LinkedIn Publishing Platform: What Marketers Need to Know

Do you publish long-form content?

Are you wondering if the new LinkedIn publishing platform can help your business?

To learn about the LinkedIn publishing platform and why you may want to consider it, I interview Stephanie Sammons for this episode of the Social Media Marketing podcast.
More About This Show

The Social Media Marketing podcast is a show from Social Media Examiner.

It's designed to help busy marketers and business owners discover what works with social media marketing.

The show format is on-demand talk radio (also known as podcasting).

In this episode, I interview Stephanie Sammons, who is a LinkedIn marketing expert and CEO of Wired Advisor, a digital marketing platform that helps financial advisors create and publish content. She blogs at Build Online Influence.

Stephanie shares how marketers can make the most out of the LinkedIn publishing platform.

You'll discover what type of content works best, when to schedule posts and how you can use the platform to grow a following.

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Here are some of the things you'll discover in this show:
LinkedIn Publishing Platform
What is the LinkedIn publishing platform?

Stephanie explains that the LinkedIn publishing platform was first made available to around 500 LinkedIn influencers. These individuals were chosen by LinkedIn to be a part of the initial rollout.

More recently LinkedIn has opened up the publishing platform to all 277 million+ members. It will be rolled out over time, allowing every single person the opportunity to publish his or her own content on the LinkedIn platform.

Listen to the show to find out why this new addition is great for publishing long-form content.

Does the LinkedIn platform support images and multimedia?

Stephanie says that you can embed content from SlideShare, which is owned by LinkedIn. It's a network where you can publish PowerPoint presentations, Keynote presentations, PDFs, white papers, infographics and embed videos from YouTube. In addition, you can embed images in the posts that you publish to LinkedIn.

The formatting capabilities are very similar to a basic blogging platform. It's a little bit easier to use than WordPress, although you don't have the ability within the editor to categorize or tag your posts. You can use headers, bullets, numbered lists, bold, italics and hyperlink text as well.

Listen to the show to find out why it's really important to double-check your post before you hit Publish.

Marketers and business owners should consider posting content on LinkedIn

You have to remember that LinkedIn is your professional identity online and this not only gives you an opportunity to demonstrate and illustrate your expertise, but also to get in front of a very active and engaged audience.

You'll discover why you now have the ability to grow a following on LinkedIn—even with people who aren't in your LinkedIn network—and how this can be a huge benefit to your business. It's still important to have your own platform that's away from all of the other social networks.

One of the real advantages of when you use the LinkedIn publishing platform is that you can grow an audience very fast. My friend Dave Kerpen, the founder of Likeable Media, is a great example.

Although he has mostly written for traditional print and didn't really have a huge platform online, he was able join the original LinkedIn influencer network. Since then, he has seen amazing growth as a result of the articles he has published on the platform.

You'll hear about an article that Dave wrote on the LinkedIn publishing platform about 10 Marketing Podcasts That You Ought to Listen to and how this affected the podcasts mentioned in a phenomenal way.

When you put your content together,