One of our clients recently asked us to come up with ideas to create visibility for C-level executives who are interested in building their personal brands in conjunction with building the corporate brand. It was a fun assignment and we outlined several strategies for helping them. One of these focused on regularly contributing content on LinkedIn. Below we have summarized some of the ways to do this on the popular social networking site for professionals.
Be a LinkedIn Influencer
According to its website, “LinkedIn Influencer is a designation given to approximately 500 professionals who have been invited to publish on LinkedIn. As leaders in their industries, geographies and seniorities, they talk about broad topics of interest such as leadership, management, hiring and firing, disruption, how to succeed, and more.”
Today LinkedIn Influencers include high-profile figures such as Richard Branson, Bill Gates, Arianna Huffington, and Guy Kawasaki.
Becoming an influencer is not an easy task, because you cannot apply for this status. LinkedIn staff invite people to be influencers. To increase your chances that LinkedIn will select you, we recommend appealing to the editorial staff with LinkedIn, being high profile, and having a breadth of content that will be relevant and interesting to LinkedIn’s members.
It is also important to know that LinkedIn may package Influencer content and market that content, as it deems appropriate.
LinkedIn also states, “The roster of Influencers changes throughout the year. We regularly evaluate existing Influencers to include only the most engaged, prolific and thoughtful contributors and to ensure that their expertise matches up with our members’ interests.”
Contribute Long-Form Content
If you don’t think you are likely to be invited to be an influencer, the good news is that there are other opportunities to contribute. LinkedIn will soon invite all its members to share information via a long-form post. Look for this invite via your LinkedIn homepage. If you do not want to wait for the invite, you can also apply for access here. (I have done this and am waiting to hear back from LinkedIn.)
According to an article in Bloomberg, “The company also added 30 new content channels – such as one focused on residential real estate – in the last week, drawing from more than 1 million publishers.” Personally, I have found it difficult to discover these channels on LinkedIn and am hoping they make it easier to find and subscribe to them.
Before you get started with publishing long-form content, please keep in mind:
- Your original content will become part of your professional profile.
- Long-form content will appear on the “Posts” section of your LinkedIn profile. LinkedIn will share this information with your connections and followers.
- Members not in your network will be able to follow you from your long-form post to receive updates when you publish next.
- Your long-form post is searchable both on and off LinkedIn.
For more information about long-form posts, please check out these guidelines.
Share an Update
If publishing long-form content does not appeal to you, you still can post thoughts, articles or other information from your LinkedIn homepage and several other places on the LinkedIn platform. For those who are too busy to create the long-form content, this can be a very effective way to stay top of mind and connect with other professionals. Specifically, you can create this information via updates from your homepage, via group discussions, from partner news sites such as the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times, and from LinkedIn Pulse.
So what is Pulse?
LinkedIn Pulse is a special “news” section on LinkedIn with a corresponding award-winning news-reader app that makes it easy to consume news on mobile phones and tablets. Content found on LinkedIn Pulse includes Influencer posts, member posts, publications, and SlideShare decks.
To get your content featured in the Pulse app, you will need to fill out a Pulse Publisher Feed Onboarding Form. To do this, visit http://www.pulse.me/publishers. I have done this, but have not yet heard back from LinkedIn. As a next step, I will likely reach out via email to [email protected] to check on the status of our application.
Finally, you should know that if you share a link on LinkedIn and choose to make it visible to “Public” or “Public + Twitter,” your picture could appear on Pulse.
Undoubtedly, the LinkedIn platform will continue to evolve, but for now, the information in this blog post hopefully will serve as a starting point for people wanting a brief tutorial on the publishing options available with LinkedIn.