Not Just for Resumes: What Your Company Is Missing on LinkedIn

If your familiarity with LinkedIn is limited to your profile, contacts’ profiles, and your company page, you might be missing something big.

Perhaps you’ve seen the long-form posts by “Influencers” such as Bill Gates or Richard Branson.  Are you aware that LinkedIn now offers every member the opportunity to publish long-form posts?

This platform means that you can now create and publish your own content—blog posts, articles, white papers, even videos.

Perhaps you’re wondering why using LinkedIn as a publishing platform is such a great idea. Here are five reasons:

1. With more than 364 million members (more than the population of the United States), LinkedIn is the internet’s largest professional network. More than two new professionals join every second. That means millions of potential clients, partners and investors are on LinkedIn searching for opportunities and hungry for insight. Having your content there is a great way to satisfy that hunger.
2. Members of LinkedIn can subscribe to new content and updates based on their interests, which allows you to target the people who are looking for you, thereby putting your content in front of those who will most benefit from it. No more searching for an audience.
3. LinkedIn pages and posts rank high in Google’s search results. When you post to LinkedIn, you access a huge amount of web traffic and gain enormous visibility. Wherever you’ve published content up until now, it’s almost surely not as visible as it would be on LinkedIn.
4. Publishing on LinkedIn allows you to promote your company without sounding like an advertisement. According to Laura Montini, a reporter for Inc., “70% of individuals want to learn about products through content rather than through traditional advertising.” Of course, you can run ads on LinkedIn too (see #5), but your published content can be all the more compelling by not setting off people’s ad radar.
5. LinkedIn offers “sponsored updates” (formerly called “native ads”), which allow you to put your company’s advertising (and therefore, content) directly into members’ feeds. You can select the job title, LinkedIn group membership, professional connection, and other criteria of the individuals you want to target. LinkedIn’s advanced metrics allow you to track and optimize the performance of your ad campaigns. It’s a cost-effective way to get your message to the right people.

So now that you have a taste of what you’ve been missing on LinkedIn, how do you take advantage of its awesome features? You can start by looking further into whether blogging on LinkedIn would be good for your business. In my next posts, I’ll tell you how to publish on LinkedIn and how to integrate it with your marketing efforts. Stay tuned!