If you are a regular LinkedIn user, you will no doubt be aware of the facility to publish long-form posts to your profiles, otherwise known as Publishing to LinkedIn.
Originally publishing to LinkedIn was the more high profile users, such as Richard Branson and Bill Gates who were granted access to this feature and after realising the impact it can have on all users, it was decided to branch out and give everyone the opportunity to take advantage.
“When a member publishes a post on LinkedIn, their original content becomes part of their professional profile, is shared with their trusted network and has the ability to reach the largest group of professionals ever assembled. Now members have the ability to follow other members that are not in their network and build their own group of followers.” LinkedIn Blog – Publishing to LinkedIn
Using the Publishing to Linkedin Feature
We recently posted about ‘Putting a Price on Your Work’ which looked at finding the right balance between profit and service and valuing yourself as a business, especially if you are new company looking for ways to market your product or service. This post got far more attention than our historic practice of sharing on our status or to groups; receiving 927 views, 50 likes and 10 comments and was featured in the Linkedin category Entrepreneurship & Small business.
On a business social network platform, such as LinkedIn, it seems only fair that everyone should have the opportunity to share and grow a business with their knowledge and influence. So are you? Can you?
Although there was an opportunity to apply for early access for publishing to LinkedIn, it has now closed so a user can only wait until they receive an email notification from LinkedIn admin to confirm the feature availability. If however, you miss this, it will soon become apparent on your Home screen, you will spot that you have publication capabilities with the addition of a pencil icon next to the paperclip in your usual status sharing box.
What about those people who don’t want to wait? Is it a case of just sitting tight until that little symbol appears and feeling the frustrations of knowing they can’t do anything about it, or should we be doing more to enable our voices to be heard?
“In the UK we are brought up to be modest, to not toot our own horn, not to brag… when you become a small business owner you need to blow your own trumpet, you need to (metaphorically) shout – look at what I can do! You need to have confidence in your products or services – if you don’t why would anyone else?” The Last Hurdle
Do we then, as a business, need to be more forthcoming with social media? After all it’s all about engaging; or do the owners of these social sites need to become more aware of the impact their decisions are having – both good and bad – in order to incorporate a more structured roll out in the future?
Once you have access to publishing to LinkedIn, you will be able to either write directly onto your ‘publish posts’ area and save and review it before publishing. You are then set to ‘Publish’ as often as you like to your audience, creating a fantastic opportunity to branch out on a wider scale. Enabling a user to publish articles to LinkedIn generates a high flow of traffic, engagement and interest so it is vital to take advantage of this as soon as it is enabled so you can continue to build on developing your business and reach out to the audience that is waiting for you. Before the inevitable spammers make this great feature another instance of white-noise!
What’s your view on Publishing to LinkedIn? Is it already bordering on spam? or are you, like us finding some article gems?