How LinkedIn could be your next great content marketing channel

If you’re like most people, you use LinkedIn as your ‘professional’ social networking tool: It’s where you connect with business colleagues, clients or influencers (and, for many of us, recruiters).

But a few months ago, LinkedIn introduced a ‘publishing’ feature, allowing users to publish articles (essentially blog posts) to their profiles. It was introduced to help LinkedIn retain and recoup some of the traffic they were losing to other social networking channels, but it’s turned out to be an unexpected boon for companies who were already engaged in content marketing.

Here’s how it can help build your consumer brand, improve your employment brand, and make your existing content deliver more value.

It delivers a unique audience
If you’re publicizing your current blog posts by posting a link to the corporate Twitter account or the company Facebook page, you’re probably reaching a limited audience: Even if you have a lot of Twitter followers, not all of them will see any given tweet, and many of them aren’t really engaged with your brand; your Facebook page may have more engaged readers, but most companies struggle to build volume in page ‘likes’, and new Facebook rules mean that page-based updates just don’t show up in users’ newsfeeds.

LinkedIn not only delivers a more engaged audience, because people who are personally connected to you tend to be more interested in what you have to say than people following your brand on Twitter or Facebook. And there is typically little overlap between the people who follow your company on other social media channels and the people to whom you are connected on LinkedIn. So at the very least you’re reaching an audience you might not otherwise have reached.

You can utilize several authors and ‘voices’ – and grow thought leadership
LinkedIn posts are attached to individuals, not to the overall company. At first glance, this can seem limiting – but in fact, attaching different posts to a variety of senior leaders throughout the company can be a great way to extend the reach of your content across a wider audience than might otherwise be possible. By utilizing different roles and voices, you can deliver a wider range of thought leadership than might be possible using a corporate blog or other content marketing channels.

At the same time, by having multiple employees post articles, you’re growing the impression that your company is filled with thought leaders – and that’s good for business.

Improve your employment brand by creating positive ‘buzz’
Everyone in your network gets an alert when you post a new article. By combining regular posts with a regularly updated LinkedIn ‘Company’ page and encouraging current employees to ‘like’ and discuss posts, it’s relatively easy to create the kind of buzz that makes people think that your organization must really be doing interesting and noteworthy things.
This perception can make it easier to attract, recruit and retain top talent – and over time, that can make a big difference to the bottom line.

It’s a great way to reuse content
It can be frustrating to spend time and money developing thoughtful, incisive content, from blog articles to whitepapers to industry analysis, only to find that it’s had only a handful of clickthroughs when you publicized it through the usual channels. But just wait a month or six – and then repost it to LinkedIn. You may find that a piece that received a lukewarm response when posted on your blog gets a much more enthusiastic reception on LinkedIn, where, as we mentioned, your audience is likely to be more engaged in your subject.

(LinkedIn says that content posted on its site should be ‘unpublished’, but they don’t double-check, and adding a new headline or graphic can be a good way to give new life to even an older post.)

What are you waiting for?
Posting an article on LinkedIn is easier than posting to most blogs – if you’ve got great content kicking around, start posting it!