Welcome to the After Show!
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This week’s episode of the Courageous Entrepreneur show featured an interview with LinkedIn marketing expert Tracy Enos. Tracy is the author of the excellent book, LinkedIn Publishing to Profits.
You can watch, listen, and / or download the original episode here.
Why Share Content on LinkedIn?
Tracy shared some of the benefits specifically of writing long-form articles, but let me just repeat them and add to them here.
Some of the benefits of posting include:
- Positioning yourself as an informed professional
- Communicating your interests and skills
- Building your overall brand and reputation as an expert
While editing Tracy’s episode I started to realize one thing that might hold you back from leveraging LinkedIn could be writer’s block. Or “Creator’s Block” as I’ve started referring to it.
What Do You Share and Write About?
Sure, sharing content is a great way to position and pre-sell yourself as a trusted advisor to your audience. It’s a great way to build your brand with your potential clients as well as in your industry. And if you’re an introverted coach, consultant, or expert I know you want to leverage as many opportunities as you can to truly attract clients.
But what the heck do you write about and what type of media works?
Tracy mentioned there are two places you can post on LinkedIn.
One is in your news feed. This is the area you see with posts from your contacts and as of the minute I’m typing this the news feed is in the center of the page when you log in.
In LinkedIn lingo, these are considered Posts.
The other place is in its Publisher platform and those are technically referred to as Articles.
Where Do You Share Short Form Posts Versus Long Form Articles?
This image below shows you where to post your short form posts and where to click through to post your long form articles in LinkedIn’s publishing platform.
What Types of Posts to Share in Your News Feed
The news feed is the place to share :
- short tips
- links to resource and articles you find
- links to your own articles and content outside of the LinkedIn platform
- questions to ask or points you want to make to encourage discussion
- situations you want to share for discussion
People tend to scan and scroll through their feeds on any platform including LinkedIn. So you want to make sure the content you share there is what others in your network will find valuable.
You only have space for about 25 words to write in that post box before it gets truncated; so be sure you get to the point and if your post includes a link, your copy better be compelling or no one will click on it.
If you’ve been letting your LinkedIn account languish, you definitely want to revisit it and start interacting and sharing there.
Keep in mind the atmosphere is different on LinkedIn than it is on any other platform. Don’t go in there and start posting the sort of stuff you’d post on Facebook or Instagram. LinkedIn is all about professional stuff so no matter what your industry, stick to business-related content.
Focus on making 80% or so of your short posts high value content from others –– articles and content outside of the LinkedIn platform as well as shares of useful content from your contacts. That leaves 20% of your short posts for your own updates and shares of your own content outside of LinkedIn.
For example, you can share your podcast episodes, blog posts, SlideShare presentations, short videos, or other content with some copy and a link. It helps to include an appropriate image to grab people’s attention as they scroll through their feed.
If you’re not going to take your own pictures or create your own images then consider using a royalty-free image site like Pixabay (my favorite) and Canva. But take the time to create your own images when you can. I used Tech Smith’s Snagit to create the image above.
What to Write About in Long-Form Articles
Sharing useful content is a great way to demonstrate your expertise.
Let’s face it, we’re being judged. Everything we do sends a message to those around us. This is why it’s so important to take control of your brand — your reputation — and demonstrate your knowledge, skills, and abilities (what back in HR we referred to as KSAs).
Long form content on LinkedIn — the articles you publish through their Publisher platform — help you do that.
Here are 7 suggestions about what to publish:
Republish existing content. You’re likely already creating great content for your blog whether it’s on a tool like Medium or on your own website. You may want to massage it a little and then repurpose it for LinkedIn.
Go to the vault. If you’re like me, you’ve been creating content in various forms for a long time. You could look at past blog posts or newsletter articles and polish them up. You can update them, re-edit them, and generally give them a going over, then publish them in Publisher.
Repurpose other media. I’ve got lots of videos I’ve done along with my podcasts. I’m going to go back to that media and create articles out of them. They’re not going to be word-for-word transcripts though.
Then there are the subjects that got mentioned in another piece of content and you could pull out one of those to write a longer piece on. That’s really what I’m doing here. I took my podcast episode, identified what was missing that would be good companion information, did a live video to share those thoughts, and now I’m cleaning those ideas up and turning them into an article.
FAQs. You get asked questions all the time. If you run a coaching group like I do, what are the questions and problems that come up? Chances are good you’re sharing great information you could repackage into an article and share on LinkedIn and other places.
SAQs. I first learned about this concept from my mentor Mike Koenigs.
I’ll bet the questions people ask you aren’t really the important things they SHOULD be asking you.
I get asked technical questions about podcasting all the time. From what microphone to buy to what hosting platform to use, you name it. But those tech issues are the least of your worries because tech is always changing.
What people SHOULD be asking me is how to decide what your show will be about? How do you get listeners and how do you turn listeners to subscribers and ultimately to clients?
Those are examples of what Mike calls “Should Ask Questions” or SAQs.
Case Studies. These are great to share when they’re well written (and you have the permission of your clients). They can illustrate the successful application of your process while celebrating your client’s success. Make sure you’re sharing valuable lessons and talking about how others can apply the same concepts.
Opinions on Trends or Developments. The foundation of your content creation strategy should focus on evergreen content — meaning stuff that’s useful no matter what time of year or when your content consumer discovers it. But, when new developments happen writing your thoughts about implications or things to look out for, or some other take on the topic helps position you as someone who is up on things and who has an opinion. Having an opinion and voicing it is one of the most basic elements of positioning yourself as a leader to your audience and in your industry.
I hope this got you thinking about all the things you can share on LinkedIn and also on your own website or other content delivery platform.
Content Creator’s block should never be a problem for you after this.
What new ideas did you get from reading this? What types of content have you shared on LinkedIn that you’ve found worked for your goals?
Did you find this useful? Please share it if you did.
