Many business owners are well aware that now is the time to get involved in content marketing. After all, if you have your own brand then you need a branded content strategy to support it. However, a new innovation from LinkedIn might be just the thing to give all marketers that extra push toward content strategy as the social platform announced that individual users can now post blog entries—including those disseminated on their company’s blog—to their profiles. In just one simple click, companies can share their entries with their entire social network.
This is a great way for LinkedIn to up its ante. The site is no longer just a platform for professionals to connect with one another but for users to explore and connect to companies, as well.
This is huge news in the content marketing realm, and it’s just as big of news for your business if you’re looking to stay competitive this fiscal year. Your business needs to generate more revenue and in order to do so, you need to reach prospective customers constantly. But you can’t accomplish this without a comprehensive blogging strategy or plan in place to ensure that your content is always fresh and highly branded.
Realizing this, LinkedIn took to its own blog to divulge more details about its latest blogging venture, or what the company is referring to as “The Definitive Professional Publishing Platform.”
“Starting today, LinkedIn is opening up our publishing platform to our members, giving them a powerful new way to build their professional brand,” wrote Ryan Roslansky, director of product management at LinkedIn. “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.”
Here are some ways that you can maximize LinkedIn’s new blogging platform to support your business:
- Leverage your connections to brand content: Over 84 million people in the U.S. have a LinkedIn account, according to aggregated data from a Top Dog Social Media infographic. Chances are that your marketing department uses LinkedIn, as well. Leverage the information you are learning about others to craft the kind of content with which they will engage.
- Double your blog’s exposure: You’re already pushing blog content on social platforms like Facebook and Twitter, but since LinkedIn now offers the best of both the social networking and blogging worlds, you can use it to gain double exposure. For example, use the platform to promote a new whitepaper or infographic.
- Start Blogging Now: The only way to maximize your use of this new blogging platform is to get the content creation process started immediately. Do a quick Google search and you’ll see that LinkedIn’s new blogging platform is being touted as the newest thing to hit the content marketing scene. Needless to say, your competitors are going to start using the platform so you can’t fall behind.
Eighty percent of marketers plan to increase digital media spending in 2014 and
68 percent of consumers spend time reading content from a brand they are interested in. The facts prove that now is the time for content marketing, and LinkedIn’s recent announcement is giving us even more impetus to do so. It has
Edited by
Brooke Neuman
