LinkedIn’s Best New Tool: Professional Publishing Platform
By now, we are all familiar with social media’s viral nature. Speaking on the topic of branding in particular, businesses showcase interesting and unique content across various platforms, hoping to gain widespread awareness for their companies; essentially, hoping to “go viral.” To break it down, think of social media as a game of darts: you need to hit the bullseye. For instance, the right share on a social media platform—Facebook, Twitter, etc.—allows you to connect with a large number of business prospects and strategic partners that perhaps you had never even considered.
Enter LinkedIn’s long-form blogging tool, an emerging and extremely viable option for businesses to grow their influence. However, as it is a “professional” networking tool, LinkedIn is often unfairly omitted from social media discussions. With over 300 million members, LinkedIn undoubtedly provides tremendous opportunity for building your personal brand; most notably, it allows you to establish yourself as a “thought leader” in your respective industry. The new blogging feature allows you to create content and publish posts, which automatically become a part of your professional LinkedIn profile, and in turn, automatically shares it with your connections. Additionally, people who are not yet members of your professional network can now “follow” you, allowing them to view all of your long-form posts, as well as receive alerts each time you share new content. To give you an idea of how powerful all of this can be, below is a synopsis of the engagement our company experienced with our first published post on the long-form platform, With Social Media, Fakes Are a Real Problem for Your Business.
As you can see from the numbers above, this post generated a great deal of engagement, providing us with additional opportunities to establish connections and establish us as subject matter experts. Afterwards, we noticed I now personally had over 2000 people “following” me on LinkedIn, which now provides us with a larger, built-in audience for future posts. Here is the best part: this article was something we originally wrote and posted on Entrepenuer.com as a contributor. When you factor in the sharing, engagement, and interaction numbers already experienced through their site, the total amount of people we were able to reach skyrocketed. Casting another net by leveraging the blogging capability of LinkedIn allowed us to expand our brand’s reach even further, and capture a large audience we may have otherwise missed. Since this post took off on LinkedIn, inquiries have increased regarding our services and capabilities. Is your phone ringing? Well, it could be. Log into LinkedIn now, and start blogging!
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