Your favorite how-to social media posting series is back, complete with shameless self-promotion! ICYMI, during the first installment we delved into sharing links on Facebook—a niche topic with a lot to discuss. On this edition, we’ll be sharing a broader spectrum of information: posting to LinkedIn.
The reason for the broad topic is because LinkedIn simply doesn’t have as much power as Facebook does. It’s limited by the fact that LinkedIn is one of the truly social media left. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and all your other favorites focus the majority of their efforts on how to bring in ad revenue—LinkedIn will straight up tell you it doesn’t care a whole lot about ad revenue right now. Sure, they’ve got contracts with many zeroes behind them for companies who are running “We’re hiring” ads, but brands are not scrambling to LinkedIn and LinkedIn doesn’t really want them there.
So what does this all mean for you as a personal brand or an employer brand? You’re limited. What does that mean for us, right here and now on this blog? We’re going to give you a Bob Ross level lesson in the art of posting to LinkedIn in one happy little blog post.
When you go to make a post on LinkedIn, you’re given three different options: Share an update, Upload a photo, or Write an article.
Sharing Updates
Most updates people share on LinkedIn are links to news articles, blog posts or their websites. Link sharing on LinkedIn is the biggest way that it relates to posting on Facebook. Essentially, you’re going to want to reset yourself on the do’s and don’t’s of sharing links on Facebook and apply those same rules to any links you share on LinkedIn. Namely:
1. Paste the link into the “Share an Update” box
2. A link preview will appear, and your post, pre-published, will look something like this
3. The boxwhere you’re seeing the hyperlink is editable—I recommend deleting the link (the link preview generated below the text box will stay) and putting a caption there
4. Say there was no picture—upload one!
5. Say the title (“5 Things Your Exclamation Point…”) or text beneath the title (“You know who you are…”) looked wrong. Those fields are auto-populated and sometimes pull incorrect information that leaves you with a funky looking title—change them! Just click in those areas and you’ll be able to type whatever you want.
One new link sharing feature that LinkedIn just released (I’m talking like a month ago), is supporting native video plays. This means, if you paste a link from a YouTube or Vimeo video, you can not only do all the editing like you would for any other kind of link preview preview, but once you share your update, users will be able to play your video, right in their LinkedIn feeds! This means easier access for your followers and more video views for you.
Sharing Photos
This is a pretty self-explanatory feature of LinkedIn. You choose the option and it opens a dialog box for you to select an image from your computer to upload. From there, you’ll simply write a caption and hit “Share.”
If this one is so simple, why even bother giving it its own section? Because I’m going to take this as an opportunity to hop up on my soap box.
Because this is the art of social media posting, let’s go into the theory of LinkedIn social posting. LinkedIn is, in its own words, a place where you, “Manage your professional identity. Build and engage with your professional network. Access knowledge, insights and opportunities.” I.e. LinkedIn is a place where your professional persona lives—where you share professional achievements, build your brand through sharing content related to your field, etc.
It is NOT where you go to share political memes—or any memes of that matter.
Anything you would virtually post to LinkedIn, you should feel comfortable sharing in real life with someone who is interviewing you for a position, or sitting across a conference table discussing business.
Rather than practical how-tos on sharing photos to LinkedIn, take my more theoretical how-to on posting photos on LinkedIn.
Writing Articles
The final option LinkedIn gives you is “Write an article.” Unlike the other two, clicking on this option will take you to a new page. This page will look like a very user-friendly web design tool. You have the option to upload a header picture, give the article a headline and then you’re given copious amounts of space to write pretty much whatever.
This type of post is perfect for long-form content, or any content you want to stand out in someone’s LinkedIn feed. Some common examples I’ve seen are job postings where the recruiter wants to share tons of details about the opening, portfolio displays, or thought leadership articles that are meant to go straight into your followers’ feeds.
These posts make a big impact in the feed and they look really cool too. As long as you’ve got the headline and the header image, you have completely free reign over what kind of content goes into the post—you can have text, images, links or video. The end result is a post that’s feature on your followers’ feeds and directly on your profile like so:
And the post itself has a clean, concise layout:
I wouldn’t recommend doing posts like this for everything you want to share, but if you’ve got heavy thoughts about a subject in your field of work, think about writing an article to showcase your ideas and prove that you’re a subject matter expert. This is a great way to get content with your name out there, without worrying about creating a whole website or blog for yourself.
LinkedIn may have its limits, but that doesn’t mean there’s not still ways to perfect your posting and make a splash. Stay tuned for the next edition of The Art of Social Media Posting!