Recently, the signs have been pointing to LinkedIn to become a content site and formidable media contender, in addition to being the place professionals go to connect. This is good news for the smaller or lesser known business people in the community, because LinkedIn has just opened up something exciting toward that end: publishing.
Limited LinkedIn Publishing of the Past
Now to be fair, LinkedIn has had a publishing platform for quite some time. It’s just that it was extremely limited in who could use it. You had to be an influencer if you wanted a piece of that online real estate. Seeing as how influencers include names such as Martha Stewart and Barack Obama, and that the pool of influencers was capped at 500, the dreams of a small-town entrepreneur from Iowa ever getting in on that action were hopeful at best.
LinkedIn Publishing Now Open to the Masses
In an epiphany of sorts, it seems the crew of LinkedIn became cognizant of the fact that you don’t have to be a multi-millionaire, well-known celebrity or fearsome politician to have great ideas. Modest business people can be experts in their respective fields, too. Moreover, other people want to hear what these people have to say.
What this means for you is that you now have an incredible opportunity to get your content in front of the eyeballs of the people you want to see it most. It’s going to be a gradual process, starting with 25,000 users initially, but eventually, every single LinkedIn user will have access to the powerful publishing platform.
Let’s take, for example, a company like Maxwell Systems. They have a great website, a blog and solid content marketing strategies. Even so, there are still more people to reach. If they were to take advantage of the publishing platform; dishing out some great, helpful content, then they would have the potential of reaching 31,000+ new readers with every article published.
Things to Consider with LinkedIn Publishing
While all of this is exciting indeed, it’s important not to jump the gun and make too many radical changes to your content marketing strategy. No one knows yet just how successful this move from LinkedIn will be.
Furthermore, LinkedIn is its own entity capable of making changes to its Terms of Service and algorithms at any time; one big change to either could have a huge impact on your success should you decide to shift all of your eggs into the one LinkedIn basket.
If you’re currently publishing on a blog, you’ll want to continue publishing on that blog. Publishing on LinkedIn should either be in addition to those posts or syndicated across the board. Since it can be difficult enough to come up with enough fresh content to keep your blog interesting, there are some big questions to consider before vamping up a LinkedIn publishing strategy:
- What types of topics will we cover exclusively on our blog versus exclusively on LinkedIn?
- Will our LinkedIn articles be shorter or longer than our typical blog posts?
- How can we realistically expect to handle the additions to our editorial calendar?
- Should we syndicate our articles or would our audience see this move as lazy?
- What are our priorities with our content marketing strategy?
- Are we prepared to deal with the potential rapid expansion that so many additional viewers could bring?
Of course, there will be other questions to consider and answer as well, but this gives you a good place to start. The point is- LinkedIn publishing has all of the signs of being an incredible, valuable new tool in the realm of content marketing and social networking. At the same time, we should all proceed with caution.
Don’t abandon what’s working now in favor of what might work in the future, but don’t avoid trying something just because what you’re doing is working fine. Keep a smart balance, don’t be afraid to try something new; take advantage of bright, new opportunities; and ultimately go with the platforms and techniques that grow your business best.
Images: Sheila Scarborough | Nan Palmero