LinkedIn Publishing Platform Tips: Should I Republish My Blog Content on LinkedIn?

Neal Schaffer: 0:02

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, founder of maximize social business, and soon to launch Social Media Center of Excellence. Neal Schaffer. 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 listen, my last podcast, I promise 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 podcasts. 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 linked in 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 is 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, you know, 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, as you can see how many views your your article gets, it got, it's got about 650 24 hours afterwards. And I know that when I helped my brother, sort of promote his LinkedIn posts, and he doesn't have that many connections, he was still able to get a few 100 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 3040? And when you start to think of it in, we need to be no surprise, those that have come to your website. I mean, maybe they found you through Google, right. So you know, the Google search engine has brought them to your website where they have found your and you're getting some views. But you know, 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 SEO that are competing with you as well, unless you, of course, are one of those large enterprises. So it has a huge online audience. But yet they find you via search. And it's hard to say how they're going to consume the 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, your user interface, and what have you. But LinkedIn is where the professionals are. And it's where professionals take the new seriously and LinkedIn polls has become a major publishing platform that can literally send you hundreds of 1000s of views. And I've seen this and if you saw me speak at b2b Marketing profs in Boston, recently, I showed the example of the gentleman who, you know, he was getting a few 100 hits on his LinkedIn polls close. And then one, he had several 100,000, because he opted to publish on something that was very timely, I guess you could say he was doing a little bit of news jacking. But it got picked up by the LinkedIn polls, 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 discover 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 you know, it really depends what you're looking for. But if you're if you can get several 100 views or visitors for every one of your blog posts, you know, LinkedIn is not going to 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 published first platform, because you're going to get more traffic now, I'll be at that traffic is not going to be primarily on your website, it's going to 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 different shape that content with more general content on your blog that is less targeted towards a lucrative demographic 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 can, you know, leverage segmentation of your content, so that you're really you know, publishing the right content for the right platform, your blog, on your platform, on your website, you know, already includes your current customers, your current fans, that are already going your website anyway, and subscribing your blog. So you're building a different community there, then you are on LinkedIn, the community on your blog is very company centric, 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 Neil, you know, I want to take advantage of it. How do I replicate my content? Well, assuming that you're publishing unique content, and each site, you can also publish, you know, they say, for Google, you should have at least 300 words. So you can publish the 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, where I'll you know, 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 of something that you published on your own blog. And in doing so, you are not only creating unique content, which is not duplicated, because the you know, 300, plus word summary, it may be a little bit duplicated. But considering that's a summary, the wording 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 that's 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 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, if it's something tells me, okay, I haven't experimented with it, it would be a good be really, really good to test, you're gonna get additional views on LinkedIn. But the problem may be that LinkedIn as a domain, is going to 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 platforms, where is the search engine going to send people are they going to 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 profiles, you could actually be losing traffic to your LinkedIn profile, we all know the conversion is going to happen on your website, not your LinkedIn profile, LinkedIn profile should be an additional and augmentive channel for your content marketing for your social media marketing. So I hope what I'm talking about makes sense. You know, when we talk about the use of content and social media marketing and content marketing, you know, you see people that just put blog posts in the SlideShares and infographics and you know, there's there's best practices in doing this. And I don't think that content is as easy it just slicing 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're very visual. And someone can flip through them without having a lot of text and a short amount of time. And those are the SlideShare as I 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, you know, giving a shout out on your blog that one of your employees published something and, and in fact, once you can start doing that, you know, 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, you know, 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 you know, hopefully the day comes 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 is helping others in a very, very unique and human way. And I think those companies are going to do very, very well on capturing mindshare, 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, you know, 500 views for each one of your blog posts. You know, 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 you know, 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 that in a different way, and asking different questions to get to the best way of leveraging LinkedIn, for 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 hope you found that out. If you didn't let me know. Always appreciate those comments, ratings on 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 asked me a social media question, I'm asking to join the Social Media Center of Excellence, the Facebook group, this is where I'm going to 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're on the world. Stay warm and make it a great social Day. 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 Please also make sure to check out Neil's new community is Social Media Center of Excellence at social media ce o e.com. Thanks again and make it a social day.