LinkedIn might not be the most popular social media site on the Web, but it is an important one for podiatrists, lawyers, and other professionals who rely on business-to-business partnerships, outside referrals, or a strong personal brand. If other businesses and professionals contribute to your success, promoting content on LinkedIn can be a great way to harness those relationships and drive more traffic back to your website.
After you have set up your LinkedIn profile, you basically have two options for promoting content: “sharing” a shorter update or “publishing” a long-form article.
Both options can be useful, but they each need to be handled a little differently to be effective. If you’ve been having trouble promoting your content on LinkedIn, or if you’re interested in getting started, here are some tips for getting the most out of your efforts.
5 Tips for Improving the Content Your Law Firm Share on LinkedIn
Shared posts are meant to be fairly short—no more than 600 words. These posts appear on your profile and in your connections’ newsfeeds. They tend to work best when they are concise, but they can point to more substantial information elsewhere.
Not sure how to get started? Here are five ways to improve the content you share on LinkedIn:
- Follow the rules. Titles, headlines, and body content should follow LinkedIn’s guidelines for formatting and character limits. You should also pay special attention to what you write about—and how you write it. Your content should be interesting, relevant, and readable. Be careful to follow the official guidelines for self-promotion, and avoid sounding spammy or only offering a sales pitch. LinkedIn likes to curate what it delivers to its users tightly, and that means that you have to start by delivering high-quality content that plays nicely with LinkedIn’s policies and sense of etiquette.
- Create unique content. When you’re sharing updates, it’s okay to link back to content on your site or feature your website’s blog posts, but try to add some changes and extras that make it unique for your LinkedIn audience. You should also occasionally create some short pieces that are meant solely for use on the site and are distinctively tailored to your readers there. You don’t even necessarily have to stick to industry topics; you can also share interesting stories and relevant anecdotes from your personal life.
- Build an audience. Once you have content, you need an audience. Keep posting status updates, but take advantage of sharing those updates to LinkedIn groups, too. Read each group’s rules for posting content, and make sure that you choose groups that are likely to be interested in the content you have to offer. Add buttons or links to your LinkedIn profile on your website. You might also consider inviting contacts from other social media sites to connect with you on LinkedIn.
- Post often. To keep your audience’s interest and engagement, you need to find the right balance for the frequency of your posts. A few times a week is sufficient, but more than once a day is probably too much. If you post too irregularly or infrequently, you run the risk of your audience forgetting who you are. Ultimately, you may need to experiment a little to figure out what works best for you and your audience.
- Use links, images, and videos. You can share more than text with your LinkedIn audience. You can provide links to interesting content on your site or around the Web. You can add photographs, images, and videos. You can choose to share an image directly and add text, or you can use images to enhance your text posts. These kinds of extras help bring your content to life and provide some variety on the page.
Publishing Long-Form Articles on LinkedIn
Another option is to promote more comprehensive content through LinkedIn’s publishing platform, sometimes called Pulse.
The benefit is that content approved for publication through the platform can reach a huge audience. The difficulty is that the articles should be much longer than shared posts—up to 40,000 words—and the rules are a little different. It’s also much more difficult to promote content through the publishing platform, and not everyone will make the cut with every article.
Aside from being longer, the articles you write for publication through LinkedIn’s platform should feature high-quality writing and offer something of real value to readers.
For example, this can be a good place to post in-depth articles from your blog or website library, although you may want to make some minor changes in older content to match LinkedIn’s guidelines.
You can also publish exclusive content, as long as it isn’t focused on a sales pitch. Avoid adding videos, but do include images that help clarify and break up text. The platform offers a fair amount of flexibility for layout and formatting, so use that capability to help guide your readers’ eyes across the page.
Lastly, you should know that paid promotion for LinkedIn content is expensive. It’s also usually unnecessary if you’re already producing and promoting high-quality content with the methods above. That being said, paid promotion might be the right fit for some businesses and campaigns in certain circumstances.
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