LinkedIn Pulse
LinkedIn is arguably a very effective tool for helping websites and businesses get more traffic. The platform has the tools you need to get more exposure and quickly reach your target audience with relevant content. But how do you do that?
One great way is leveraging LinkedIn Pulse. It is a publishing platform that helps you share your thought on LinkedIn. If used well, LinkedIn Pulse can serve as an excellent addition to your current marketing strategies, helping you achieve better results.
In this post, we will be showing you what LinkedIn Pulse is and how to post on the platform. So, read on to see how to publish on LinkedIn Pulse – and in just a few steps.
What is LinkedIn Pulse?
Publishing your thought on social media can be a great tool for helping you build a good reputation for your business online and reaching a larger audience. This strategy has worked for several businesses across a wide range of niches and industries. And with LinkedIn Pulse, you can take social media publishing a step further and better engage with your target audience.
LinkedIn Pulse is a newsfeed for LinkedIn users. The platform allows you to self-publish content right to your audiences. Although it was originally created for influencers, LinkedIn has now made it a tool every member on the platform can use to create and publish their own content for their followers.
The tool generates news stories, insights, and blog posts from both individuals and businesses and shows them to members based on their interests. That means members only see the content they would love to see. At the same time, members can also tailor their own feed to see specific types of content they are interested in. They can also search posts by popularity and category.
What more? LinkedIn Pulse allows you to better understand your readers by showing you analytics of their demographics. You can see their locations, industries, job titles, and sources through which they view your content.
Who Uses LinkedIn Pulse?
We intend to make this post as simple as possible, so you can make the most out of it. So, let’s see which set of people LinkedIn Pulse is most useful for.
The tool is useful for a wide range of users – and for different purposes. That includes thought leaders, experts, business owners, B2B marketers, job seekers, and recruiters. But because LinkedIn is particularly designed for professionals, Pulse seems to be most useful for B2B brands.
After publishing an article on Pulse, LinkedIn will notify all your connections about it, hence helping you get the content to as many people as possible.
Why Should You Use LinkedIn Pulse?
You definitely must have picked one or two reasons you might need to consider LinkedIn Pulse for your brand from all we have said above. But if you are still not convinced if you should utilize the platform, here are some more motivations to help you decide.
· It helps you better connect with your audience
This is probably the major benefit of using Pulse. It is designed to help you grow and nurture professional relationships. You know that with a platform like LinkedIn, your audience is not just anybody. You have a specific target audience and also know what type of content they would be interested in.
Pulse comes as a means of getting your content to your audience quickly. It helps you build visibility online and help create an engaging community for your brand. Apart from helping to boost your visibility on search engines – just like blog posts on your website, Pulse content also gets to reach your audience on LinkedIn every time you post. Why? LinkedIn will always notify them.
That way, you can be sure your content will not be lost among the crowd but reach just the people you want it to reach.
· It helps you engage your audience with useful content
There is nothing that attracts and engages users on LinkedIn as useful and quality content. Remember, it is a place where social and professional networking combine. So, you can’t be passing junks there and expect people to engage with your content. They will only engage, interact, and connect with you if you are consistently dishing out useful and quality content that aligns with their goals.
Therefore, using Pulse to post relevant and inspiring content will give you an ultimate avenue to build an engaged customer base without stress.
· It provides easy content marketing
LinkedIn Pulse comes as a much easier way for thought leaders and business owners to publish articles without having to learn how to use a content management system. That makes it extremely useful for the busy type of people who just don’t have the luxury of learning how to use any tool to reach their audience.
· It can help you generate more traffic to your website
It is not uncommon to see some companies and brands convert their blog posts into LinkedIn Pulse content. They do this so they could get more people to be interested in their ideas and then guide them back to their website.
So if you are looking to generate more targeted traffic to your website, you can leverage LinkedIn Pulse. Just make sure you don’t have the same content posted on your website and on Pulse, so it doesn’t look like duplicate content in the search engines.
Now that you know what LinkedIn Pulse is and what benefits you can enjoy from it, let’s dive deeper to see how it works exactly.
How Does LinkedIn Pulse Work?
By now, you should be familiar with the LinkedIn homepage. But what you might not know is that most of the content you see there comes from Pulse. Yes, LinkedIn brings Pulse content straight to the homepage feed to be visible to more people.
On a weekly basis, LinkedIn sends out email digests containing new posts to Pulse users. What users need to do is just to get either the Android or iOS app for LinkedIn Pulse and begin enjoying amazingly useful content pushed to them. At first, they don’t necessarily need to follow any publisher to get useful content; by just login in, LinkedIn will push relevant content to them based on their connections and industry.
There are many options on the app that allows users to get personalized news. They can search for content based on different criteria, save posts for a later time, and follow authors with just a click of a button. All these actions are what determine the type of content users will receive in the future.
Whenever a post that might interest them is published, they will automatically get a notification from the app. They also get notified when authors they follow post any content on their Pulse.
How to Publish On LinkedIn Pulse: Step By Step Approach
To start publishing on LinkedIn Pulse, there are two ways to get started. One way is to select “Pulse” from the “Interests” dropdown menu in your navigation panel. Once you select it, it will take you straight to Pulse homepage, from where you can choose “Publish a post” in the upper right-hand corner to create your post.
The other way is to choose “Publish a post” directly on your LinkedIn homepage. That will also take you to the publishing panel, where you can start writing your Pulse post.
So, let’s see the step-by-step guide to writing a Pulse post.
Step 1: Choose a topic
Once you have located where to start writing your post, the next thing that you should sort out is what topic to create content about. There is a wide range of options to explore here. You can choose to write a post about something that particularly interests you in the industry or something relevant to your business or brand.
You can think back on what you have benefited from in your career or advice you would like to give someone just entering into your field or industry. You can write about trending issues in the industry or useful solutions to major challenges people face there.
Another way you can get inspiration for your topics is to use the “Writing ideas” tab on the top left-hand corner of the page. It will give you ideas into potential trending topics that your readers might be interested in.
Once you have your topic, take it a step further by getting relevant keywords to include in the post. There are lots of keyword research tools out there you can use for this. Then, use Answer the Public to get wider angles to touch in your post.
Step 2: Create an interesting headline
Your headline is very important when creating Pulse content. In fact, it is what helps you to stand out and attract more people to your post. It is what readers see to decide if they are interested in what you have to say. That means if your headline is not catchy and relevant enough, you may not get too many people to read and engage with your post. So strive to get this right before moving on.
Make your headline interesting, concise, and use relevant keywords. Create the impression of authority by using numbers, facts, and statistics in your headline. Keep it short and straightforward. Let’s see some examples of headlines that perform best on LinkedIn Pulse.
Best performing headlines on LinkedIn Pulse
- How-to posts: According to statistics, these types of posts perform best on LinkedIn Pulse, generating the most views, likes, comments, and shares. Examples of how-to posts include “How to publish a post on LinkedIn Pulse,” “How to establish your brand message,” etc.
- Listicles: This is another type of content performing well on LinkedIn Pulse. They get slightly more engagement in the form of views, like, comments, and share than a post that is not a listicle type. An example of such posts includes “5 ways to boost brand visibility with social media.”
Least performing headlines on LinkedIn Pulse
- Question posts: This is a type of post where the headline poses a question. Research shows that this type of post performs poorly across the board compared to other forms of posts. An example of such posts includes “Why use LinkedIn Pulse?”
Step 3: Create your content
Now that you know what topic to write about, keywords to use, and the right headline to use, the next thing is going ahead to create your post. When writing your LinkedIn post, it is important to maintain a clear and authentic message and voice. Your post should be clear, concise, interesting, and free of spelling errors.
Step 4: Add an image
That LinkedIn is a professional network doesn’t mean everything has to be buttoned up and text-only. You can make your posts more engaging by adding some appealing visuals you think people would love. Add a relevant image as a header image and include a couple of other images in the body of the post. That will help reinforce your points and also help break up long blocks of text.
Step 5: Add tags and publish your post
Once you have finished writing your article, add relevant tags to the post to make it easier for others to find. Then you can now go ahead and publish the post.
Once you publish the post, it will be automatically added to your profile and will also appear in your “Posts” section. Your followers and connections will also get a notification that you just published a post. If they have subscribed to daily emails from Pulse, they will also get an email notification about it.
That doesn’t mean users who aren’t following you cannot also see your post. So far they fit within your industry and share similar connections, they can also get a notification about the post. And if they find it really interesting and useful, that may convert them to a follower eventually.
Tips for Using LinkedIn Pulse
Achieving the best result with LinkedIn Pulse is similar to succeeding with any content strategy. Before you start publishing posts on the platform, first take your time to understand it and know how it works. Work on your tone and make it appropriate to your audience – remember you will be serving professional audience here, and your tone should reflect the same. Some other things to keep in mind in order to enjoy the most from LinkedIn Pulse are:
- Conduct keyword research before writing a post
Remember that keywords are crucial in helping your target audience find your content – both on LinkedIn and outside. So before you write any post, conduct mild keyword research to know what relevant keywords to use in the post. When you have them, use in your headline and in the body of the post.
- Use appealing headlines
We have mentioned this earlier, but it’s okay to mention it again. That’s because your headline plays a crucial role in determining if your audience will read your post or not. So think of a headline that will capture your audience’s attention and make them want to read your post. Your headline should be short, compelling, concise, and simple.
- Promote your posts
LinkedIn will indeed help you do a lot of publicity for your posts. But you can’t rely on the platform to do all the work. That may not bring the best result for you. So, take a step too and cross-promote your content on your other social media sites like Facebook and Twitter.
- Publish frequently
To regularly keep your audience engaged and build a community for your brand, you will need to regularly post on LinkedIn Pulse. To make it easier for you, you can have a post calendar to help you plan your content. Frequently posting means your audience can rely on you for fresh and constant content.
- Choose quality and relevant images
That you need to add images to your post doesn’t mean you can just push in any type of image. You will need to choose quality and relevant images. You don’t want your audience to back out from reading your post because of the wrong choice of images.
- Publish at the right time
Your audience on LinkedIn are professionals – you need to regularly remind yourself that. So, it’s important to keep a posting time that these people are most likely going to check their feed and find your post. There is no need to post content that your audience won’t be available to read before it gets buried in their news feed.
- Be mindful of duplicate content
You may be tempted to want to post the same content on your LinkedIn and website to get the best result from both worlds. But that is a practice you need to consciously avoid. It can do more harm than good.
When your content appears twice on the web, search engines see it as duplicate content and will penalize your website for it. If you would like to publish the same content on both platforms, there are two ways you can go about that:
- Publish a complete version of the content on your website and only write a teaser post on LinkedIn. That will cause people to want to visit your website to read the full story. That will mean huge and targeted traffic for your site.
- Rewrite the article and publish different versions on each of the platforms.
LinkedIn Post vs. LinkedIn Articles: What’s the Difference?
Well, this is a common question people asked today whenever we talk about LinkedIn Pulse posts. They always want to know if it’s the same thing with LinkedIn posts because the two seems to be avenue on LinkedIn to share content. But really, the two aren’t the same. LinkedIn posts are different from LinkedIn articles (Pulse posts). Let’s see some of these differences in the following few paragraphs.
LinkedIn articles are not limited in characters
Unlike LinkedIn posts, where you are limited to about 700 characters for personal posts and 1300 for company post, there is no limitation with LinkedIn Pulse posts. You can write as many words as you like just to express your thought and meet the expectations of your audience with each post. That means with LinkedIn Pulse, people can read more information about what you have to share.
LinkedIn Pulse has a long term effect
Compared to LinkedIn posts, Pulse articles tend to perform for a longer time. Even months after you posted, people can still find your LinkedIn articles. But with LinkedIn posts, you have a very short time to have your audience read what you have for them in the post.
This is how a LinkedIn post works:
- You make a post
- After publishing, people will see it in their newsfeed
- A few days after publishing, the post disappears and stops showing to your audience as other people make good viral posts.
But with LinkedIn articles, people can see it on your profile even after a long time of publishing. They can also find it via Google and get to read it from the email sent to them at the time of publishing.
However, LinkedIn articles are served to a smaller group of people. And that is one downside of LinkedIn Pulse compared to LinkedIn posts. LinkedIn posts are designed to reach a larger audience than articles, which are only for members of LinkedIn Pulse.
Final Note
It is okay to diversify your content any time you feel you are not getting enough reach and engagement for your business and brand. You can take things a step further than just writing blog posts on your website. You can take the game to other platforms to gain more views, readers, followers, and customers for your business. And LinkedIn is one of the useful sites to use for this.
However, not everyone realizes that they can post full articles on LinkedIn. With LinkedIn Pulse, you can write long articles on LinkedIn to better engage your audience and build credibility for your business on the platform.
In this post, we have highlighted some benefits of using the new publishing platform by LinkedIn and how you can get started with creating posts on it. We have also shown you some tips to make the most of the platform for your business. So take your time to go over the content again because it is all you need to get started with posting on LinkedIn Pulse.
