3 Lessons Learned During My First Week on LinkedIn Publisher

 

Earlier this year, LinkedIn opened its publishing platform to all of its members. This allows you to blog directly on LinkedIn.

You might have heard this news and thought, “Not another blogging platform!” However, LinkedIn Publisher offers a number of benefits:

• Your posts are automatically featured in your LinkedIn profile, which gives your connections more reasons to explore your profile and learn about you.
• LinkedIn automatically notifies your connections when you publish something new. Your posts appear in your connections’ newsfeeds and their notification drop-down menus.
• LinkedIn members who are not in your network can read your posts. They can also follow you from your posts to receive updates when you publish something new.

Since these benefits were so compelling, I decided to give LinkedIn Publisher a try. I took one of my existing blog posts called, “How to Tell a Consistent Story Across All of Your B2B Marketing Channels” and reposted it on LinkedIn.

Uploading a post to LinkedIn Publisher is easy. You just click the pencil icon in your status update bar, and LinkedIn takes you to a text editor.

You can type your post directly into the editor or copy and paste your text from another source. LinkedIn also lets you add images, videos and links to your posts.

You can either publish your post right away or save it as a draft. As far as I can tell, you can’t queue your post to publish at a later time. I uploaded my post, saved it and had to manually publish it at the correct time.

Here’s what I learned during my first week on LinkedIn Publisher:

1. Using LinkedIn Publisher is a great way to get your content in front of a wider audience.

I noticed an increase in engagement immediately after posting to LinkedIn Publisher. When I originally published the post to my blog, it got 11 LinkedIn shares. When I republished it to LinkedIn Publisher, it got 61+ shares.

The post also received six comments and brought me about 34 new LinkedIn followers. And best of all, two new leads said they found me through LinkedIn.

2. You shouldn’t copy and paste stuff from your blog.

To test LinkedIn Publisher, I reposted an article word for word from my blog. However, I won’t do this in the future. Google indexes all LinkedIn Publisher posts, which could raise issues with duplicate content.

I checked with Ian Cleary from RazorSocial on this issue. He recommends that you rewrite your blog posts enough so Google doesn’t think you’re publishing duplicate content. This means changing your title, sub-headers and images. You’ll also want to rephrase the majority of the text in the body of your posts.

Another option to improve your SEO is to write original content for LinkedIn Publisher. This is also a good option if your LinkedIn audience is different than your blog’s audience.

3. LinkedIn just made it harder to measure your results.

The first few days I was on Publisher, LinkedIn showed me the following stats:

• Number of views
• Number of LinkedIn “likes”
• Number of comments
• Number of Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn shares

However, a few days later, LinkedIn changed the Publisher page layout. It no longer shows individual Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn shares. See the before and after images below:

Before:

Before: LinkedIn Publisher shows social shares below the post’s title. This image is low quality, but it’s the only one I could get. 

After:

After: LinkedIn Publisher allows readers to click social sharing icons, but you can’t see how many times a post has been shared.

This makes it harder to measure the success of each post and determine how much your content resonates with your target audience. I hope LinkedIn adds the social sharing counters back soon.

Overall, LinkedIn Publisher is a great tool. I’d recommend it to B2B marketers who want to get their content in front of a wider audience.