Linked to Influence

by Stephanie Sammons

  Ultimately, the high-quality content will rise to the top as it does everywhere else online. There are far fewer content creators in the world than content consumers. The biggest hurdle for most professionals who publish is investing the time and energy to put their work out on a consistent basis.

  If you can commit to publishing more than one or two articles on LinkedIn, and you have something important to say that can truly be value-added to your network, go for it. This publishing platform is right for you.

  The Value of Building LinkedIn Followers

  I mentioned previously that one of the benefits to publishing on LinkedIn is that you can earn followers. Your current follower count is prominently displayed near the top of your LinkedIn profile next to the most recent three posts you’ve published.

  Your 1st-degree network is automatically following you (unless they manually unfollow you). Your additional followers are LinkedIn users you are not formally connected with but who have decided they want to see your LinkedIn posts in their news feeds.

  If you earn more followers, you will create more visibility and engagement for your LinkedIn posts. The best way to earn more followers is to publish to LinkedIn consistently and share your posts with your network.

  A quick tip: if a LinkedIn member sends you an invitation to connect and you would rather not accept, you can always send a message back with a link to your “posts” page on LinkedIn and suggest they follow you instead.

  How to Write for LinkedIn

  The world already has too much content. It’s overwhelming. There is more information than we know what to do with. Yet, people are really thirsting for inspiration and guidance from all of that information. They want to feel excited, validated, motivated, and/or convinced by the content they consume. They want to become smarter, more resourceful, and more productive. Most important, they want to connect with the person behind the content!

  Much of the content online these days misses the mark. Informative is good, but inspiring is great.

  Write your LinkedIn posts in the first person, as if you are speaking directly to the person one-to-one. This is a very effective tactic for personalizing your content and making a connection with your readers.

  Next, think about how you can integrate the three Ps into your articles. If you recall from prior chapters, the three Ps include your personality, your passion for what you do (or in this case, for the topic), and your unique perspective on the topic you are writing about.

  Remember, all of the posts you publish on LinkedIn are going to be attached to your personal LinkedIn profile. They reflect your personal thought leadership! What personal stories, experiences, and lessons can you weave into your LinkedIn posts?

  You may find it difficult to get all three Ps into every post you publish, but strive to include at least one of them. The more you can make that human connection with your readers, the more opportunity you have to build influence.

  Finding Your Content Voice

  What kind of person are you? For example, are you the practical voice of reason? Are you the person who takes the contrarian point of view? Do you like to be on the cutting edge as the first to share new knowledge or insights? Or do you sit back and assimilate what others are saying on the topic first before formulating your ideas? Are you a big-picture person? An idea person? A tactical person? Are you funny or sarcastic, or more on the serious side?

  Hopefully you get the idea. We each have our own voice and/or style of communicating. Finding your “content voice” is a process. It takes some thinking and awareness on your part to get clear on this, and it also takes practice. The more you can replicate how you would communicate in person through your content, the better your opportunity to make a meaningful connection with someone who consumes it.

  I recommend looking at the content of current LinkedIn Influencers or bloggers that you admire to see examples of content voice. Learn to get comfortable with integrating your voice into your content!

  Blend Authority and Authenticity to Build Your Influence

  Sallie Krawcheck is a financial industry executive turned entrepreneur. She is also a well-known, official LinkedIn Influencer. Her forced exit from her last corporate role as the head of a well-known wealth management firm is something that she has candidly written about in her LinkedIn posts.

  Krawcheck has also written about being a mother on LinkedIn. What she does very well is personalize her posts. She shares her perspective in every post and typically pairs it with a relevant personal experience.

  In one post, for example, she talks about attending her son’s graduation and realizing how much she had missed out on his growing up because of her corporate leadership positions. (You can check out Sallie Krawcheck’s LinkedIn posts here.)

  In order to build personal influence with your LinkedIn posts, you also need to be willing to open up and share your personal experiences. I’ve published posts like this on LinkedIn, and it’s not easy. However, when you let your authentic voice shine through, your readers will feel more connected with you. They will feel like they know you better, and they will begin to like you and trust you as well.

  Your Post Headlines Matter

  I am someone who never thought much about my headlines. I figured they were just fine. Now I think strategically about my headlines for every post. The bottom line is that headlines do matter significantly. It is your post headline that will be more prominently displayed on your profile and in the LinkedIn news feed.

  In a study conducted by LinkedIn and Percolate,6 28 percent of the top 250 LinkedIn posts contained the words “Who,” “What,” “When,” “Where,” “Why,” or “How” in their title. Twenty-seven percent of the top 250 posts contained the pronoun “You” or “Your.” List posts also performed well (such as “5 Ways to Improve Your LinkedIn Profile”).

  There are some great resources that can help you create better headlines. However, the easiest way to get started with improving your headlines is to review popular business blogs and comb through your favorite business magazines. Notice the headlines that make you want to read the actual articles!

  Only 20 percent of the people who read headlines actually continue on to read the full article. Make your headlines count.

  Publish Your Thought Leadership

  LinkedIn is by far the best social platform for positioning yourself as a thought leader in your industry or target market.

  Thought leadership is not difficult to earn, nor is it dead, as some believe. It is alive and well, especially online and on the LinkedIn Publishing Platform!

  Dorie Clark, author of Stand Out: How to Come Up with Your Breakthrough Idea and Build a Following Around It, explains that thought leadership is something you earn by sharing your thoughts and building a following around them.

  The LinkedIn Publishing Platform is an ideal place to position yourself as a thought leader. You already have a built-in audience with your LinkedIn network as well.

  Don’t ever attempt to market and sell your services through your LinkedIn posts. Remember, you want to market your message in a way that adds value to your ideal clients or customers. With LinkedIn, your entire network will not be made up of clients and customers, of course. But ultimately, you want your content on LinkedIn to strike a chord with your connections and followers.

  Writing insightful long-form posts on LinkedIn that appeal to the professionals in your network does require you to be deeply in tune with them. What are their needs and desires? What are their problems and struggles? What do they desperately need guidance with?

  People never forget when you point them in the right direction and give them valuable guidance. This is what thought leaders do. They aren’t afraid to take a stand and lead. Publishing your thought leadership on LinkedIn will enhance your credibility and grow your personal influence.

  Educate through Your LinkedIn Posts

  Teaching through your LinkedIn posts can be very effective.

  What can you teach through your L
inkedIn posts? What expertise can you share that can help LinkedIn members get smarter, improve, and overcome challenges? Can you weave in a personal story to illustrate your point?

  So many content creators are reluctant to give away what they know. They don’t want to share their secrets. Doing just the opposite is what works. First of all, don’t take for granted that others already have the knowledge that you have. They do not know what you know.

  Also, most people don’t have the time or energy to do the research and gather all the content available on a particular subject, much less organize it into a logical flow. When you organize knowledge in this way for your ideal clients, you create significant value for them.

  As a former high school teacher, I learned how to break down broad subjects into modules, and lessons for each module. You certainly don’t have to have teaching experience to teach. Start by making a simple outline for your subject matter. Go from broad to narrow and think about taking someone through an A-to-Z learning process for your topic.

  Not only can this help to create a logical flow for your LinkedIn posts, it will also give you a roadmap for what to publish next.

  Repurpose Existing Blog Posts (but Don’t Replace Your Blog)

  The LinkedIn Publishing Platform is actually a blogging platform that lives on LinkedIn. That means LinkedIn owns the content, not you. In order to own your content, you will want to publish it on your blog first and then repurpose your blog posts for LinkedIn.

  By doing this, the blog post you publish on your own site has a better chance of outranking the same post on LinkedIn in search engines. I do suggest waiting at least a week before you republish a post from your blog to LinkedIn.

  When you repurpose existing blog posts on LinkedIn, I recommend stating at the top of the post where the original post was published (include a link back to your website). You also might want to change up your headline and even some of the text within the post. For example, when I republish a blog post to LinkedIn, I use it as an opportunity to review and improve the post.

  You may find that there are topics you want to write about on LinkedIn that are not applicable to your blog. I’ve written a few original posts that exist only on LinkedIn because the topics didn’t necessarily fit with my core blog content.

  Another tactic you could experiment with for longer posts is to publish 50–60 percent of your post on LinkedIn and provide a link to read the remainder of the post on your blog where it exists in its entirety.

  One idea is to publish a “Part 1” blog post in its entirety on LinkedIn with a link to read “Part 2” on your blog.

  Most LinkedIn members are not going to want you to take them outside of LinkedIn to finish reading your article. I am more of a proponent for publishing a blog post in its entirety on LinkedIn rather than breaking it up in this way.

  Unless you already have significant traffic coming to your website, it is likely that your LinkedIn posts will get much more visibility and engagement than those on your blog. Utilize the LinkedIn Publishing Platform to grow your visibility, network, and influence.

  When you republish blog posts to LinkedIn that you’ve already worked hard on, you can leverage your time and get the most mileage out of that content.

  Important LinkedIn Post Formatting and Frequency Tips

  The content that works best on the LinkedIn Publishing Platform is long-form text articles that are insightful, educational, and helpful to your network. The top performing posts tend to be on the longer side, at fifteen hundred words or more. However, I’ve had 750 word posts do well. Post length is something I recommend testing, but stick with at least a five hundred-word minimum if possible.

  It is important to integrate at the very least a primary image for your post. Otherwise, it is difficult to gain visibility in the LinkedIn news feed when the post is shared. Your main post images and titles will also show up on your profile near the top in your “Posts” section. LinkedIn makes it super easy for you to upload a primary image to your post.

  You can place images throughout your post. This works well if you are explaining how to do something and you can use screenshots to better illustrate.

  Notice how I made use of multiple images in this LinkedIn post.

  You can also hyperlink the images within your posts. An example where I have seen this in action is when an author has written a book—they will insert an image of the book’s cover within their LinkedIn post and hyperlink it to the actual book page on Amazon.

  Keep in mind that you can embed SlideShare presentations and videos from YouTube and Vimeo into your LinkedIn posts!

  Break up your post paragraphs and text with subheadings to make them easier to read and scan. This type of formatting makes a big difference for the reader!

  At the bottom of your LinkedIn posts, or even throughout the post, you can insert calls to action that lead to a specific and relevant landing page on your website.

  For example, at the end of my posts, I offer a free guide and link to the landing page for this guide. For popular posts, these calls to action can lead to a significant number of leads.

  Tag your posts with relevant categories. You can choose up to three categories that are provided by LinkedIn to categorize each of your posts. Select categories that accurately describe your post. If possible, find relevant categories that also correspond to LinkedIn Pulse channels. When you choose LinkedIn Pulse channel categories, your post could be featured! (I will explain later in the chapter how to get featured by LinkedIn Pulse.)

  With regard to your LinkedIn publishing frequency, there is really no set standard. A monthly publishing frequency strikes a good balance between being consistently visible and valuable, yet not overbearing. You could also publish twice a month or even once a week. Most importantly, make sure that each post you publish is value-added to your network!

  Who Can See Your LinkedIn Posts

  The brilliant strategy that LinkedIn has employed with its publishing platform is to tie all posts that you publish to your personal profile.

  This means that anyone who views your LinkedIn profile will have access to your published posts.

  As you may recall, your three most recent posts are showcased prominently near the top of your LinkedIn profile. If you use a primary image in each of your posts, those images will appear along with your post titles. (Using an image in your posts will make them stand out more on your profile.)

  To see your additional posts, someone viewing your profile can click on the “See More” link in this section. They will be taken to a page where all of your posts are displayed as an aggregate collection. In fact, this is your personal LinkedIn Pulse page, which is also indexed by search engines.

  When you first publish a post on the LinkedIn platform, LinkedIn will immediately share it with all of your followers (which includes your 1st-degree connections). You can also manually share your post on LinkedIn and on other social networks like Twitter and Facebook. Additionally, your 1st-degree connections will receive a LinkedIn notification that you’ve published a new post.

  Your LinkedIn connections, followers, and even out-of-network members can engage with your posts by liking, sharing, or commenting on them. When someone engages with your post, it may be visible to his or her LinkedIn network. This is the LinkedIn network effect. Your thought-leadership content can reach beyond your 1st-degree network.

  For certain posts that you publish, it might make sense to send the post link directly to other handpicked LinkedIn members. For example, you could publish a post that talks about a particular influencer in your industry and let the person know you’ve written about them with an InMail message. This could open the door to a valuable new connection.

  If one of your posts does get featured on a specific LinkedIn Pulse channel, it can potentially be viewed by thousands of LinkedIn members who follow that channel. Your posts may also be featured in the LinkedIn Pulse e-mail newsletter that goes out to members who have subscribed.

  As you
can see, your LinkedIn posts have the ability to become visible in numerous places within and outside of LinkedIn. This is what makes publishing on LinkedIn so valuable for building a following around your thought-leadership content.

  How to Promote Your LinkedIn Posts

  I recommend promoting your published posts above and beyond what LinkedIn will do for you.

  Here are six ways to promote your LinkedIn posts:

  1) Share your posts as status updates more than once on LinkedIn. Remember, LinkedIn will share it once for you as soon as you hit “publish,” but many of your connections and followers may not see it.

  2) Share your LinkedIn posts to your other social networks, such as Twitter and Facebook.

  3) Share relevant LinkedIn posts in the context of a discussion within LinkedIn groups. If you want to share your content in LinkedIn groups, keeping members on LinkedIn is a better way to go rather than sending them out to your blog or website. If you own a group, you can share every post you publish with your members.