A few weeks ago, I wanted to play a deeper LinkedIn game. I said to myself that I should go deep into writing long-tail articles natively on LinkedIn. Natively here means I will write and publish articles on LinkedIn. The idea behind it was that I’d like to share my honest opinions and ideas with the world when it comes to marketing strategy and business. If you noticed, everybody can write a direct post on LinkedIn but to write a structured article that comes with a proper flow and narrative, now that is not easy. And I happened to be doing a good job in this department (I think).
Man, I was wrong—so wrong about LinkedIn. After publishing ten articles there, I noticed all of them didn’t perform well. Despite having 26,000 followers on the platform, the engagement level was pathetic. People didn’t read them because they didn’t know those articles exist. I compared the engagements I have there with random postings on the platform after that. True enough, LinkedIn is treating those direct postings way better than how they are treating published content there. The gap is pretty far.
I had my own reasons why I decided to publish on LinkedIn a couple of months back. The platform is a great lead generator among all social media platforms, that’s my first reason. Unlike others, I don’t play LinkedIn to network but to push my written content for eyeballs. And from these eyeballs, I’m able to convert them into paid customers. Since 2013, LinkedIn has been doing a great job until recently. The other good thing I found out about publishing long articles on LinkedIn is that, Google index them. When Google index my content, obviously I will be searchable through my articles. On top of those two reasons, I already have slightly a large followings there. And how genius (read, not so clever) I am to think that LinkedIn will push my articles to them via the feed.
They don’t.
Enough, no more publishing my long-tail articles on LinkedIn moving forward. That’s for sure. Now I know that LinkedIn loves postings more than native publications. Every single piece I write from now on will be published elsewhere but here. Perhaps I should come up with my own asset and publish stuff there too. I know there are a few platforms out there that are better options than LinkedIn, and many of them pay good money for content.
What about LinkedIn then? Well, publishing on this platform I can safely say that it is a waste of time. That’s my conclusion. They are no longer serious about native content there. As I said, they prefer postings instead. The more posts you have there, the better—according to them. LinkedIn as I know them, they don’t pay for long-tail content either. And I’m looking at LinkedIn only as one of the means to distribute my articles just like other social media channels, nothing more. It’s all about generating traffic from LinkedIn and bringing it back to the articles on the other platform.
Now remember this. If there are people out there telling you about LinkedIn being a great platform to publish long-tail articles and give their reasons why, run the other way and don’t turn back.
Don’t believe them!
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