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So tell me listener, have you received your LinkedIn Pencil yet? Have you gone into your profile and noticed that not only can you attach images now but you can also write if you so wish to. Well that’s the big thing that’s going on in LinkedIn at the moment and it’s the subject of today’s podcast and how you can leverage this amazing ability now and some of the dos and don’ts around being an author on LinkedIn so let’s get into it.
So hi everyone! This is Denise from Super Fast Recruitment and as always there is a transcription of this recording from iTunes on our website superfastrecruitment.co.uk/blog. So big news – a few different things happening on LinkedIn at the moment and today I wanted to cover the new LinkedIn authorship and how you might be able to use it, who’s got it and who hasn’t got it and all the skinny around LinkedIn and authorship. So let’s just get into it here.
So what is now available for minions like you and I is the ability to post content onto LinkedIn within our profile. Now this has been available for a number of years for the hallowed few. So the likes of James Cann, Greg Savage, people like that… obviously Richard Branson have been able to post content within LinkedIn and then obviously that gets distributed amongst all the different networks, groups and various other things. How great is that to be able to distribute your expertise and to develop yourself as a thought leader and get noticed? So that’s the opportunity that LinkedIn authorship brings.
Now they started to roll it out earlier on this year. There is no real definitive answer as to who’s got it and who hasn’t got it. If you are published in other areas then you can apply and if you’ve not got it yet, it will probably appear on your profile at some point. Some people think it’s dependent on how vibrant you in an online community. I’m not sure whether that’s the case or not but it doesn’t really matter. Eventually everyone will have it.
Now as with all things new, there will be a rush of people using it and then people will probably stop using it which will be a shame because they won’t to see the advantages of using this great little new tool. So in today’s podcast/blog post I want to share with you some of that dos and don’ts, how it works and what the advantages are of this new opportunity.
So first of all, logically it has the opportunity to brand you depending on what content you share as an expert within your own niche. So that’s important. It will get you out as well to all the people that you are connected to because what you might have noticed over the last few days is that you’ll start to see within your notifications tab different people posting content. These are the people posting now on LinkedIn. It’s a great way because you can get in front of your audience provided you do it with the right context which I’m going to come onto later on.
So it’s great to have your content in front of people. It’s great to have that social sharing. You can also link back to your own website. You can give people a totally different perspective on you and what you do and of course, all about content marketing, all about generating leads. Well, that’s exactly what you can do on LinkedIn.
Now as many of you will know that listen to this podcast I’m a big advocate of ‘create your own authority’ site. However if people like LinkedIn and Facebook are giving us the opportunity to share our content then why not to do it but always make sure that we have the ability for people come back and find out more about us. Make it compelling on our own website. I’m going to tell you how you can do that as well.
So how do you do it? Well first of all, write some content or better still utilise some of your great content that you have on your website currently on your blog and curate that content and put it within the platform. It’s very easy to do. If you’ve ever done any blogging or you’ve used the word document even, this is exactly how it works.
So you paste your content into there and then my strong suggestion is that, as I would suggest with lots of people, is make sure that you are appealing, this is a lovely jargon word, to peoples different modalities. So make sure that you also are having images within the content so people can get a visual representation. It helps to take them onto a journey and that you space your content out well. Remember there are more and more LinkedIn apps around where you can access your LinkedIn on the go particularly for recruiters, particularly for candidates and clients. You want to make sure that people can read your content. So don’t just have these big blocks of text and paragraphs. Space it out so it makes it much easier for people to read.
Where it’s relevant link back to your website. Now you know, people will know that we are very big in to SEO and were historically and you can link back to the website which is great because you can take people where you want them to go. So make your content interesting and compelling as I say, utilise some of the content that you have on your own website and just change it a little bit. Put a slightly different context on it. Make sure you have a nice compelling title that people are more likely then to go and access. Numbers are great, words like ‘easy’, ‘practical’, contentious things as well will also work well to get people to go and have a look.
What is great is people can follow you. People start to see more content. So make sure you are sharing great content but also what you can do which, this is a bit of a ‘ninja tip’ that not many people are doing, is you can put a little bio at the end. So you can put ‘About Fred Smith, ACME Recruitment’. Put a bio about you, what you do and then obviously a call to action. Now that can be different it could be a free report that you’re giving away, it could be just a link back to your vacancies page, your job board on your website. It could be anything like that that you could utilise so really important to make sure that you do that.
Now, what about some of the don’ts? Well you know, it’s a new platform. Make sure that you are utilising it but don’t overutilise it. On Friday evening I was working late to get some things complete for a client of ours with a particular promotional campaign that she’s got going on. So I was working a little bit later in the evening and just before I shut the computer down to have a nice G&T, then I noticed one particular guy had actually posted 10 articles within the space of an hour.
Now, he’s either a frustrated writer or what I’m not sure but I would say don’t do that. That is not the way to utilise it. Spread your content out. You are also going to chase people off because they’re going to think “Holy moly! What’s happening here? This guy is bamboozling me with all this content.” It’s really too much and they might even flick you off your list of your LinkedIn connections. So be mindful of that because you are going to start seeing more and more people appearing in your feed that are sharing content. So just be respectful of that.
This is an additional promotional tool. Yes, it is a way for you to share your content and pull those people into you. The other thing is don’t make it promotional. They can find out about your recruitment company on your website. This is about authorship. It’s not about a free job ad or a free job board. Trust me. If you start doing that people are going to unconnect from you and you are not going to get the benefit but that you really could get from this.
So, in summary then – great opportunity for you to post your content. So it’s about posting content, branding you as an author and getting your name out there. So as soon as you get your pencil, get to work and start showing some of your fantastic content and attract more clients and candidates to you.
So this is Denise from Super Fast Recruitment and we’ll speak next time.
Tweetables:
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This podcast was hosted by Denise Oyston. Follow us on Google+
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