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Back in February, LinkedIn opened up its publishing platform, giving 25,000 members the ability to post original, long-form content and share it with their professional networks. The social media channel has since steadily been extending access to this feature, allowing users to build their individual brands, and share their expertise with customers, partners and potential prospects and employers.

Whether you’ve seen the pencil symbol appear on your homepage or are eagerly awaiting it, here are two things to know with regard to the publishing tool.

1. Publishing on LinkedIn doesn’t mean that you are an official “Influencer.”

LinkedIn’s Influencer designation is given to about 500 hand-picked thought leaders. According to the social network, influencers like Richard Branson, Deepak Chopra and Jack Welch, are viewed more as contributing editors who develop content that will engage members and align to their areas of professional interest.

LinkedIn’s publishing platform is meant to build on Influencer posts and the channel’s aggregated news content, and capture and share the knowledge and varied experiences of members. What B2B tech executives should find most interesting, however, is that their content could potentially be tagged, featured and end up listed next to an influencer post via LinkedIn Pulse, and see a significant boost in reads, shares and engagement as a result.

2. LinkedIn Shouldn’t Replace Your Blog.

Ginny Soskey of HubSpot offered this sound advice; LinkedIn shouldn’t become your sole or primary blogging platform. Plus, with Google’s Panda 4.0 algorithm changes, it’s even more important that tech companies are posting frequent, fresh, high-quality content to their own websites.

You may want to steer away from straight content duplication to LinkedIn, too, or you run the risk of being penalized in search rankings or having it taken down by the social network. So, the new(ish) publishing tool is rather one more avenue to consider as part of your content and social media strategies.

 


This post was first published by Beth Brenner on March Communications’ blog PR Nonsense.