LinkedIn has become an ideal platform to strengthen your professional identity by sharing your insights and expertise.
When I first started using LinkedIn, it was primarily a place to post your resume and get a job or research prospective clients. It has now become much more.
“LinkedIn is opening up our publishing platform to our members, giving them a powerful new way to build their professional brand. When a member publishes a post on LinkedIn, their original content becomes part of their professional profile, is shared with their trusted network and has the ability to reach the largest group of professionals ever assembled. Now members have the ability to follow other members that are not in their network and build their own group of followers. Members can continue to share their expertise by posting photos, images, videos and their original presentations on SlideShare.” via LinkedIn’s Official Blog
LinkedIn, the third fastest growing social network, has become even more powerful as a publishing platform for all 277 million+ members.
Previously, you were only able to share your content in a status update with only a post title and link. Now you can create original articles and publish them in long form, directly to your LinkedIn account.
Something that many have missed is you also have LinkedIn’s permission to add previously published content. Just be sure to customize your existing content for your LinkedIn audience.
Rights and Responsibilities for Your Posts on LinkedIn’s Publishing Platform: You can republish something that you have published somewhere else as long as it is your original content that you own the rights to.
The formatting capabilities for publishing your posts are very similar to a basic blogging platform such as WordPress. You can use headers, bullets, numbered lists, bold, italics and hyperlink text as well.
Additionally, you’ll have the capability to embed:
- Images
- SlideShare Presentations
- PowerPoint and Keynote Presentations
- PDFs
- Infographics
- YouTube Videos
It’s simple to get started. When you sign in to LinkedIn you’ll see a little pencil icon on the right-hand side of your “Share” box. Click the pencil and you’ll go to a “compose” screen to create your new post or you can copy and paste content directly from your blog post. I’ve found that when I copy and paste it maintains the formatting. But you’ll still need to upload any images.
When you publish a post on LinkedIn:
- Your published articles become part of your profile.
- It’s shared with your followers.
- Members that aren’t in your network can choose to follow you from your posts and receive updates whenever you publish something new.
- Your posts will be searchable both on and off of LinkedIn.
One of the real advantages of using LinkedIn as a publishing platform is you can grow your target audience fast. It has notably increased my visibility in search and with both my connections and followers who can now see my published posts. A few of my posts were viewed enough times that they were picked up by LinkedIn’s newsreader, Pulse which significantly accelerated the views, comments and shares.
Here are some examples of my LinkedIn posts:
- The 8-Word Mission Statement for Ad Agency New Business
- A New Approach is NOW Needed for Ad Agency New Business
- Traditional corporate communication is beginning to give way to social communication
- Audience Development Comes Before Business Development
Promote your posts
Remember to consistently share what you’ve written across your social networks, not just LinkedIn. The more you share, the larger you will grow your audience.
photo credit: Lynn Friedman via photopin cc
