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FAQ: How Do I Publish an Article on LinkedIn?

CopyPress

March 20, 2022

Business-to-business (B2B) companies know that if you’re looking to connect with the best minds in your industry and find the right talents for your team, being active on LinkedIn can help. More than just a talent recruitment tool or a place to boast about accomplishments, LinkedIn also has features that help you expand your content marketing efforts and appeal to potential leads and loyal customers alike. In this article, we answer some of your common questions about publishing articles on LinkedIn, like:

• What Is a LinkedIn Article?
• Why Should I Publish an Article on LinkedIn?
• Who Can Publish an Article on LinkedIn?
• How Often Should I Publish Articles on LinkedIn?
• What Length Is Best for LinkedIn Articles?
• How Do I Publish Articles on LinkedIn?
• Is There a Way to Start an Article and Come Back to It Later?
• Can I Preview My Articles Before Publishing?
• Where Can I Find My Article After It’s Published?
• Who Can See My Article After It’s Published?
• Where Can I Share My Article After It’s Published?
• How Can My Audience Engage with My Article?
• Can I Publish Articles Through the LinkedIn Mobile App?
• What Are Some Best Practices for Publishing LinkedIn Articles?

What Is a LinkedIn Article?

LinkedIn articles are pieces of content you publish on the social networking platform to provide value to your readers and increase connections and engagement. They’re like any content you’d publish elsewhere, like a blog post or a resource article. The difference is this content lives on LinkedIn and you share it natively through a personal profile, company page, and the home feed. You can create and publish articles on LinkedIn to:

• Share professional experiences and stories
• Give industry insights on specific topics
• Advise professionals in your field
• Share opinions about industry trends or developments
• Develop content marketing messages to support your brand

LinkedIn articles differ from updates because they’re longer, more focused, and in-depth. An example of a LinkedIn update may be something short, like reminding your network that the window to apply for a specific job posting closes at the end of the week.

Why Should I Publish an Article on LinkedIn?

There are a variety of reasons your company can benefit from sharing articles on LinkedIn, including:

Providing Value to Your Connections

One of the primary goals of any type of content marketing is to provide value to your audience. Through LinkedIn, you have the advantage of learning more about your connections, followers, and subscribers from their profiles. This ease of information can tell you who’s reading, sharing, and interacting with your pieces. When you learn more about your audience, you can tailor your articles to keep their interest and share the information for which they’re looking, in a place where they already spend time.

Preventing Content Redirect

On social media, content that lives natively on your platform may perform better than content linked from another source. Why? Because it doesn’t require people to take any extra steps to view or engage with it. Think about your shopping habits when running errands. Would you rather go to a store like Target, where you can get everything in the same place, or have to drive from specialty store to specialty store to get all your items? You’d likely pick option one.

People looking for good content may choose the same. They want to get as much information in one spot without getting a redirect somewhere else. By sharing your content natively through LinkedIn, either as your business page or on your personal profile, you’re providing people everything they need to read, review, and engage without leaving the website or app.

Sending Notifications When You Share Content

Your connections can set their notification preferences to receive updates to their account when you post a new article. Notifications are a way to alert your audience directly when you share new content and keep the pieces from getting lost in the endless home feed scroll. Like you may do on other social media channels, you can request that people follow or subscribe to your content on LinkedIn within the posts where you share your articles.

Encouraging Article Shares for Better Reach

Anyone who sees your article on LinkedIn can share it with their connections, to other social media platforms, or with a direct link to the content. Content syndication, or sharing your pieces through different channels, is just one way to increase your audience engagement. LinkedIn makes it easy to do this by giving you another platform in which you can share articles. They also make social sharing easy, letting your audience syndicate your content for you.

As you may do with notifications, you can also ask people to react to and share your content right within the feed post that contains the link to your article.

Developing Content That Positions You as a Thought Leader

Developing thought leadership is the process of showing your audience, competition, and the public that you have expertise in your niche or industry. Companies often want to be thought leaders because with that comes audience trust, brand loyalty, more engagement, and likely more sales. But how can you get that reputation? By using content marketing to explain what you know and provide valuable, well-researched, and insightful information to your audience.

Sharing your articles on LinkedIn is a way to do this, not just with the people who already follow you, but if they share it with their connections, that’s a wider reach of people within your industry who may trust your research, opinions, and advice. If you’re looking for content topics to establish your thought leadership, request your free content analysis from CopyPress. The report can show you gaps in your content strategy where you can capitalize on the information your audience is looking for but you, or your competitors, don’t yet provide.

“CopyPress gives us the ability to work with more dealership groups. We are able to provide unique and fresh content for an ever growing customer base. We know that when we need an influx of content to keep our clients ahead of the game in the automotive landscape, CopyPress can handle these requests with ease.”

Kevin Doory

Director of SEO at Auto Revo

Humanizing Your Brand

Content marketing helps develop and share your brand voice and company personality with potential leads and loyal customers. Sharing LinkedIn articles is another way to get your company essence out in the world. No matter your angle, you can let it shine through in your articles and attract the audience with which you want to work and converse.

Related: 6 Ways To Be a Successful Business on LinkedIn

Who Can Publish an Article on LinkedIn?

Any individual account or company page can publish articles on LinkedIn. This is a fairly recent development for company pages, something that rolled out within the last few years. Before that, you could only publish articles from personal accounts with you as the author. That wasn’t ideal for sharing content written by your marketing team or from freelance writers. Now, content admins and super admins from company pages can post articles as the business.

Content admins can create and manage content on a page, such as updates, stories, events, and jobs. Super admins have unlimited access to all features for a LinkedIn company page. If you have either of these privileges, you can visit the “My pages” modal on the left side of the LinkedIn homepage and click the correct page name to access the dashboard that lets you post an article to the company page.

How Often Should I Publish Articles on LinkedIn?

Hootsuite recommends businesses post on LinkedIn at least once per day, but no more than five times in 24 hours. But this isn’t just for articles. It also includes all posts, such as curated content from other companies, job postings, and other updates. While there may not be a specific number of articles recommended to post within a week or month, it’s important to stay consistent and develop a posting schedule that works for your team and within your greater content strategy.

For example, you may share an article on LinkedIn once per week or once per month, and at a certain time. This can help your audience learn when to look for your content so they can come back and read your latest pieces. You may also consider starting a LinkedIn Newsletter through your company page. This allows your connections to subscribe and receive notifications when you publish something new. Through LinkedIn Newsletter, you can publish one article every 24 hours, though you don’t have to do it that frequently if it’s not the best option for your team.

What Length Is Best for LinkedIn Articles?

Image via Unsplash by @alexbemore

If you wonder how long your LinkedIn articles should be, you may get a different answer from every source you visit. Some argue to keep the articles short, like blog posts, between 500 and 700 words. Others say to make them longer, between 1,500 and 2000 words for better engagement. So which source is right? It’s a trick question. Your audience is the right source. They can tell you which type of articles work best for your business on LinkedIn. Your industry may play a role, too.

When you first share articles on LinkedIn, you may repurpose old content you’ve already written and shared on other platforms, such as through your blog or an email newsletter. Try sharing this repurposed content of various lengths to see which ones gain the most traction with your audience. This can tell you which types they’d prefer to read and share.

Related: Why Word Count Is Important

How Do I Publish Articles on LinkedIn?

Use these steps to help you publish an article on LinkedIn:

1. Log Into Your Account

On a desktop or laptop computer, open your preferred web browser and navigate to LinkedIn. Click the “Sign in” button, in the top right corner of the window. Enter your email address or phone number and your password to log in. You can also “Sign in with Apple” or create a LinkedIn account if it’s your first time using the service.

2. Create a Post

After signing into your account, the home dashboard loads automatically. Find the post widget at the top of the page. Click the “Write article” option. This takes you to a new page where you can write your content.

3. Write a Headline

Choose a headline for your article. Click in the headline box and type it there. If you’re unable to click in the headline field, one of your browser extensions may block your access. LinkedIn notes that Grammarly and Lazarus may cause this issue. You can solve the problem by disabling the extensions and refreshing the page.

Related: Your Definitive Guide To Writing Attention-Grabbing Headlines

4. Add a Cover Image

The cover image accompanies your article and appears above the text when people view it. Click within the gray box that says “No cover image uploaded” to select an image from your drive. LinkedIn recommends using an image sized at 1280 x 720 pixels to best fit in the image container. Once you’ve uploaded the image, you also have the option to add an image credit or caption. You can remove or replace the image by hovering over it and clicking the garbage can icon.

5. Craft Your Content

Click below the image container, in the section that says “Write here. Add images or video for visual impact” to develop your article content. You can type directly into the text box or copy and paste your content from a word processing program. For text content, you have the option to choose between paragraph text and H1 and H2 headings. You can also include ordered and unordered lists, blockquotes, linked, and include bold, italic, and underlined content. You also have the option to add additional media to your articles like:

• Images: Drag and drop or upload images from your computer within the text.
• Videos: Share a video link from a source like Vimeo or YouTube.
• Slides: Share a link to a slide deck from a source like Prezi or SlideShare to have it appear in the text like a widget.
• Links: Share a link to a web page, social media profile, or other internet content to have it appear in the text like a widget.
• Snippets: Add a code snippet within the text of your article.

6. Publish the Article on LinkedIn

When you’ve finished writing your article and adding additional media, click the blue “Publish” button in the top right corner of the editor. Your article must have a title before you can click the button. In the new “Share” window, add additional text information as you would for a regular LinkedIn post. You can also add hashtags related to your industry or article topic.

Change the audience on your post, showing who can view the article, or change the audience for who can comment on it. When you’re satisfied with your post and settings, click the blue “Publish” button in the bottom right corner of the pop-up window.

7. Promote Your Article

You can promote your LinkedIn article by sharing it on the service, to other social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, or by sharing the link elsewhere, like in an email newsletter. You can also boost your article post through your paid advertising campaigns with LinkedIn. Boosting a post can help you reach more users.

Is There a Way To Start an Article and Come Back to It Later?

Yes, you can start a draft of an article on LinkedIn and come back and finish it later. The editor page has a publishing menu that allows you to create a new article, view your published articles, and view your drafts. Click the “My drafts” option from this menu and a new pop-up window appears with your current drafts. From here, you can click which article you’d like to return to, or delete any drafts you no longer intend to finish.

Can I Preview My Articles Before Publishing?

Unlike other editor programs, you can’t view a preview of your article before publishing from anywhere other than the creation editor. Your published post should look nearly identical to the content in the editor once it’s live on LinkedIn. You can, however, share a link to the draft of the post before it’s published to get feedback from your team members. Those people can view the post as if it was live online, even if the article is still in the draft phase. If you want to use this feature to preview the article before publishing, follow these steps:

1. From the menu bar at the top of the editing window, click the drop-down arrow next to the words “Publishing menu”.
2. Select “Share draft” from the list.
3. Copy the generated link from the pop-up box.
4. Open a new window or tab in your browser.
5. Paste the link into the address bar.
6. Preview your post.

Where Can I Find My Article After It’s Published?

Articles on company pages show up under the “Posts” tab. Articles on an individual profile page show up under the “Activity” tab. You can also view all your published articles on the editor page by accessing the publishing menu from the toolbar. Select the “My articles” option from the drop-down list. A pop-up window appears, showing you all the articles you’ve published on that page or account.

Who Can See My Article After It’s Published?

Your connections and followers can see your article in their news feeds after you publish it. If people signed up to receive notifications from your company or profile, they may also access your article through the notifications tab. People may search for and find your article both on and off LinkedIn, depending on your profile privacy settings.

If you have your articles, profile, or company page set to “anyone” or public visibility, the service can distribute your content across the platform and around the internet. People can view your public profile or company page through search engines, the LinkedIn platform, and on affiliate and approved third-party services like email clients. Make sure your profile or page is public to get the most reach from your articles and to help with search engine optimization (SEO).

Where Can I Share My Article After It’s Published?

LinkedIn lets you share your article as a post on your company page or another account, or in a message. You can also share it directly on Facebook or Twitter. You have the option to copy the link, too. This can let you share it as an anchor link on your website or blog, through an email newsletter, or anywhere else you can paste a link. If you share the article as a post to another company page or personal profile, you can also embed that post into your website or blog.

How Can My Audience Engage with My Article?

People can share your article in the methods we explained above, the same way you could share it with other sources if you choose. Each article has a host of reactions people can choose to show that they’ve read or noticed your content. The reaction options include:

• Like
• Celebrate
• Support
• Love
• Insightful
• Curious

Users can add comments if you leave them enabled. Comments can include text, emojis, and photos. Besides interacting with the article itself, if the piece is part of a weekly newsletter that you send through LinkedIn, there’s an option at the top of the article to subscribe and to follow the author at the bottom of each post. All these options matter because they can help you track engagement with your posts and people’s interest in what you have to say through a variety of means.

Can I Publish Articles Through the LinkedIn Mobile App?

No, you cannot currently publish an article through the LinkedIn mobile app. You also cannot publish articles by signing into the site through the web browser on your mobile device. The only way you can publish an article on LinkedIn is to sign in to your account on a desktop or laptop computer and access the main dashboard through your web browser.

What Are Some Best Practices for Publishing LinkedIn Articles?

Use these best practices when creating your LinkedIn article content:

• Think visually: Take advantage of creating custom cover images and sharing media content throughout your articles to capture audience attention.
• Focus on readability: Craft content like you would on any other platform by using headings, bulleted lists, short paragraphs, and media to make your articles scannable and easy for readers to digest.
• Use calls-to-action: End your articles with strong calls-to-action (CTAs) to encourage your readers to take the next step into the marketing funnel. This may include asking people to subscribe to your newsletter, using a specific reaction button to share their thoughts, or posing a question that starts a discussion in the comments.
• Drive engagement and viewership: Use techniques that get the most eyes on your articles, such as tagging the personal profile for the author to encourage reposting, or sharing the article multiple times over a long period on your company page.

According to LinkedIn, the most successful articles are on topics that lend themselves to conversation. If you want that kind of content for LinkedIn and beyond, give CopyPress a call. We write articles that get people talking about your business on LinkedIn and all your content channels.

CopyPress

March 20, 2022