Since its founding LinkedIn has helped millions of people get great career opportunities, make connections with other professionals and customers, and gain the much needed visibility in their industries. In 2014, LinkedIn added the Pulse platform to enable its users gain even more visibility by publishing long form content. This content can be accessed not only by people the user has connections with but also by millions of other LinkedIn users. This means an audience of over 230 million people across the world. Since its launch, over a million such posts have been published via LinkedIn Pulse. You too can join this group of self publishers and promote your blog/social media business page or gain more visibility/exposure in your industry. Here are a few tips to get you started.
Understand the Platform
Used well, LinkedIn Pulse can transform your business, company and or career. However, you need to first get a handle on the platform and your audience to best reach your industry. As every platform is different, you’ll want to see what is already working on Pulse. What type of topics? How long are the articles? What is the structure? Do they include images? This will give you a foundational understanding of how your LinkedIn audience likes to receive their information on Pulse. From here you can decide how you’ll one up the competition.
Checking the top articles is fairly easy. Just sign in to LinkedIn, go to Interests and then Pulse. Once you are in Pulse you can look through the Top Posts. By going through these top posts you will get a rough idea of what is expected and what can be improved to make your content successful.
Create an Amazing Specific Title
Why go through the work of writing an amazing article only for it to never get read? LinkedIn audiences, like any other audiences, are attracted to content that will be useful to them. LinkedIn is the biggest social media website for businesses and business people are busy (as you probably are). So your content needs to call out and immediately communicate it’s worth the time to stop what I’m doing and read this article.
This will be done with your title. Your title needs to be clear and specific. At minimal it should communicate a specific benefit or problem. This is not only important for those searching via the LinkedIn website, but it’s important for LinkedIn emails as well.
Usually, when a post is made LinkedIn notifies your connections via email. Only the title is shown in these notifications. It is, therefore, important that the title be as specific and attractive as possible so that as many people as possible click to read.
Post at the Right Time
Unlike Facebook and other social media sites, LinkedIn users are mostly professionals. There are times of the week when you might not find many of them checking their emails. A good example is on Friday afternoon when most professionals wind up their work week and head out for the weekend (of course this is dependent on your industry).
When you publish your post at such a time you are unlikely to have many people read it. LinkedIn statistics show that posts published on Thursdays and weekends are the one that are read the most. This does not mean that you limit your publishing to these days. It is advisable to experiment publishing at different times and days of the week and find when you get most LinkedIn users read your work. Thereafter you will know the best time to be publishing your content for maximum readership.
Whether you want to promote your blog, increase your social media presence or establish yourself as the industry thought-leader, LinkedIn Pulse is great platform to help you achieve all of these goals. Hope the guide discussed above will be prove useful as you begin using this great platform.
If you have any questions about publishing on LinkedIn or any online marketing solutions please feel free to contact us.
