Publishing on LinkedIn – How and Why
A few months ago LinkedIn rolled out its new article publishing feature to all users, allowing them to publish long-form articles and effectively use their LinkedIn profiles as blogging platforms.
Although this new direction was initially received with some scepticism and a little confusion, the value of the publishing on LinkedIn has quickly become clear since its inception, and the benefits to those that have started utilising the feature are numerous, significant and outlined below.
Making the most of LinkedIn has long been advisable, particularly from a B2B perspective, and this new feature only accentuates its place in terms of knowledge sharing and illustration of personal expertise.
How to Publish an Article on LinkedIn:
On your LinkedIn home page, where you would normally post a status update, you can now click on the small pencil icon to take you to the long-form article publishing feature.
From here you can either type or copy and paste entire articles, including links, images, embedded videos and font and paragraph styling. The result is a very individual publication that is streamed directly to your LinkedIn connections.
Publishing Tips:
- Make your articles easy to read – formatting is important. The most shared articles are also not too long – usually between 400-600 words
- Don’t rush to publish content. Go back to edit to make sure the quality is high. These articles are directly linked to your personal brand, so the incentive to make them all they can be is high
- Consider the purpose of your article, and identify who your audience is before you begin writing
- Write a compelling title, and use visuals and videos to illustrate your content if possible and format the written content to accentuate important words, phrases and links
- Don’t limit your content to LinkedIn – post links to it on other social networks to maximise traffic and reach
- Respond to comments on your articles for two reasons. 1. If someone has taken the time to read your content it is polite to respond to their thoughts, and 2. By engaging your commentators you can keep the conversation around your content going, drawing more attention to it and maximising the chance of getting it noticed
- Analyse your results. LinkedIn publishing has inbuilt stats that allow you to see the number of views your article had. Use this to gradually gauge the tastes and requirements of your audience, then adapt your future content to suit
- Develop a publishing plan. You don’t have to post frequently, but you should aim to post consistently – in terms of style, content, voice etc, but also in terms of timing. As your audience grows, they will come to expect a certain standard, frequency and style to your posts. Start as you mean to go on, don’t over-promise on volume, and put the same amount of effort into each of your posts
4 Key Benefits of Publishing to LinkedIn:
- Published articles become a part of your LinkedIn profile, increasing credibility and trust, and positioning you as a thought-leader
- Published articles have the potential to reach the largest network of professionals ever created, and distribution is largely done for you
- LinkedIn can act as a natural blogging platform, meaning you can create and distribute your content without any technical know-how
- Published posts allow others who are not in your network to find and follow you. This means you don’t have to know and connect to others in order for them to see your content – a good way to attract new, relevant connections
