The Junction Box: A nod is as good as a LinkedIn
26 June 2020
In his 172nd column, exclusive to Connectivity, Richard Stone, the founder of Stone Junction – the first PR agency for the Fourth Industrial Revolution, explains how to write an article for the LinkedIn Publishing Platform.
“Rule number one: Never use a pun in your headline,” explained Stone to his avid class of future LinkedIn experts.
“LinkedIn is, at its heart, a search engine and, while the primary signal you can give it is content freshness, relevance is also important.
“For instance, if you were writing an article about how to write for LinkedIn, you should call it something like, ‘Seven ways to write for the LinkedIn Publishing Platform’. If you lack taste and credibility, you might want to append the phrase, ‘Number 7 will amaze you!’ However, if you do so, I urge caution,” opined Stone, the vegan-leather elbows on his tweet jacket atremble.
Jones: “So, ‘A nod is as good as LinkedIn’ would be an awful title then Sir?”
“Yes Jones. Yes, it would. It would be dreadful.”
The sensible bit of the article
The LinkedIn Publishing Platform, which was called Pulse until 2017, is a genuinely powerful way of reaching your audience with written content about your business. As long as you have put the effort into building a set of contacts who are genuinely beneficial to your organisation, either as potential or existing customers or other stakeholders, your perfect audience is sitting right there, waiting to hear from you.
But there are secrets to its use, and they aren’t as simple as just writing a good headline, although that is part of the process.
Your article title can be up to 150 characters long and, when your piece is first published, the headline, and accompanying image, will be all that’s visible in your follower’s feeds. So, make that real estate count by using all 150 characters in your headline or subdeck.
The header image, or article banner, you use to illustrate your content should be bespoke. The simplest way to create it would be to use an online graphics tool, like Canva, to design it. That way you will be certain of getting something with the correct dimensions. Like all social platforms, LinkedIn changes the specifications for image size regularly.
A pro-tip is to ensure that the middle third of your article banner works by itself, because that is the only bit of the image that will viewable in a feed and will need to entice the reader in by itself. So that’s where the text and the most compelling part of your image should be.
Did you say LinkedIn was a search engine?
As I mentioned in my hilarious introduction, LinkedIn is a search engine and the people, jobs, content, schools, groups and events on the site that you search for are presented in order – just like the content on a Search Engine Results Page (SERPs). You can influence this search, just like you can influence Google, by communicating very clearly.
My brilliantly satirical headline, for instance, would be less findable, if you were searching for an article about writing for LinkedIn, than my ‘Seven ways to write for…” version.
But there are other ways you can make content more clearly searchable on LinkedIn as well. You can use bold, italics, underline and block quotes to emphasise the key words in your content, providing you remember that you are writing for a person, not a robot. So, keyword stuffing is out of the question.
“Block quotes, which look like this on LinkedIn, are a great place to put the phrases you want to be found for. Imagine you are speaking to a person. If you raise your voice, they understand that you want to be heard. The visual equivalents of this for a search engine make it obvious that the text you’ve put in block quotes, or make italic for instance, is important and the subject of the article — so it should be found for those phrases.”
Similarly, your choice of subheadings, or H2 and H3 text as we call them in fancy digital marketing circles, will also influence where you article appears in search.
When I’ve been found, how do I make my reader trust me?
Once you’ve attracted the reader to your article, you need to ensure that you pique and keep their interest, but also leave them sufficiently hungry for more so they want to get in touch with you.
For instance, in this piece I’ve outlined some fundamentals about how to influence LinkedIn search and I’m about to share another killer tip as well. But I haven’t delved deeply into the craft and process of writing compelling content. That is so that, when you want to hire an agency to manage LinkedIn for your business, you come to Stone Junction. Cunning eh?
Another way of creating trust is embedding additional, compelling, content into the piece. LinkedIn allows you to embed images, video and documents — which can take the form of PDFs, Word files or presentations. A little-known fact is that you can also embed HTML code on the page, allowing you to add all kinds of interactivity.
That last killer tip
Writing for LinkedIn is about being found, trusted a chosen. By ‘chosen’ I don’t necessarily mean that the reader has to ring you up and place an order instantly. It might be as simple as them liking or sharing the article.
The easiest way to get them to do this is to include a list of things ‘to do next’ at the end of the piece. This goes just before the potted biography of you, which is intended to reinforce your credibility as a trusted source of information. The list might go a bit like this:
• If you found this article about writing for LinkedIn helpful, please click like at the bottom. If you are reading on the Connectivity website, you can find this article on LinkedIn here.
• I would also really appreciate it if you would share this article. If you enjoyed it, your contacts probably will as well, and that in turn will reflect positively on your own brand.
• If you have something to add, I would love you to leave a comment and I promise to respond when you do.
• Finally, if you want to build an enhanced level of LinkedIn marketing into your technical PR campaign, then get in touch with me on richards@stonejunction.co.uk.
You know I mentioned that you should finish the piece with a potted biography of the writer? Well, here is mine…
Richard Stone is the founder of Stone Junction, a specialist agency delivering international and digital PR and marketing services for scientific, engineering and technology companies. Richard is a chartered PR consultant and was named in the Chartered Institute of PR’s 70 most influential PR practitioners list, which celebrated the organisation’s 70th birthday last year. Stone Junction has won 28 industry awards for its work since 2015, including the Mark of Excellence for Best Specialist Agency in the national CIPR awards in June 2020. It is a PR Week Top 150, Technology Top 50, Top 50 Outside London and Top 50 B2B agency and it would never title an article, ‘A nod is as good as a LinkedIn’.
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