currently performing so well.

Check out our six tips to be more effective on LinkedIn, as well as six mistakes businesses make on LinkedIn that you want to avoid.

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