LinkedIn announced a new content publishing platform this week.
It’s exciting to see LinkedIn expand into original content. When sites add content it’s usually to their benefit and to the benefit of the site’s audience. I love reading professional content about specific industries and about business management. There is a lot of this content shared on LinkedIn and there is a lot of original content shared in the groups as well.
But this new publishing platform should give business owners and content creators a little pause.
Here is a snippet from the announcement:
Starting today, LinkedIn is opening up our publishing platform to our members, giving them a powerful new way to build their professional brand. When a member publishes a post on LinkedIn, their original content becomes part of their professional profile, is shared with their trusted network and has the ability to reach the largest group of professionals ever assembled. Now members have the ability to follow other members that are not in their network and build their own group of followers.
Here is an example of what the content looks like.
The basic concept is nothing really new. LinkedIn is getting people to publish original content on its site. LinkedIn is thinking more like a media company. They’re publishing useful, relevant and interesting articles that are original. The only difference is that instead of LinkedIn hiring writers to do the writing they’re having the users create the content.
This is where you should pause before publishing a bunch of original posts on this new platform.
LinkedIn Owns This Unique Content
As with all social media, this is about balance.
When you publish content on a platform like this publishing platform you’re giving up ownership of your content. This content belongs to LinkedIn. They can use it to generate more users and more ad revenue.
The benefit to your and other users is that you can use the content to attract new connections that can lead to a better job or even more clients for your business.
The alternative to publishing original content on a platform like this is to publish the content on your own blog. Then you can use something like The Snippet Strategy to share that content on social media (including LinkedIn) to attract traffic to your site where you get your target clients into your sales funnel.
Conclusion
It will be interesting to see how this platform does. I’m sure that as users we’ll get to read some really great content and that’s exciting. I’m going to keep an eye on things and probably dig deeper into the people sharing content that interests me. I’ll check out their blogs and see where it goes.
The LinkedIn platform can be an opportunity, but remember that for now it’s just another way for LinkedIn to builds its content. It’s still generally better to publish content on your own platform and use that content to get followers.
But maybe publishing every once in a while on LinkedIn would be a good mix.
We’ll have to wait and see.
Action Step: Publish content on your own platform and use The Snippet Strategy to promote it. Maybe publish a unique post on LinkedIn once in a while and see if it generates new connections and traffic to your site.