Efficient Promotion of a LinkedIn Article

How hard can it be?  Write 500 words, drop it into LinkedIn.  Job done: Bob’s your Uncle, Fanny’s your Aunt?  No, not job done: if you’re lucky, very lucky, as much as a handful of friends and one stranger will view it.

Presumably you’ve written the article because it has some importance to you?  You have after all put the effort into writing your 500 words.  You want people to be aware and respond.  Valid reasons are:

• Self-publicity
• Corporate publicity
• Altruism: paying back to society

Here are my tips for promoting your article:

• Think about hashtags: what are the key terms / concepts in your article? Next use a hash-tag checker site: this will let you know how popular your hash tag is on Twitter, but more importantly, what other terms are relevant.  Select ones that match your article: maybe edit the article?  You’re now ready to publish.  Make sure you have the title perfectly correct: while you can edit the body of the article later, the title inviolate.  On the second page, enter the hash-tags. Save the second page, then copy and save the full URL.
• Re-publish on LinkedIn: use your company page plus one (and only one) group. Notice that there’s now a shortened ‘lnkd.in’ domain URL: save this too.
• Re-publish elsewhere. I have an account on a technical question and answer forum, so I publish article links on my profile there.  I’ve recently capitulated on something I said I would never do: I have created a Twitter account to advertise the LinkedIn post.
• Now choose how you’re going to tell people.
  1. LinkedIn will automatically tell people who are following you: it will be in their ‘Notifications’.
  2. Pinging individual personal contacts in WhatsApp will work, but not efficiently, you’re telling them only about the most recent article, and they’re probably already following you in LinkedIn already. This is worth while if you know that they are not an avid checker of their LinkedIn notifications.
  3. By using email you might think you can reach a much bigger audience, and tell them about previous and draft articles too. Make sure you’re marketing appropriate business goods or services to their job function.  On the topic of bought lists, it may be counter intuitive, but I’ve also not noticed any advantage in the metrics where I’ve emailed to people I’ve not already been in contact with.
  4. Another option is to use LinkedIn InMail, but you may be limited to the number you can send each month, and like email may have zero benefit.
  5. LinkedIn and other advertising is an option if your objective is business publicity. These are outside the scope of this article.

• Follow through:
  1. Flag any ‘STOP’ requests in your contacts list with a date: do not delete the record. To a person within the European Union the GDPR, and from within the UK the ICO, will expect you to not contact the person again if you acquire a subsequent contact list with them in it.  You also need to remove duplicated records from the new list before merging into your distribution list.  Make sure your CRM and processes handle duplicates appropriately in this context.
  2. For each comment that gives you the opportunity, you should consider replying.
  3. For ‘Likes’ by people you don’t recognise, check their profile. Send them a ‘thank you’ and if they’ve not left a comment, then ask them what in particular they liked.  If they’re not on your distribution list, ask them if they would like to be added.
• Metrics:
  1. Record the results in a systematic way: book a slot in your calendar once a week. Your objective is to determine if you are being efficient.  Are you getting views and likes on older articles too?
  2. Record your LinkedIn SSI (Social Selling Index) values. The SSI is the sum of four components:
     • Professional Brand
     • Right People
     • Insightful
     • Relationships

• Benefits in terms of self- and corporate-publicity:
  1. Meaningful posts mark you as a thought leader, and more likely to be engaged with.
  2. You are staying on potential customer's radar with regular posts acting as reminders that you exist, provided you’ve already engaged with them.
  3. Reshare other people’s articles too, with a constructive comment: you’re showing you’re a team player and ‘in the know’.
  4. “STOP” requests are filtering out people who have gotten bored with you and are unlikely to want your services, so you stop wasting time and effort with them.
  5. Your prospects are hopefully being educated about what your services are, and perhaps more importantly, what they are not.