Start with people, not your Page
LinkedIn is a network of individuals. A post from a company Page reaches its followers; a post from a person reaches their connections, and every reaction shows it to the reactor's connections too. For most events the people involved (you, your speakers, your partners, your colleagues) have far more reach between them than the Page does.
So plan the LinkedIn campaign as a set of posts by named people, each with a reason to post, and use the Page to back them up.
Should you create a LinkedIn Event?
A LinkedIn Event gives your event a page on LinkedIn where people can say they're attending, and that shows up to their connections. It's worth creating for most professional events. A few things to know from LinkedIn's own help pages:
- Set it up early. LinkedIn recommends creating events two to four weeks in advance, and notes you can't save an event as a draft and some details can't be changed after it's created.
- It posts once for you. Creating the event shares a one-time post to the feed from your profile or Page. After that, you have to post yourself.
- The cover image is 16:9. LinkedIn's help recommends a 16:9 image at least 480 pixels wide. It shows on the event page and in the feed.
- Pages can take registrations on LinkedIn. A Page's event can use a LinkedIn registration form so people sign up without leaving LinkedIn.
The catch: attendees on a LinkedIn Event are LinkedIn's list, not your registration. If your event actually runs on Zoom, Luma or your own page, people who click "Attend" haven't necessarily registered for it. Either point the event's link to your registration page, or connect the LinkedIn registration form so each sign-up becomes a real registration. Our guide to LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms for event registration shows how.
Invite connections, but choose them
LinkedIn lets organizers and attendees invite their first-degree connections to an event, up to 1,000 invitations a week. That's a lot. Sending all 1,000 to whoever's on your list is the quickest way to make the invitations feel like spam.
Invite the people who'd want to come: the job titles the session is for, people who've attended before, people who've commented on the topic. A hundred well-chosen invitations do more than a thousand random ones. And because attendees can invite their own connections, ask your speakers and the first registrants to invite theirs.
Get your speakers to post, with their own link
Speakers are your best channel on LinkedIn: their audience trusts them, and "I'm speaking at" is a post people like to write. Make it easy. Send each speaker an image with their face and name, two posts they can paste and edit, and a link of their own, so you can see what they brought. Ask for one post on a specific date. Our guide on getting speakers to promote your event covers how to ask.
A posting schedule for the weeks before
| When | Who posts | What |
|---|---|---|
| 3 to 4 weeks before | You, and the Page | The announcement: the promise, the speakers, the date, the link |
| 2 to 3 weeks before | Each speaker | "I'm speaking at", in their own words, with their own link |
| About 2 weeks before | You | A preview: one useful idea from the session, as a short post or a carousel |
| About 1 week before | A partner or colleague | Why they're going, or what their team will get from it |
| 2 days before | You | Last call: what registrants have asked, and the link |
| The day after | You and the speakers | A takeaway, with a link to the recording |
Every post should work on its own for someone who has never heard of the event. Lead with the idea, not the logistics: "Most onboarding fails in week two. Here's why." works better than "Join us on 14 March". Put the date and the link at the end.
Links in posts
Put the registration link in the post. People who are interested will click it. Use a short link that is the source, rather than a long URL with tags (why tags go missing), because a short link survives being copied into a message or a comment and still tells you where the person came from. Give each poster their own.
Going live on LinkedIn
If you want the session to stream on LinkedIn as well, you need LinkedIn Live. LinkedIn says there's no application: members and Pages with more than 150 followers or connections, at least 30 days old and in good standing, are eligible to be evaluated. You then stream from a tool that can send to LinkedIn, using the stream URL and key LinkedIn gives you.
Streaming to LinkedIn reaches people in the feed, but it doesn't register them. Keep your registration where it is and treat the stream as another way in.
Paid promotion, if you use it
LinkedIn also offers Event Ads for Pages. If you pay to promote, use a Lead Gen Form so people register without leaving LinkedIn, and pass each lead into your registration so they get the confirmation and reminders. Judge the spend by how many came, not how many clicked: easy sign-ups bring more registrants who don't show up.
Measure what LinkedIn brought
Give the LinkedIn Event, each speaker's post, your own posts and any ads their own link or way in. Then compare registrations and, more importantly, attendance by source. You'll find that some posts with modest reach fill the room and some viral ones don't. Our guide to tracking registration sources has a sheet you can copy.
Doing this in Programmable Talk
Your event stays on Zoom, Luma or wherever it runs. Make a way in for each LinkedIn post and each speaker: each gets its own link, short link and QR code, and share images sized for a LinkedIn post, a story or a banner. Speakers get a kit with their face, their link and posts to paste; if you've connected your own AI key, posts can be drafted for you. LinkedIn Lead Gen Form leads can register through Zapier or Make and count to a LinkedIn way in, and if the session runs in a room made in Talk on your own Daily or LiveKit account, you can stream it to LinkedIn Live with your own stream key. The Promote tab then shows registrations and attendance per post. See LinkedIn and Talk.