LinkedIn is a social media network that connects professionals across various industries. Like Facebook, users are given a personal profile to highlight their professional accomplishments and experience. Unlike Facebook, however, LinkedIn also has additional features allowing for long form content that attracts attention to individuals or businesses. Content published on LinkedIn is initially shared with the publisher’s network. This content has the ability to spread much further with likes, comments, and sharing. Posts from famous business leaders, such as Bill Gates, Richard Branson, and others, can reach millions of people and help spread valuable information.
For everyday less famous people and their businesses, LinkedIn can be harnessed to display in a detailed way, a business’s expertise and specializations. This type of uniquely deep awareness, made possible through long-form content, helps companies create connections to other businesses, potentially creating new opportunities for sales, products, and much more.
4 Ways to Effectively Use LinkedIn Publishing to Improve Your Awareness
Tips for producing quality LinkedIn content are very similar to ones for producing basic quality website content, but frankly very different from producing content that will succeed on Facebook or Twitter. Because LinkedIn Publishing is intended to host long form content, quality and sourcing are incredibly important. Below is an overview of basic advice for making the most of your LinkedIn content but attempting a few articles on your own is the best way to learn.
Do Your Research
Before sitting down to write a LinkedIn article, read a few written by others first. It is important to cater to the community to see what engages them. The professional focus of LinkedIn means that content must concentrate on their professional areas of interest. Popular LinkedIn articles include:
- How Successful People Stay Calm
- Simple Tips for Becoming a Better Leader
- Toxic Behaviors That Ruin Working Relationships
- The Biggest Mistakes I See on Resumes
- Things I Learned from Warren Buffet
Note that in each of these instances, the content has at least a tangential connection to workplace success or business growth. So when drafting potential titles, make sure that your content does as well.
Write Long Form Content
All too often people make the assumption that web content should be short. Typical blog posts are usually somewhere between 350 and 800 words. However, some of the most popular posts on LinkedIn can exceed more than 2,000 words and might even include graphics or other visual information. The key to writing long form content is to concentrate on quality. Merely stretching your word count to reach a certain length can reduce the effectiveness of the content. To prevent this, empirical research can be incredibly important and add value and information to your LinkedIn posts.
Cite Your Sources
Depending on the specific nature of your content, citations may be required to provide evidence for any controversial statements or positions included in your writing. Research and citations also have the added benefit demonstrating the professional competency of the writer. Calling upon well known and regarded works within your industry demonstrates familiarity with industry standards and thinking, thus garnering greater credibility for your writing and indirectly, your business.
Publish Consistently
A single article on LinkedIn will not typically change the trajectory of your career or business. Rather, to have maximum impact, consistency is required. Multiple articles over a long period of time will be necessary to cultivate a significant LinkedIn following. Users are interested in multiple articles from writers they know and appreciate. A post or two a week can create a sizeable following that can lead to increased leads, added revenue, and more networking opportunities.
Catchy Titles Are a Must
Despite the fact that LinkedIn appeals to a more professional audience, and long-form content, by its nature tends to be more professional and dry, you must still “sell your article” via its title on LinkedIn. Enticing a reader to click on your article among their feed of dozens of choices is the first step to increasing your LinkedIn following. To do this successfully, pleasing or catchy article titles help greatly. Boring, overly technical titles fail to gain clicks compared to titles that pique interest. Use words like “how to” and “tips for” is an effective way to gain readers, but to really boost your readership hyperbole is the most successful strategy. Including “most”, “the best”, or “amazing” grabs attention and gets people reading your articles. Then, of course, the key is to engage the reader by having actually interesting well researched and cited long form content, that garners further interest in you, and your company.
Andrew Egan is a Houston-based writer and speaker who, on behalf of Soar Payments, covers issues relating to credit card processing, including obtaining a credit repair merchant account as well as obtaining credit card processing and succeeding in doing so in other high risk industries. You can read more about Soar Payments by visiting their company’s LinkedIn page.