Native posts are those that are posted directly on LinkedIn as opposed to a content calendar where you schedule posts ahead of time. Which is better for you or your business?

Linkedin is one of the best and most effective ways to connect for B2B marketing. Regular and consistent posting is one of the biggest keys to success on the platform. This goal is difficult to achieve without planning, so you should use a content calendar. 

What LinkedIn Says

You don’t have to take it from us; LinkedIn rewards native posts by giving you more impressions ( directly (a.k.a. native) on their platform. You’ll see higher engagement if you post directly.

BUT, there’s a caveat!

Native posts take more time, and you’ll be locked into posting daily, including holidays and your days off. You’ll also lose more time scrolling through the platform. 

Are Native Posts Sustainable?

It’s not reasonable to expect that you will write and set up native posts daily. You will need a content scheduler to set up some of your posts, especially if you work with a team.

Even LinkedIn recognizes the situation. LinkedIn recommends you use a content calendar to post on their site. They say that content calendars help you spread out your content, engage with your audience better, and help organize your team. Content calendars can also help you keep variety in the content you post, ensuring that your audience doesn’t get sick of seeing the same things repeatedly. Content calendars also come in handy when you have multiple platforms to post on. 

Can I Create a Content Calendar on LinkedIn?

No. There is no integrated calendar or “schedule send” option where you can plan your posts on LinkedIn. The only way to do this is through a third-party website or app.  

What Content Calendar Should I Use?

There are so many options of content calendars that you can pick from. Searching through your options can be very overwhelming. At Abask, we use CoSchedule to plan our social media campaigns. Here’s why we love it:

• So organized and user-friendly. When you have to organize your content, it can quickly become overwhelming. There are features in CoSchedule that allow you to color-coordinate your posts, making it so much easier on the eyes. 
• Very customizable calendars. If you use CoSchedule to organize all your social media, you can easily filter out to just one platform to focus on. 
• Social Campaigns. We love the social campaign feature of CoSchedule because it allows us to promote specific marketing campaigns. We use it primarily to promote blogs, we can add the link, and we have a template telling us all the places we need to post it. In the social campaigns feature, we make the posts for all the platforms we run, and it automatically adds them to the calendar to post. Using social campaigns, we can also provide our clients with a report based on that campaign alone. 
• Templates. Speaking of templates, that is another great feature of CoSchedule. When running a bunch of platforms at once, templates are vital to keeping up with the recommendations for posting schedules. 
• Good for a team. When you work with others on social media, organization is critical. You need to know when others are posting or if a native post will be set up on a particular day. 
• Requeue. CoSchedule will automate your social media by allowing you to repost any content whenever you have a blank space in your calendar. Why is this good? Well, it takes about 10 minutes to craft every single post, but it will only be seen by your audience if they happen to be online when you send it and they don’t scroll right by it. Using requeue gives you a better chance of being seen and a better ROI on each post. 

The Conclusion: Native Posts or Content Scheduler? 

Both! Depending on our client, we post at specific times directly on the LinkedIn platform. We track which times are busiest for our clients (using CoSchedule!) so that we know when native posts will get the maximum engagement. Immediately after posting, we go through and comment on other posts to encourage people to visit our page, and we make sure we share with our clients’ employees. 

If you have any questions about LinkedIn, please send them to us! Fill out this form: LinkedIn Questions, and we’ll get your answer written up asap. Want to learn more about CoSchedule? Visit their site now: https://coschedule.com/r/o61793