A Beginner’s Guide to Publishing on LinkedIn

By cstec@hubspot.com (Carly Stec)

Try as I may, I’ll never be able to recreate my mother’s tomato sauce recipe.

It’s a science; a tried-and-tested formula that took her years to master. (Time well spent, if you ask me.)

But the great thing about formulas is that they provide us with a starting point — a list of the elements we need to produce an intended outcome. From there, it’s up to us to put them together.

Over the past year, you’ve probably noticed something a little different about your LinkedIn notifications. LinkedIn announced in February 2014 that they’d be opening up their publishing platform to the public. For marketers, this instantly transformed the professional network into a more interesting destination to explore.

What does my mom’s tomato sauce have to do with this?

Well, while many have seen immense success with the new platform, others have remained on the sidelines, unsure how to break onto the map. Maybe they were hesitant about the return they’d see from expanding their distribution. Or, maybe they lacked a clear formula for how to approach this unfamiliar territory.

Unwilling to leave good marketers behind, we’ve put together a roundup of everything you need to know before you hit publish on LinkedIn. From topics, to structure, to timing, this formula will have you up to speed in no time.

1) Explore the platform first.

Before you dive into a post, it’s important to note that LinkedIn’s publishing platform is a little different than your company blog. The audience, the tone, and the overall «lay of the land» are unique to those of LinkedIn.

What does the «lay of the land» look like, then? In a SlideShare announcing the publishing platform, LinkedIn described themselves as «the working world in one place.» They wrote, «LinkedIn has millions of executives, entrepreneurs, entry-level, workers, and people about to retire.» While this is a without a doubt a valuable audience to tap into, you’ll want to be sure that you’re using their platform in combination with your actual business blog where your niche audience lives.

To get a feel for how people are already using the publishing platform, start by reading through a handful of successful posts. Here’s how to locate the best LinkedIn posts on a day-to-day basis:

1. Select «Pulse» from the Interests tab in the main navigation.
2. Select «Top Posts» to surface the top-performing posts that day.
3. Dig in.

Once you start feeling comfortable about how people are using the platform, it’s time to learn about the best practices for actually writing pieces to publish. Here are a few, according to LinkedIn:

• Write about specific areas in which you have experience and/or expertise.
• Keep your writing focused. Avoid covering too many topics in the same long-form post.
• Keep your voice authentic.
• Don’t shy away from expressing your opinion. However, keep your long-form posts appropriate for the LinkedIn audience. Don’t post anything obscene, shocking, hateful, intimidating, or otherwise unprofessional.
• Publish whenever you have something valuable to share with LinkedIn members. In general, the more long-form posts you publish, the more credibility you will build, and the stronger your professional profile will become.
• There are no limits on word count, but the long-form posts that are best received are more than three paragraphs.
• Upload pictures, videos, presentations, and documents to add to your content. It helps bring your insights to life and is a good way to showcase concrete examples of your experience.
• Use the share box on your homepage to share short-form thoughts, questions, and other media such as articles and images. (Learn more about sharing on LinkedIn here.)
• Have colleagues, friends, or family members review and edit your long-form posts.

Want to learn more great tips for publishing on LinkedIn? Check out this post by LinkedIn Executive Editor Daniel Roth on how to crush it as a LinkedIn writer.

2) Hone in on a specific topic.

A LinkedIn post shouldn’t take readers here, there, and everywhere. And in terms of cutting through content saturation, your best bet is to cover one topic — and cover it better than anyone else.

To shed some light on the power of specificity, let’s turn to a series of tests that Marketing Experiments conducted for an online dental company to determine if minor changes could significantly impact response rates. In these tests, they explored six headlines representing non-specific, semi-specific, and super specific topics:

1. «Control»
2. «Dental Plans for $8.33 a Month. Acceptance Guaranteed.»
3. «Over 55,000 Dental Care Providers. Acceptance Guaranteed.»
4. «Dental Care Coverage. Best Price Guaranteed.»
5. «Low Cost Dental Care for the Uninsured»
6. «Best Price Dental Care – Without Insurance.»

The results?

Interestingly enough, the only two headlines that contributed to a positive impact on overall conversions were the ones that included specific numbers: «Dental Plans for $8.33 a Month. Acceptance Guaranteed.» and «Over 55,000 Dental Care Providers. Acceptance Guaranteed.»

The takeaway? People like specificity.

While it’s clear that specificity contributes to the attractiveness of a headline, getting comfortable with this concept of «zooming in» on ultra-specific topics can take some getting used to. To help you get started, take a look at how this initial idea was transformed into something specific enough to stand out in a sea of sameness:

• Start here: The Top 10 Business Blogging Best Practices
• Take it to here: How to Write Blog Titles That Actually Get Clicked
• Then try this: How Using Verbs in Blog Titles Helped Us Generate X% More Clicks

Sure, it’s not the easiest route to take, but after seeing the results of the Marketing Experiments study, it’s clear that the potential payoff is much greater.

3) Choose your title wisely.

Aside from specificity, the structure of your title has a lot to due with the success of your post.

The beauty of LinkedIn publishing is that every time you publish a post, your connections receive a notification in real-time. This notification contains the title of your post, and the title of your post only. In other words, if the title you employ doesn’t dazzle them, the notification will go unnoticed.

To fully leverage the potential of this notification, we dug into some data from Noah Kagan and Search Wilderness. The data, based on an analysis of over 3,00 of the most successful blog posts on the platform, was conducted in an effort to generate some insights regarding what makes a post successful.

In terms of titles, here’s what Kagan found:

Titles that Work Best on LinkedIn

How-To Posts

How-to posts perform best for post views, Likes, comments, and shares than any other post type. On average, these posts had 22,368 LinkedIn views.

Example: «How to Establish Your Brand Message«

Listicles

List posts perform well, getting slightly more post views, Likes, comments, and shares than non-list posts. On average, these posts had 16,364 LinkedIn views.

Example: «8 Ways Social Media Marketing Can Benefit Your Brand«

(To learn how to write how-to posts and listicles, check out this blog post for helpful formulas.)

Titles That Don’t Work As Well on LinkedIn

Question Posts

Posts where the headline poses a question (like «Why Publish on LinkedIn?») perform poorly across the board in terms of LinkedIn publishing metrics. On average, these posts had 13,832 LinkedIn views.

4) Add visuals.

Just because LinkedIn is a professional network doesn’t mean everything has to be buttoned up and black-and-white. People like pictures and visual examples. Including them your posts will not only help you to reinforce your points, but it’ll also help to break up long blocks of text.

But before you go sprinkling visuals through out your posts, it’s important to be mindful of how you’re using them.

According to Kagan, you should aim to have at least one image in your post — but if you can include eight images in your post, even better. Kagan found that including eight images in one blog post is associated with a greater number of LinkedIn shares, Likes, comments, and views.

What about multimedia assets like SlideShare and videos? Kagan’s data revealed that the inclusion of multimedia assets is actually associated with fewer post views. If you’re going to include them anyway, be selective. While posts with one multimedia embedded generated just under 15k views, posts with three multimedia embeds dropped down to just under 8k views.

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