Need some incentive to try out LinkedIn’s new publishing platform?
If you publish on LinkedIn, you may gain visibility with a new audience. I wrote about the reasons to try writing on LinkedIn’s platform already, but today, I’ll share my experience, and I hope you’ll let me know how the platform works out for you, too.
I published my first post on March 4th. I did it on a whim, and I believe it went live around midnight ET. I immediately started seeing page views, likes and comments on the post — mostly from European contacts! Keeping in mind the 6- or 7-hour time difference, it made sense that a lot of those people were checking their LinkedIn feeds early in the morning. I would never have calculated that result, but it certainly got my post off to a good start.
Another important point — I added a fun, colorful image — the same one I’m using in this blog. This may have had something to do with its success. I found the image on MorgueFile.com.
My title (in keeping with Employee Appreciation Day that week): Do you deserve to be appreciated at work?
Whether it was the topic that resonated with people, or the timing was exceptionally good, the post did get picked up in the careers news section, and I saw 75+ new subscribers to my newsletter in less than 24 hours! (I included a link to my list embedded in the post.)
You can see how many Tweets (64), Facebook Likes (140), G+ shares (19) and LinkedIn shares (1618) the post has had since publication. 14,116 views, 576 likes and 96 comments — not bad for a first try!
I wanted to see if lightning would strike twice, so I published again two days later. This post: How to improve your mood, did achieve 855 views, but it was not picked up on LinkedIn’s content network, Pulse, and the shares, comments and other stats are much less impressive than my first post. I published this post in the evening hours, which was a mistake, as many of my new LinkedIn “followers” were likely sleeping at that time! Was it the content, the timing, the photo, a combination? Probably a bit of each.
Considerations
It is really fun to watch the post’s stats update before your eyes. Not that I was obsessed or anything, but it seemed like every time I clicked back to my first post, it had another few hundred views and comments kept coming! I made a point to respond to most of the comments and to add my own “likes” and mentions in the comment stream. My profile views skyrocketed during the first day after the post was published, although I did not see a lot of new requests to connect, which was surprising. If I wanted to be strategic about increasing contacts, I could have asked each person who commented to connect.
Duplicate Content
A big topic of conversation is the issue of duplicating content online. If you already have a successful blog up and running, you may have heard Google does not like duplicate content. Some people even say Google will penalize you for duplicate content. This may be true, so consider it if you do plan to duplicate your content on LinkedIn. The platform does allow you to duplicate your content, so it’s up to you if you want to share it on LinkedIn. If nothing else, be sure to give the post on LinkedIn a different title from your original post.
I have noticed that some very prominent bloggers who know a lot about social media marketing ARE directly duplicating their content from their blogs to LinkedIn. Take this all under advisement, and keep an eye on Google’s recommendations.
I can tell you that my LinkedIn post ranks on Google for the topic, and the image I used even comes up in a visual search for the topic.
What’s Next?
I publish three times a week already — for U.S. News & World Report and AOLJobs, so I haven’t written for  LinkedIn’s network since that second post didn’t take off as much as I had hoped. I’ll probably spend some time researching other successful posts and consider headlines that are timely and topical before I do. The great thing is that you can easily see stats for every post on LinkedIn; it’s easy to see what resonates with the audience.
I’m sure I will publish on LinkedIn again, and I hope you do, too. Let me know how it goes!
Don’t miss my first post about LinkedIn’s publishing platform: Reasons to try writing on LinkedIn’s platform.