How Becoming a LinkedIn Publisher Will Skyrocket your Business

Becoming a LinkedIn publisher is a great way to boost your brand awareness among relevant audiences. In fact, regularly connecting and interacting with contacts on LinkedIn using long-form posts sets you up as a recognized voice in your field and an authority in your trade. 

This can rapidly establish your presence as a professional, naturally generating leads exponentially and taking your business to new levels. So, how does it work? 

The good news is that it’s not at all difficult or complicated to become a LinkedIn publisher. Learn a handful of tricks and follow some basic practices for publishing appropriate content, and you’ll be there in no time. It’s really easy to get started; keep reading to find out how. 

LinkedIn Publishing

The LinkedIn platform offers users the opportunity to publish updates and posts that can be commented on and shared among the relevant user base. This system works similarly to other popular social media platforms and on LinkedIn, can be used to quickly generate leads and boost brand awareness. 

Long-form articles posted to your company page, when well designed, should create discussion, engage new and interested prospects and expand your reach. Given enough attention, your content could make it onto the LinkedIn newsletter Pulse, vastly increasing your viewer base. 

Publishing is easy with LinkedIn’s built-in tools, and the platform offers analytics for reach, engagement, and other metrics to help you measure and adjust the effectiveness of your content strategy. All you have to do to publish is open your Page Super or Content Admin view to get started. 

Using keywords and phrases in articles on LinkedIn Publisher allows your content to show up when users ask questions in LinkedIn’s search bar, so it will be accessible to people who have problems you’re able to solve. 

All of these factors make LinkedIn a great platform for reaching relevant audiences. So with this in mind, it’s useful to know exactly what kind of content is typically successful. To know this, there are a number of points to understand about the LinkedIn algorithm and how to make the best use of it. 

The LinkedIn Algorithm

A social media algorithm’s purpose is to create a good user experience. Its job is to take the millions of posts being made and present its users with the most engaging and relevant to their interests. This means it has to sort each item and rank it by various metrics. Knowing what some of these metrics are will allow you to tailor your content to optimize reach and engagement, therefore boosting your brand in the right direction.  

Your Contacts

The first thing to consider is that Linkedin prioritizes displaying your posts to people you are already connected with. While you can get started publishing at any time, keep in mind LinkedIn’s preference for profiles with more than five hundred contacts. 

Growing your LinkedIn network shouldn’t be a random practice; instead, reach out to people whose industry or interests are relevant to the content you want to create. LinkedIn values profiles with higher numbers of connections, so this alone will help you boost your posts. 

Tying your personal page to your company is one easy way to extend this reach; the company page serves as a trustworthy backing, and the personal page brings the individual engagement up. Furthermore, several representatives of the company can publish content on the page, each with their personal page tied in. This allows you to boost your relevant contacts quickly. 

Relevance

When designing your content, it must be relevant to your target audience. So, while it’s important to make contact with people interested in your content, it’s also important to design your posts to further draw those contacts into engaging with them. 

LinkedIn will recognize keywords, hashtags, and comments on your posts, using these metrics to rank your content by relevance, so make sure these are all of interest to the people you want to reach.

Timed Engagement

The engagement you’re looking for must be reasonably fast. LinkedIn appears to use a 10% formula: if 10% of your audience responds positively to your content, LinkedIn will push it to a wider audience. Timing is important here. Engagement is more heavily weighted during the first hour or two after posting, so this is the time to encourage connections to like and comment on a post. 

Vary the posting times to figure out when your users are paying attention. This might take some experimentation; post at various times throughout the day until you notice patterns of engagements. However, be aware that it may take a couple of months to gather enough data to answer that question. 

Content Categorization

LinkedIn has a content filter that categorizes content into three types: spam, low-quality and clear. To avoid falling into the first two categories, you have to appeal to a sample audience with whom LinkedIn will test your post. LinkedIn relies on the engagement of the sample audience to judge the quality of your post before presenting it to a wider group. 

Conversely, the spam filter uses disengagement, such as unfollowing or reporting to judge posts as spam, so avoid this at all costs! Stay away from posts that are too promotional or heavy on cliches, and make sure to get people engaged by leading with value and relevance. Avoid being too controversial.

Design

The algorithm rewards consistency, so developing a design that works early on will pay dividends. Pay attention to your LinkedIn metrics after posting and modify what doesn’t work. 

Pay attention to the style of successful posts. This will help you create content that LinkedIn respects and appreciates. This could involve looking at sentence structure and themes of high-ranking posts from other users. 

It can help to understand basic SEO principles when beginning with LinkedIn publishing: answer questions that people will search for, and aim to solve problems and educate your audience in your post. This will create content with high relevance scores.

Extra Tips

Headlines need to be interesting to create curiosity, and intros should include a hook to keep people reading. 

Posts and updates are both means to draw in an audience, and if you’re going to be doing both, updates should be the priority in terms of volume. Updates keep people’s attention and can create the foundation for your long-form posts. 

When designing a post, use eye-catching images that people will respond to. Some suggest that eight images are the optimal amount to have in a post. This might seem like a lot, but you can experiment and check the feedback you get from the analytics.

Putting it All Together

With the above pointers, you’ll soon be on your way to becoming a LinkedIn publisher and using the platform to boost your business. 

LinkedIn publishing allows you to share your expertise, build credibility, and form relationships. LinkedIn Analytics helps you create consistently high-quality and relevant content while gathering useful data on your audience. As such, publishing on LinkedIn expands your reach and helps you understand the needs of your customer base better.

Educate current prospects and attract new leads by focusing on engaging and relevant long-form content, backed up by regular updates to keep your presence fresh. Watch your business skyrocket as your network expands exponentially. It’s never been easier to become a LinkedIn publisher - so get writing!