Share the love - and your content

Valentine’s Day is fast approaching.  Have you bought that special person some flowers or chocolates?    If so, you’re going to actually hand it to them, right?  There’s no point buying a gift and not giving it.

And there’s no point writing an article but not telling people about it.  

Sure you can post the article on LinkedIn, but is that really enough?   I would suggest “no” for the following reasons:

1. You don’t have enough followers for it to go viral; it’s unlikely to make LinkedIn’s “Pulse” of curated news and let’s be honest, won’t get shared thousands of times
2. Your audience is unlikely to see it (let alone read) as very few people scroll through their LinkedIn posts
3. LinkedIn doesn’t show every post to everyone - it ranks them according to relevance and quality - so it may just appear in just 10% of your connections’ feed.

Now, you can take steps to improve your chances of your posts and articles being seen - increase your followers, add hashtags, ask people directly to like / share / comment on them, become Elon Musk, that sort of thing. 

But really what you need to do is have a better distribution network.  Tell the people that it’s aimed at, that you’ve written something they might find interesting.  Give that gift to the intended recipient (or recipients - and my valentine’s analogy might not work with that one!) 

What we recommend to our clients is that they run a search on LinkedIn for those people that might find it interesting - typically their target leads rather than friends and family - and then send them a message saying: “Hey, I wrote this; you probably didn’t see it; but thought you’d find it interesting. What do you think?”

Is it spammy? If you do this once every couple of months, then absolutely not - I’d argue you’re adding some value (assuming the post is interesting!)

Will it take a lot of time?  If you’ve got 1000 people that might be interested, then maybe - send 100-150 messages a day and it’ll take a week.  (shameless plug: this is a service we can offer clients) 

But is it worth it? Yes!  The thing is, a post is a “One-2-Many” broadcast.  You might get some views, some likes, but it’s unlikely to get much business for you.  A message is “One-2-One”, and actually makes someone feel special as a result. Of the 1000 people, you’re going to get at least 50-100 people to reply, and that’s when you can start up a conversation about the topic, the pain point you’re discussing, and see if it can lead to a sales opportunity.

In summary: you should definitely write content (it shows off your experience and knowledge) but make sure you distribute it effectively.  You’re not going to eat those chocolates by yourself, are you?   OK, maybe just one…  Happy Valentine’s! 

#phase2 #contentdistribution #valentines2021 #sharethelove #linkedinarticle #linkedintips #ContentMarketing