Why LinkedIn articles are the best feature for your profile

RELEVANCY WARNING: This article was written in 2017 and may not still be relevant.

What are articles?

LinkedIn’s articles feature is similar to a post, in that it is seen by your connections and works just like any other post feature on any social media platform. However, articles are more specifically designed as a way for you to share your expertise and thus establish greater credibility and identity for yourself. This all leads to enhancing your profile with one simple feature.

The concept is similar to a blog feature and is useful for distinguishing yourself from the rest.

How?

You can find the ability to ‘write an article’ on your profile page. You need to add an informative headline, which targets your audience and tell them exactly what the article is about and essentially why it is worth their time to read it. A great headline will address the audience, indicate what the article is about and demonstrate the benefit to the reader.

Above the headline, you can add an image by clicking on the + symbol in the blue space. An article with an image tends to gain more insights than one without.

Visual content is very popular and using it will help to gain more traffic as the image may also show up in search engines and drive readers to your article, as well as giving the article some context.

Overall, it’s just more visually appealing and can be used in many different ways to convey some of your personality. For example, you could create your own infographic, demonstrating further your skills, or use an ironic image to make the article appear witty.
Make sure you use a royalty free image! A great site for this is Pixabay but alternatively, you can search via Google. To use royalty free images on Google, and select the ‘tools’ button under the task bar, choose ‘usage rights’ and click an option other than ‘not filtered by license’ depending on what you plan to do with the image.
If you intend on modifying an image, Canva is a great, free piece of online software that allows you to create your own graphics and as a bonus you’ll be able to adjust the size of the page to the optimum LinkedIn article image size, which is 744 x 400.

‘Write here’ is where the content of your article goes. Tools at the top of the page will allow you to edit the text, such as by underlining, adding a quote or adding bullet points for example. The typical text tools you would expect.

Clicking on this square icon with a plus symbol then allows you to add images, video, slides, links and snippets throughout your text.

If you need to, you still have the option to edit an article later on after it has been published. This not only means you can edit mistakes or adapt to external factors like updates. Articles also have an analytics feature, so you can see how many people have liked it, commented on it and shared it.

Clicking on the little graph icon to the right of these details then leads you to more in-depth analytics, giving you a greater overview. This makes the edit option even better; you can change your headline, image and body of the text if the analytics show that the article is not doing as well as you had anticipated. The ability to constantly improve upon your work is a huge helping hand.

Why?

In its most recently reported quarter, LinkedIn had 467 million members. Posting articles is a way of you encouraging some of those members to engage with you. Articles bring you credibility, show that you are an active user, increase your reach, open you to more opportunities and develop your brand, business or identity.

The articles feature is one of the only ways to continuously generate content and be seen in a network that is rapidly growing.

To beat LinkedIn’s algorithm, which shares the article with those who are strong (1^st) connections, it’s up to you to ‘sell’ the article as much as you can. This includes making sure the content is captivating, using a strong headline and using a relevant image that aids the article.
LinkedIn also allows you to share your post onto your other social media sites, such as Facebook, so you can gain greater reach.

Getting your article featured is perhaps the best way to gain a huge audience. One way you could potentially get featured, although it is not guaranteed, is to tweet the LinkedIn editors using ‘tip @LinkedInEditors’ and a link to your article and you may get featured in one of the 85 channels in Pulse! As Pulse’s channels are so popular, being featured will lead you to have a much larger audience reading your posts than usual. Views are not the ultimate goal however; engagement is much better. Having more views is likely to bring with it more engagement.

All said however, you will only be featured if your article is worth being featured. Although no set criteria exists, being original, creative, showing off your expertise and being up-to-date are all helpful. It is wise not to use this feature as a sales pitch, but a display of your knowledge and expertise to your audience.

As well as demonstrating what you can do, LinkedIn articles also are great for letting others show you what you could do better by allowing you to receive feedback, through comments for example.It also gives you a chance to gain new connections which could turn into stronger associations.

By writing an article, you may learn so much more about the topic by hearing from others in the same industry. This opens a door of opportunities to reach out to members of the LinkedIn community that you otherwise may never have come across, and it’s likely these members will be like-minded if they’re hanging about on your articles.

It also gives you a chance to gain new connections which could turn into stronger associations. By writing an article, you may learn so much more about the topic by hearing from others in the same industry. This opens a door of opportunities to reach out to members of the LinkedIn community that you otherwise may never have come across, and it’s likely these members will be like-minded if they’re hanging about on your articles.

If you need help with your LinkedIn strategy, then check out our services!