Now that you see the value in publishing on LinkedIn, should you simply republish your blog’s content on LinkedIn? Or …? It’s time to take into consideration your target audience, the potential traffic to your website, conversions, and how search engines will process duplicate content. Once people are on your website, you all need to think about the user interface, products, and services. This week, I respond to this popular question point blank with advice to help you better understand, leverage, and maximize your LinkedIn content marketing.
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In This Episode:
- I often get asked about LinkedIn Pulse, and I want to answer the question about published content on this platform
- There is no single answer – it depends on your marketing strategy, objectives, etc.
- LinkedIn is nice because you can see how many views your article gets
- Numbers are important: when you do your website blog post analysis, are you getting 200-300 views or 30-40?
- Maybe Google has brought people to your website, but search engines are competitive – you have search engine marketers that are paying to compete, plus large enterprises that are SEO savvy
- So people find you via search, but how are they consuming your content? Are they sticking around a while? Or are they reading and leaving? It’s hard to say
- LinkedIn is where the professionals are, and where they take the news seriously. LinkedIn Pulse has become a major publishing platform that can send hundreds and thousands of views your way
- When you have a blog you have the online audience that uses Google, but with LinkedIn you have a lucrative, well-defined demographic that may find you as well
- LinkedIn isn’t going be nearly as important if you aren’t getting several hundred views for each of your blogs posts; you may want to think of LinkedIn as a publish first platform
- The traffic won’t be on your website, it’s going to be on your LinkedIn profile or that of one of your employees, but that’s where thought leadership begins
- Great strategy to create content specifically for the LinkedIn audience and differentiate between more your more general blog content
- You can leverage segmentation of your content by posting the right content on the right platform – your website is company-centric, while LinkedIn is person-centric
- Assuming you’re publishing unique content, you can publish a 350 word introduction to the content on your own blog, letting people know about the content on LinkedIn, or vice versa; that way you’re creating two unique pieces and pushing them out to the different platforms
- We know Google doesn’t like duplicate content!
- You’re going to get additional views on LinkedIn, but it may be the case that LinkedIn as a domain has much greater authority in Google’s eyes than your company, unless you’re a Fortune 500
- If you publish on both platforms, is the search engine going to send people to LinkedIn or to your website? You want them on your website, right? The danger of publishing duplicate content is that it could lose you traffic, and we know that conversions happen on your site, not on LinkedIn
- Once your employees are publishing content on LinkedIn, that’s a great way to promote your team as thought leaders through their posts, and you can promote their LinkedIn posts on your blog
Resources & Links:
- Connect with me on LinkedIn.
- Check out the two books I’ve written on LinkedIn.
- Have you downloaded my free ebook Maximizing LinkedIn for Business?
- Looking for more ways to get traffic from LinkedIn? Here are 10.
- LinkedIn is a great place for employee advocacy
- Here are more ideas for establishing thought leadership on LinkedIn.
- Customize your content for different platforms. Here are a few basic differences between Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
Transcript:
Hey everybody, this is Neal Schaffer. This is Maximize Your Social. You’re in the right place if you want to learn how to leverage social – well, for almost anything these days. No, it’s for your business actually.
Hey, if you listened to my last podcast, I promised you I was going to try to record something back when I go to New York. In fact, I have yet to go to New York. I had an idea for a podcast, and I wanted to get it out because I think it’s really timely and it’s important. And I hope next time I’ll be able to feature some interesting people on an interview on this podcast coming from Manhattan.
But today I want to talk about LinkedIn Pulse. I know that I’ve talked about it on a few podcasts, and it is something that I often get asked about. And I don’t think I’ve published a podcast or written a blog post that point-blank answers the question, should I publish the same thing on LinkedIn as I do on my website.
And I want to give you a point-blank answer. Now, there’s obviously no one single answer to this question. And it’s really going to depend on your objectives, your content marketing, your strategy, what have you.
But I got asked this once again today, and my point-blank answer is – and I just published again yesterday on the LinkedIn platform. I don’t publish as regularly on there as I’d like to. Ideally, I’d love to publish on a weekly basis. But I published an article there and it’s gotten – the great thing about LinkedIn is you can see how many views your, your article gets. It got, it’s gotten about 650, 24 hours afterwards. And I, I know that when I helped my brother sort of promote his LinkedIn posting, he doesn’t have that many connections, he was still able to get a few hundred views on his content.
And the numbers are important because when you do the analysis of blog posts for your own website, how many views are you getting? Are you getting 200, 300, 400, or 20, 30, 40? And when you start to think of it – I mean, it should be no surprise, those that have come to your website, I mean, maybe they found you through Google, right? So the Google search engine has brought them to your website where they have found you, and you’re getting some views.
But Google is obviously extremely competitive. You have search engine marketers that are paying to compete with you. And you have large enterprises that are quite savvy in that field that are competing with you as well, unless you of course are one of those large enterprises.
So it is a huge online audience, but yet they find you via search. And it’s hard to say how they are going to consume your content. Are they just looking for information, just wham bam thank you and they’re gone, or are you really able to convert them and stay. And that really depends on the content and the products and services you use, your interface, and what have you.
But LinkedIn is where the professionals are, and it’s where professionals take the news seriously. And LinkedIn Pulse has become a major publishing platform that can literally send you hundreds of thousands of views. And I’ve seen this.
Any of you who saw me speak at B2B Marketing Profs in Boston recently; I showed the example of this gentleman who, he was getting a few hundred hits on his LinkedIn Pulse posts. And then, one, he had several hundred thousand because he happened to publish on something that was very timely. I guess you could say he was doing a little bit of newsjacking. But it got picked up by the LinkedIn Pulse recommendation engine and got a lot, a lot of views on it.
And that’s the potential because, true, when you have a website and you have a blog, you have the online audience that uses Google when they search that may discovery you. With LinkedIn, you have a very, very lucrative demographic that may find you as well. It’s a demographic of decision-makers. It’s a very, very well-defined demographic versus what you have online, which could be a lot of different things because obviously it’s, it’s not limited just to LinkedIn.
So it really depends on what you are looking for. But if you’re – if you can get several hundred views or visitors for every one of your blog posts, LinkedIn is not gonna be nearly as important if you’re not getting that. If you’re not getting that, you may want to think of LinkedIn as a publish-first platform because you’re gonna get more traffic now, albeit that traffic is not going to be primarily on your website. It’s gonna be on the LinkedIn profile of one of your employees.
However, that’s really where thought leadership begins. It begins with people. It’s about human interaction. So I think that it’s a great strategy that you create content specific for the LinkedIn audience on the LinkedIn publishing platform. If you’re able to differentiate that content with more general content on your blog that is less targeted towards a lucrative demographic of, of business decision-makers and more targeted to a general online audience of those who may find you through search – which I think is a very, very different audience – you can start to see how you, you can leverage segmentation of your content so that you’re really publishing the right content for the right platform.
Your blog on your plat – on your website already includes your current customers, your current fans that are already going to your website anyway and subscribing to your blog. So you’re building a different community there than you are on LinkedIn. The community on your blog is very company-centric. On LinkedIn, it’s going to be very person-centric because companies cannot blog on LinkedIn. It has to be from people. That’s, that’s where you’re building influencers and thought leaders in your industry for your company through a LinkedIn profile.
So in an ideal world, you would publish on both. Now, I know what you’re saying: but Neal, how – I want to take advantage of it. How do I replicate my content?
Well, assuming that you’re publishing unique content on each site, you can also publish – they say for Google you should have at least 300 words. So you can publish a 350-word introduction to a LinkedIn blog post on your own blog, to let people know that you just published something on LinkedIn. It’s, it’s a tactic that I use often on Maximize Your Social World; I’ll publish a blog post talking about something I published on LinkedIn.
And you can also do the same thing on LinkedIn, to give people an update on something you published on your own blog. And in doing so, you are not only creating unique content which is not duplicated because the 300-plus word summary – it may be a little bit duplicated, but considering it’s a summary, the wordage should hopefully be different.
So hopefully, you’re actually – for each piece of content, you’re creating two somewhat unique pieces of content and you’re pushing them out to each platform. And on each platform you’re pushing people back to either your website and/or the LinkedIn profile. So I think that’s really the best of both worlds.
And thus in summary, I just do not think it’s a good idea – now you could, like I said, just copy and paste what’s on your website and put it on your LinkedIn profile. We know that you’ll, you’ll get additional views for that content. From an SEO perspective with having duplicate content – and we know that, that Google does not like duplicate content; we know that Google authorship, the algorithm, is still something that’s in flux. It’s sort of hard to say how they’re going to index it.
But something tells me, okay, I haven’t experimented with it, it would be a good, be a really, really good test. You’re gonna get additional views on LinkedIn. But the problem may be that LinkedIn as a domain is gonna have much greater authority in Google’s eyes than probably your company, unless you’re a Fortune 500 company.
So in that case, when you publish on both, both platforms, where is the search engine going to send people? Are they gonna send them to your company or to your LinkedIn profile? Ideally, you want the search engine, I’m assuming, to send people to your company, right? And that’s why I think the danger of publishing everything on your blog again on your LinkedIn profile is you could actually be losing traffic to your LinkedIn profile. We all know the conversion’s gonna happen on your website, not on your LinkedIn profile. LinkedIn profile should be an additional, an augmentive channel for your content marketing, for your social media marketing.
So I hope that what I’m talking about makes sense. When we talk about the use of content in social media marketing and content marketing, you see people that just put blog posts in the SlideShares and in for graphics. And there’s best practices in doing this, and I don’t think that content is as easy as just splicing and dicing it. You really need to customize it for each platform. And there are areas in which you may need to create unique things for each platform, like creating unique PowerPoints on SlideShare and making them unique to the point that they are very visual, and someone can flip through them without having a lot of text in a short amount of time. And those are the SlideShares that seem to do best.
So with the LinkedIn Pulse publishing platform, I think it is a similar approach of creating unique content for that community which showcases the thought leadership of your company through your employees and making it very specific to the community there while also giving a shout-out on your blog that one of your employees published something.
And, and in fact once you can start doing that – this podcast is not about employee advocacy obviously, but now you have a great way of sort of promoting your employees as thought leaders through their LinkedIn posts and promoting their LinkedIn posts on your blog. And you begin to get sort of a synergy going where you have all sorts of different content coming out, some that are geared towards LinkedIn, some for your company blog. But for LinkedIn, there’s a variety of topics on a lot of different levels you can talk about.
And hopefully the day will come soon when business leaders realize the advantage of publishing on LinkedIn, the advantage of having their employees publish on LinkedIn. And you have VPs, directors; you have executives from every department start to blog on LinkedIn about the thought leadership of their company, of what they do in their position, of how their company’s helping others, and in a very, very unique and human way. And I think those companies are going to do very, very well on capturing mind share and share a voice on LinkedIn through LinkedIn Pulse.
Those are my thoughts for today. I know it’s not a direct answer to the question, but hopefully you’ve been able to decipher my advice to let you know I do not think it’s a good idea that you publish the same thing on both platforms. And once again, if you’re already getting more than 500 views for each one of your blog posts, I don’t think LinkedIn is going to be as important. But I think then you shift to that employee advocacy perspective because if you’re getting that many blog hits, you’re probably already a pretty formidable company that has a lot of employees, and I think you can start to leverage it in a different way.
So when you think of content marketing on LinkedIn, think LinkedIn Pulse and think employee advocacy instead of thinking, should I just copy my blog posts and put them on LinkedIn. We should be approaching it in a different way and asking different questions to get to the best way of leveraging LinkedIn through your social media marketing.
Gosh, I hope this makes sense. It’s really clear to me. I try to really break things down in a practical, rational, and actionable way, and hey, I hope you found that out. If you didn’t, let me know. Always appreciate those comments, ratings, and iTunes, all the nice words you send to me through social media. This podcast is for you.
I’m off to New York next week. Looking forward to some great future podcasts. Until then everybody, keep those questions coming. Anybody who asks me a social media question I’m asking to join the Social Media Center of Excellence, the Facebook group. This is where I’m gonna be answering social media questions. If you have any, join the group. Just do a search on Facebook for Social Media Center of Excellence and you’ll find it there. That’s my home until I launch the website, hopefully early next year.
Until next time, wherever you are in the world, stay warm and make it a great social day. Bye-bye everybody.
Transcript provided courtesy of GMR Transcription Services, Inc.
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Debbie Gartner aka The Flooring Girl says
Thx Neal. This is awesome, and your logic makes complete sense. I love minute 7:00. That is what my gut was telling me, too and where my big concern has come in. I generally do get a lot of traffic to my site, and I didn’t want my niche articles showing up first on LI ahead of my site. You brought it to a whole new level and perspective for me.
Also, I wrote about this/linked to your webinar on ActiveRain.com – my secondary blogging site. Here’s a link to it http://activerain.trulia.com/blogsview/4599319/should-you-posts-your-articles-on-linkedin–too-
feel free to delete this link in this comment. I just wanted to let you know how helpful this is, and let my realtor friends know about this.
Neal Schaffer says
Thanks Debbie … glad to have added value to you!
Gerardo Trujillo Corona says
Hello Neal, this is great,I had a discussion with our sales and marketing team yesterday… what do you think about republishing vs sharing on Linkedin an article I wrote for an e-magazine or blog (ex. forbes)?
Neal Schaffer says
I already have a podcast on that topic Gerardo! http://maximizeyoursocial.com/linkedin-publishing-platform-tips-republish-blog-content-linkedin-podcast-ep-90-449/
Gerardo Trujillo Corona says
Thanks Neal, yes that’s exactly the one I listened to and where I posted my doubt, correct me if I misunderstood, this podcast talks about republishing (I understand re-writing) from my own blog to LinkedIN, but what about sharing media the IN share button my publications from other blogs or sites?
Supose I wrote an article for Maximize Your Social, do you think it would be better if I re-wrote the article an republish it directly on my Linkedin profile or should I just share it media de IN share button on the top of the site? I can see benefits for both of the strategies, but also some downsides, not sure what is the best path.
Thanks!
J Hunter says
Oldie but goodie 🙂 still relevant today!
Neal Schaffer says
Thank you sir! 😉