If you're looking to improve your engagement levels on LinkedIn, then LinkedIn's quarterly content insights reports are a must-read, providing data on the key topics of discussion on the platform, as well as those which are seeing significant increases in mention volume among LinkedIn's 645 million members.
Of course, you're likely on LinkedIn to boost your brand and/or professional reputation within your specific niche, which does somewhat limit what you can share. Knowing that Blockchain is a key subject of interest is of little help if you work in agriculture - but even so, getting a grip on the broader trending issues can help to give you a better understanding of what LinkedIn members are most interested in. And if there's a relevant angle for your business, even better.
In this new report, LinkedIn does indeed highlight Blockchain as a rising topic of interest among users, as well as 'Marketing metrics', 'Julian Assange' and 'Burning Man'.
Several of these issues are already past relevance, with the news cycle moving on - it's not of huge value to know, for example, that LinkedIn members were interested in Julian Assange, specifically.
But then again, it is interesting to note the breadth of subjects being discussed on the platform, which may help inform your own content choices. You may not have suspected that LinkedIn members were talking about 'kinesiology', but they were, in among the faux 'thought leadership' and aspirational inspirational posts that can sometimes crowd the feed.
The listing here shows that LinkedIn's focus is now broadening, with more content types and topics in the stream. That could help you find more interesting, diverse subjects to focus on, without having to limit your scope to strictly professional updates. You do, of course, want to keep your posts focused, but it is interesting to consider the opportunities available, and what LinkedIn users are engaging with.
LinkedIn has also provided an updated, overall list of key topics of focus across the platform.
There are a lot fewer surprises here - this listing pretty much reflects what you'd expect to see trending across the professional social network, and the topic groups themselves are probably a little too broad to glean a heap of insight from.
LinkedIn actually acknowledges such, though it also says that there are some pointers which marketers can take:
"The “management” topic regularly holds down the top spot on this list. Management is hard; finding good managers is even harder. Professionals are constantly looking for advice on how to do both better, which could be a cue for your content marketing team. This list also reveals that the trend of personal branding hasn’t abated, with top topics such as “career advancement” and “personal development” indicating that self-improvement is top of mind for professionals. It’s also good news for marketers that Marketing and Advertising landed in the top 10."
So a couple of potential cues for your LinkedIn content efforts.
If you're looking for more LinkedIn content inspiration, the platform published an updated guide on what to post back in May, while you can also now use the 'What people are talking about now' listing to help identify key subjects generating discussion among the LinkedIn user base at any given time.
And given that LinkedIn's seeing higher engagement levels than ever, it's definitely worth considering its place in your overall digital marketing efforts, and potentially giving it more focus in 2020.
And if you do want to boost your LinkedIn process, the platform continues to provide more insights and tools, like these, to help.