The Secret to Getting Content Featured into LinkedIn Pulse

Neal Schaffer: 0:04

Welcome to maximize your social, actionable 10 minute advice on how your business can maximize your social media presence. Now, the host of maximize your social social media author, speaker, consultant, and founder of maximize social business, Neal Schaffer. Hey, everybody, this is Neal Schaffer. And welcome to a another episode of maximize your social this weekend here in the United States is Labor Day weekend. And in Southern California, it always seems like it is one of the hottest weekend's of the year. So I'm really trying to stay cool here. And what better way to stay cool than recording a podcast right here. Inside my cozy home office. Hope you've all been doing well, a lot of just you know, as always a lot of stuff going on in in social media over the last week, new Pinterest analytics, Twitter analytics rolling out to everybody more Facebook newsfeed changes. It's all good stuff. But today, I don't want to talk about any of those. I want to talk a little bit about LinkedIn. And I've been talking a lot about LinkedIn recently as I prepare to publish a brand new free eBook on LinkedIn, which I hope really pushes Best Practices forward and become sort of a manual for professionals incorporations, or for marketers, really best practices of how to use LinkedIn as a professional. One of the things I am writing about in the eBook is about the LinkedIn publishing platform, and about the existence of LinkedIn Pulse and LinkedIn Pulse used to be called LinkedIn today. And I often get the question, well, why should I publish on LinkedIn? Or how do I get my content featured in LinkedIn polls? So let's take a step back here, right? LinkedIn used to only have status updates, they allowed us to publish in what they call long form posts, which is basically, you know, for lack of a better word syndicating your blog posts within LinkedIn. Now, why would you want to do it? LinkedIn is huge. One of the top 10 visited websites in the United States, sure, we'd all love to have guest blog posts on Forbes, but LinkedIn actually gets more traffic than Forbes, believe it or not. So it is a very, very lucrative and attractive demographic. And therefore if we are creating content for ourselves, our personal brands or for our businesses, it makes sense that we would want to publish on LinkedIn now what you publish on LinkedIn, obviously, you want it to be more appropriate for the demographic there. But let me talk a little bit now and switch gears and talk a little bit about LinkedIn polls, because to understand my advice for today is to understand about LinkedIn Pulse, LinkedIn used to have something called LinkedIn today. And when they announced that I thought it was huge, they were basically looking at the content that people engaged with on LinkedIn, and pushing forward, or, you know, just that can read it sort of voting up and introducing posts that were getting a lot of engagement on LinkedIn and recommending them to you. So every morning, you can look at LinkedIn today. And immediately, you would have content that was already vetted by fellow LinkedIn users and professionals in your industry. Now, what LinkedIn decided to do, I believe it was last year, they bought an RSS feed service called pulse. If you remember, Google Reader no longer exists. Probably the most popular RSS feed service right now is Feedly. But basically, it's about people that subscribe to RSS feeds and read them in a reader. I guess. Flipboard is another example of those. Now, when LinkedIn by polls, I don't think people understood what LinkedIn was trying to do. They were trying to create a publishing Empire, which they are still in the process of unrolling, I'm sure, but they've been very successful. And polls at the time already had 30 million members, 30 minute million people that were accessing polls, either on the desktop or on the mobile app, and they were consuming information. So right there, in addition to the LinkedIn population of, you know, 300 million users, or however many it may be, you now have a new audience, which is the 30 million people that access polls are the users of polls that consume a lot of content. So you start to get a picture that not only is this a huge audience to serve both polls users on LinkedIn users, but also it's an audience, at least those 30 million people are actively consuming content. And this is where you start seeing why some people get published posts on LinkedIn that gets, you know, hundreds of 1000s of views literally. So LinkedIn, I believe it was two weeks ago announced that they completely integrated LinkedIn Pulse with the pulse application. So everything you do on LinkedIn is now synced with everything you see in the pulse application. That's now become one So the next question then is, well, how do I get my content if polls is such a great application, so many people are using it. And there's already this installed user base, how to somehow I get my content to be seen by more people. I had a little experiment, you can look them up. But one of my brothers and I have a few brothers. One of them is named Gary Schaefer, Gary is on LinkedIn like my other brothers are, you can check out his profile. He's not very active in social media, but he has been publishing a few blog posts. This is a professional, you know, former CEO, startup specialist who does not even really exist in social doesn't even have a Facebook profile. This is very typical of the executive demographic on LinkedIn, but saw the value of sharing his professional ideas through publishing on LinkedIn. So he's published a few posts, he said, Neal, you know, check out my latest posts, can you help give it a little bit of social media juice? I'm like, Sure, bro. And it was a post on how a lot of professionals that do well aren't even experts in the field that they do well in. You'll have to read the post to find out more about that. But basically, I went over and I thumbed up the post, I sort of shared it on social media exposed it to some of my followers and, and some of them said, Wow, this is really great. Post me Oh, thanks for introducing me to your brother. Some people commented on the post, I commented on the post, and literally within 24 hours, the post views shot up by 10x. Literally, it didn't take long. This is because just like you know, every other social network has an algorithm. Google's algorithm is most famous for search engine results. And Facebook is also famous for, you know, the Facebook EdgeRank algorithm. Well, LinkedIn also has this algorithm that determines what content to show the how many people impulse. So the more people that engage that like a post that comment on a post, that share the post in social, these are all social signals, that tells LinkedIn, Hey, we should be giving a little bit more exposure to this post. Obviously, new posts are going to get more exposure than old posts as well. This is sort of the same with Facebook, the newsfeed, you want to show a news, right, that's what people want to read. So that is something that obviously if you're sharing on LinkedIn, you want to reach out to people, you want to let them know about your posts. You want to write content, that when your connections who automatically become your followers see it, they want to engage with you. So there's another step right, is that you need to have connections, your connections become your followers, if you only have a few connections, your content is not going to be exposed to that many people, the more connections you have, in general, the more people it's going to be exposed to, although that's not necessarily the case. But it gives you a better chance of getting exposed to more people. But if you've bought fake LinkedIn connections, or you just you know, have fake people that are connected with you, that doesn't do any good either, because they're not going to engage with your content, very similar to why you shouldn't buy fake Facebook fans, and you shouldn't buy fake Twitter followers. But there's one more piece of the puzzle that I want to talk about that I think is critical. Up until now I've only talked about your own LinkedIn profile man that was like a New Yorker, a New Yorker accent that came out for no reason. My parents are from New York, in case you didn't know that. So sometimes I have this very, very uncertain California type of talk. But when we get into LinkedIn polls, and it's like, okay, well, I want to use LinkedIn polls every day for content curation, right. So I'm gonna see stuff up here, my newsfeed, I'm gonna get notifications when there are new posts published by my followers. And I can see all the news just by navigating over to LinkedIn polls, which is underneath the interests tab in the top navbar on linkedin.com. And we can go over to top posts, there's three tabs within pulse, your news, top posts, discover top posts is okay, these are the posts that are getting the most views right now, in descending order. I see if Bill Gates were black is the second most popular post right now as I look into it with more than 50,000 views. But there's another area here, the third tab, which is called discover, okay, so if I want to look for new news to add to my own personalized news, what would I add? So LinkedIn already has this recommended for you and guess what the recommended for you is a well, it's a combination of people that they think you may want to follow because other people follow them, as well as channels that they think you may want to follow as well as media outlets that they think you may want to follow. Obviously, the more people that follow you the better chance that you're going to show up here for other connections as well. But at the beginning, you know, the people that they're showing here all have several 1000 followers, I think as far as people go, the founder and CEO at by xing.com, founder and CEO Rocket Lawyer these people like 8000 9000 followers. So once we keep going down here, we see there are three different categories of content that we can subscribe to impulse. One is influencers and influencers as people But it's gonna start with the Richard Branson's the Bill Gates of the world, it's gonna be very, very hard for you to be featured here, you're gonna have to excuse the industrial noise outside my home office here. This is what happens sometimes when you record podcasts, bad luck, no big deal. It's all about the content, not the audio quality, right? I hope so otherwise, you probably wouldn't be subscribing to this channel. So after the influences, we have channels. Now channels are basically industry categories that LinkedIn has already predetermined. And when your blog, your content is fit into one of these categories. So this really doesn't give us any clues as to what we should be doing. But when we get to the bottom, this is where it gets sort of interesting. And this is where I want to focus my advice on it talks about publishers, K publishers, is top news coming from global and industry sources. So when we look at the most popular influencers that I recommend that I haven't followed yet, we have Richard Branson and 6 million people when we look at channels to follow which we have no control over the most popular one to 7 million followers. But when we look at publishers, okay, the most popular one is Harvard Business Review with only 465,000 followers. And in fact, if I work my way down, okay, scroll down to see more. I start seeing that very soon. I see pages like CNN, CNBC TechCrunch, that have less than 100,000 followers. And if I keep following down, it gets even more interesting. I begin to see something called Freakonomics Mental Floss at 20,000 followers, The Motley Fool, but if you keep going down, okay, you actually start to see company names pop up. And when you click on the source of the news, it goes to a company page. And this is the aha moment that I had. And this is the aha moment that I wanted to share with you. Now if you go to maximize social business, there's a LinkedIn link there or LinkedIn icon. And I was having that go to the maximize social business LinkedIn group page, because I thought that was the best way to expose the maximize social business content within LinkedIn was through the community there. And whenever someone engages in the group, it obviously goes out into the newsfeed of the people. But polls being such a huge asset, you want to get more and more LinkedIn company page followers if your business because the more followers you have, the higher you're gonna show up here in the recommended companies to follow. And like I said, as long as your company is publishing links on your company page, your company is now considered a publisher, we are all the media. So that's why when I look at this recommended for you, I see LinkedIn professionals that have you know, nine to 10,000 followers. But then right next to NBC News top stories with 46,000 followers, I see Vox media with less than 2000 followers, it shows up in the top 10. Of different channels that LinkedIn is recommending I follow or LinkedIn pulses recommending I follow. So hopefully the light bulb goes on, we need to be focusing more on a LinkedIn company page, we need to attract a bigger following. Because all that is going to add to our company page being more and more recommendable in LinkedIn Pulse in our content from our company page being exposed more and more impulse, as more and more people subscribe to it. Does that make sense? It's social media I find fascinating because all these social networks have their own little algorithms. And when you piece things together, it really is pretty incredible. And you sort of get a competitive advantage because I don't think a lot of people understand this right now. Now LinkedIn groups is going to be the subject probably of my next podcast, because I've been spending an incredible amount of time in LinkedIn groups over the last few weeks. And I've had a lot of aha moments there. So make sure you subscribe to my podcast. You don't want to miss any of this. And like I said, podcast always comes before I blog. So you're literally the first to know about this information. If you're waiting for the ebook, which is going to have a lot more information like this on it. Probably still another week or two out I'm done with the content but really want to go the extra mile and proofread it so that it's some of the most professional English writing that you see out there in the market. But that's it for today. I hope by the time you hear this, it's another work week. Hope your week is off to a great start. As always, I really appreciate all your ratings on iTunes comments, subscriptions in iTunes, Spreaker, SoundCloud, wherever this podcast is being syndicated out there in the web, and hey, there's anything you ever want me to cover here. Feel free to reach out. You can find me everywhere in social media. Neal Schaffer, maximize your social maximize social business. Until we virtually meet again next week. Make it a great social day wherever you are in the world. Bye bye, everybody. Thanks for listening to maximize your social we appreciate your iTunes subscriptions, ratings and comments. If you would like to appear on this show or recommend content, please contact Neal Schaffer at Neal at maximize your social.com make it a social day.