How to Create Engaging Sales Posts on LinkedIn

What is an engaging post?

Early LinkedIn days allowed you to post updates that simply made a statement about what you’re thinking or feeling. Today’s version, however, has a much more interactive intention. In other words, writing an engaging post is a vital part of connecting with others to be truly social.

Think about conversations you’ve had and what tends to stop them. For instance, making a statement instead of asking a question. If you ask more questions and are curious about people, they’ll be more likely to interact with you — whether in person or online. 

Another example would be taking a stand regarding a viewpoint in your industry. When you take bold positions that spark passionate people — both detractors and promoters — they will feel the need to reply with their opinions.

Like any company looking to grow their business on the LinkedIn channel, we also have a publishing strategy in place with LaGrowthMachine.

From experience, we recommend that you keep your posts to a minimum of 400 characters.

Statistics show that below this volume, your engagement is less important.

People like a good story, taking the time to tell it well requires a certain amount of words!

Posting on LinkedIn also has the benefit of being seen by those in more than your own personal network. On each post you put up, you’re able to also see how many people saw it, called ‘reach’. 

At the bottom of every post you create, you’re able to see how many actually viewed it. This is also a good metric to track because the more you post, the more people will see it (usually based on the algorithm and how many people interact with it). Your post is also shown to people in their network if they interact with it as seen below. 

Why should you create engaging sales posts?

With 740 million users on LinkedIn, it’s already a challenge to be seen by your target audience. Making that even more difficult, the average time spent on LinkedIn per month is only 17 minutes. 

With this short span of opportunity, you want to make as much impact on someone’s memory of you as you can. Asking provocative questions, making bold statements, or simply commiserating with your audience can help promote your status in their minds.

So, as long as your posts are relevant to them and your industry, you’ll be more likely to be contacted regarding your service.

Businesses also typically use interesting posts as part of their LinkedIn B2B marketing efforts to personalize their outreach and close more deals.

What’s a good engagement rate on LinkedIn posts?

Apologies to the people who hate math, but this is an important aspect of knowing if what you’re doing is working. It tells you how your audience reacts to videos, images, topics, and posts. 

Calculate your engagement rate by taking the total number of interactions your content receives divided by your total number of followers (+ contacts), multiplied by 100%. 

For example, if you have 300 followers (+ contacts) and posted 5 times in September and received 5 likes each and 1 comment each, the total number of interactions is 55. Divide 30 by 300 and your engagement rate is 10%.

If this is the case, you’d be a very engaging person because the average rate in 2021 is only .35%. That’s right, not even 1%. If you’re posting something that gets a lot of people to interact with you, keep doing what you’re doing.

Despite these low rates, LinkedIn is still 277% more effective at generating leads than Facebook and Twitter! It even offers you the possibility to generate leads directly from your company page with its lead generation forms! .

Best LinkedIn post examples

If you’d really like to dive deep into all of the various options to post on LinkedIn, you absolutely can. Keeping things simple for yourself, however, will be an important part of your strategy. You don’t want to burn out in a few weeks as these things take time. 

This is especially true if you’re still building your network. Remember that if you don’t have hundreds to thousands of connections, it will take time to get to these levels but posting fun quips, numbers, images, videos, etc will engage more people more often. One interactive post idea is to be creative in your own way. 

Reality with humor

Here, the poster creatively turned a hurt feeling into a comedically clever quip. The interesting way of being honest while poking fun at himself produced 1600 likes and over 120 comments in just a few hours. 

Incite a conversation

Here’s an interesting viewpoint that incites a conversation:

What’s great about this post is that the first lines intrigue you. So much so that there are 97 comments from people who may either agree or disagree, but it gets an important conversation started with their followers. 

Color by the numbers post

Surprising numbers for your industry (even if it’s from a poll you take yourself) will get people thinking — and talking — about what’s going on. Contribute your experience with numbers to your audience so they can see you know what you’re talking about. 

Displaying your expertise in this way will mean they come to you more for questions and needs. This post received over 300 likes and nearly 200 comments in a few days because he sparked conversation around a topic people can relate to.

Next, let’s talk ‘sales-y’ posts. 

Promotional post

While sales posts should be VERY few and far between (about 20% or 1 for every 5 of your posts max), they should still be done so people can know what you actually do. That way, when they need exactly what you do they’ll know who to contact.

In addition to this post above, she also tags ambassadors in the comments bringing even more eyes and shares:

The overall process itself does take time to get in the groove with engagement and posting, but the general rules are:

1. Regularity. The more frequently you interact and get interactions, the more visibility the algorithm will give you to your followers.

2. Engagement. To increase interactions, you need to have 3-5 of the strategies described here incorporated into your posting.

There are, of course, many ways to talk about what you do. I hope these examples help give you a few ideas on how to engage your audience with some intrigue, conversation, or simply telling people what you do.

Bonus Tip: Post any links in the comment section and you may receive nearly 3 times as much reach!

This bonus tip also happens to lead me to another intriguing type of post:

Comment for Content

This post is overall quite brilliant because it shows her face, is very inspirational in content and also promotes her topic-related book by posting the link in a comment. A relatively perfect strategy because it shows off the content they’ll find, attracts the people who will connect with it, and also incites quite a few conversations with the 170+ comments.

How to create engaging sales posts 

In sales, you’re trained to ask open-ended questions. The same applies to creating a post that people will want to build upon the conversation. This is where creating engaging sales posts will become second nature using these tips.

Here are your “do’s and don’ts” of creating and posting on LinkedIn.

Do’s:

1. Be consistent. In what you say, how you say it, and how often you say it. Commit to a specific amount of posts per week and stick to it. When just starting out, try 1-2 so you get into a rhythm. More may be tiresome for your audience as well.
2. Have a conversation or debate. Treat the posts as if you were having an in-person conversation. It’s more authentic and will engage people more easily. 
3. Follow up. Don’t let the conversation die suddenly – if there’s more to discuss, try messaging them directly instead of only using comments to build the relationship. One way to do this is by using LaGrowthMachine to email automated follow-ups and by turning on your LinkedIn notifications.

3. Use visuals. Post something relevant to your company and expertise using a PDF that converts automatically into a carousel of slides. It will boost your engagement and LinkedIn will show you its statistics. Using video is also very helpful and it doesn’t even need to be more than 60 seconds, but showing your face brings more realness.
4. Use 2-4 hashtags and tag people. You could, for example, create a post that discusses an answer to a question one of your clients has asked then tag them or just a relevant hashtag.
5. Tell a story. The trick is to keep things in short-ish form for social media. People scroll so quickly through that you want to make it interesting as well as the right length.  
6. Use polls. Sparingly. They’re over-used a bit lately so use them wisely and in an engaging way.

Don’ts:

1. Use engagement pods. These will be to your detriment as most of these people post very generic, non-engaging comments and do nothing for your actual sales.
2. Use irrelevant hashtags or tag people unrelated. Not only will you annoy people, but you’ll destroy your reputation.
3. Speak to everyone. Focus your attention on the clients you want (your target audience) and what concerns them. 
4. Share other people’s posts without adding value. The following example is of someone sharing a recognition they received without even saying so much as a thank you. It’s empty and awkward, don’t do this.

Bonus tip: Create a bunch of posts all at once and post them throughout the week.

To measure the effects of your strategy, you can rely on your Social Selling Index score, a score that helps you track your profile’s optimization for sales prospecting on the professional social network.

That said, keep in mind that this is not the only way to prospect on LinkedIn! At LaGrowthMachine, we advise you to combine inbound strategies such as regular posts with outreach strategies such as:

• Sending text messages
• Sending voice messages
• Adding to your LinkedIn network
• etc.

Guaranteed to get more engagement on LinkedIn

Now that you have the secrets to creating engaging sales posts, you can focus on how you’ll increase engagement consistently. And remember, even if you’re not getting the engagement rate you’d like, your consistency will not go unnoticed. People will remember you if you stay in front of them frequently.