Writing and Publishing Articles on LinkedIn is not Worth it in 2023! Unless…

[French Version]

I hope you will forgive me for this clickbait title. Still, the LinkedIn algorithm is making it harder on all of us, and the organic visibility of articles seems to have decreased… compared to videos or, even worse, stories… Yes, I am indeed talking about LinkedIn's short-lived stories!

Let me put your mind at ease, though. LinkedIn articles still provide good and quality visibility, professional or sales contacts, interesting stats, and, most importantly, you can be sure that your articles are read/seen because they follow on from a CTA, a click on your post… This is not the case for the Views on your posts and the very strange way LinkedIn has to count them...

Indeed, LinkedIn takes into account two elements to count a view for your post: 300 milliseconds or 50% of display in the user feed (source LinkedIn, as shown in the image above, on the left). Honestly, counting as a real view a brief display of 50% of the post or one-third of a second seems a bit ambitious to me. As for videos, views are defined by the number of times your video has been watched during… three seconds or more… No comment.

I think LinkedIn is, unfortunately, using this on-steroids counting methods to highlight users who post, because if these users were to receive a real count of 40 views for a post instead of 400, they would soon stop contributing, spending time on LinkedIn, and therefore stop reading sponsored posts and watching videos!

By contrast, views for LinkedIn articles are counted after a CTA: the user click, which is only possible after a real and complete display of the post, and most of all, after the user actually reads it! I tend to have a lot more confidence in this type of scoring, and, therefore, I can appreciate the efficiency of an article that gets 300 to 400 real views, compared to a post that would show a score (boosted by LinkedIn) of 2,500 to 3,000 views.?

To get these 300, 500, or even 1,000 and more readers, you have to follow a few rules and know a few tricks that will drastically improve your publications' visibility and circulation. So yes, writing and publishing articles on LinkedIn is (almost) not worth it in 2021! Unless…

Unless you publish engaging, thematic, and original content!

It’s the first key to writing a successful article on LinkedIn. It’s foolish to believe that a botched piece, superficial, poorly written, with no reliable sources, lacking depth and research, could be of interest to anybody apart from your (generous) friends. To write an article like this one, ?Let’s Talk bout Com 5: 15 Major Social Networks: What Kind of Communication do You Need for Each of Them?, that had more than 1,500 readers in 20 days, I dedicated roughly 50 hours to researching, pouring through more than 50 different sources (French, European and American) and writing it. Write about things in your core business and, therefore, target your initial followers/subscribers! I’m not saying you shouldn’t venture into uncharted editorial territories, but this will require a lot more work. The initial visibility (that critical one, in the first 6 hours after the article's publication) will be a lot more challenging to achieve. It will also require a more intense promotion effort.

For the size of your article, Grégory Mancel, a consultant in digital strategy, presenting a study by Medium which specifies that your article should ideally be within a reading time of between 6 and 8 minutes, or approximately 1,500 to 1,800 words ... but much longer in-depth articles can reach success, if they are well written, well documented and above all, well structured... the proof is this article, not far from 3,000 words and it reads (easily) in 13 minutes and you're (still) on it! :)

Finally, pay attention to your original take on the matter, your angle; indeed, there are millions of articles that have been published on LinkedIn (I'm still looking for the exact number if somebody can help me out on this one with a trustworthy source?) and differentiating yourself is a hard-to-reach goal. To achieve that, I invite you to do a bit of research before writing another article on ??Ten things you need to know for efficient media relations and to finally get articles about you in the newspapers.? Check how many times the topic has been addressed before you give it a try, and define what original take you can have on the subject so that your article will be (again/finally) of interest to readers.

Unless you have a catchy, and, above all, not too long, title!

A study by OkDork (based on the analysis of more than 3,000 LinkedIn articles) showed that articles including ??How to?? in the title and listicles (10 solutions for, ten reasons why, 10 things to) were the highest performers, by more than 50%. Regarding title length, articles with titles between 40 and 49 characters long (maximum of 55 for a good SEO) have the most significant impact and are, therefore, read the most. (To evaluate your titles in English, you can try this tool "coschedule.com/headline-analyzer").?Avoid titles with questions as these tend to perform 20% less than informative or positive titles.

Unless you use good and creative illustrations!

The OkDork study clearly shows eight illustrations (images, diagrams, figures, highlights, Slideshare, videos, and stats) improve reading and comments/sharing. Please don’t steal pictures found on Google, and look for free image libraries instead. Several, such as Pixambo, Pixabay, Burst.Shopify, Skitter, Pexels, Fotomelia, Kaboompics, DevoStock, Picjumbo, etc., are quite good. There are more than 50 of them, and some have more than one million photos in store. They offer beautiful pictures, often quite professional-looking, in high resolution, and available for download under CC0 license, therefore free of use even for commercial purposes (you do sometimes have to credit the photographer, in which case it's always specified).

Unless you publish at the right time on this social network!

If you publish an article on LinkedIn for a American audience on a Sunday at 7.30 am, you will not get the same results as if you post on a Tuesday around 11 am. We will see below how the first hour and the next five, following the publication of your article, are crucial for the LinkedIn algorithm. Many platforms exist to schedule your posts on social media. You will have to pay for most of them (Agorapulse, Crowdfire, Social Pilot, Swello, Buffer, Hootsuite, Sendible, Onlypult, Sprout Social, eclincher, Postfity, etc.). Still, they usually offer a 30 day free trial period.

Regarding LinkedIn, my own experience and feedback from my networks (FR/US) show that publishing on Tuesdays and Thursdays around 11.30 am is most efficient. This way, the first of these six critical hours is right around lunchtime, when people usually have time to read articles. You should avoid posting on Mondays, which are famous in many countries for not getting anything done (except meetings), and on Fridays, when people rush to finish the week’s work (very French behavior), also a favorite day away from the office for a long weekend. Saturdays and Sundays are for rest… for you and your readers.

Unless you efficiently manage the first hour after publishing and the following five…

We’ve already acknowledged that the day and time of publication can significantly impact your article’s visibility. Still, you need to consider the first hour and the next five in your distribution strategy, as shown in this diagram about the life of an article on LinkedIn. Indeed, the LinkedIn algorithm will use the results of the first hour, on a small panel, to estimate your article's potential success if it's more widely distributed. In other words, if during the first hour your article only generates a weak or medium success, the chances that it will be correctly distributed are falling drastically as the algorithm is not going to push it to a much wider audience. To circumvent this problem of panel testing or limit the damage, you need to convince your community that they need to react and interact with your content.

Here are six ways to do this during the first hour:

1. Get real readings that are consistent with the article's reading time, and not a quick click from a good friend who stays 30 seconds on an article that shows a reading time of 20 minutes… This is the "dwell time", ie the time spent by your readers on your publication. This also allows Linkedin to take into consideration the part of your audience that reads your articles and consults the content without liking or commenting on them! And it's finally a smart way that LinkedIn has found to fight bots that automatically like and comment on articles.
2. Generate reactions correlated to the number of readings: like, applause, celebrate, etc. (10 readings should get you 5 to 6 reactions at a minimum).
3. Get smart comments and answer them (see below) for 5 to 10 % of your readers: 50 readers should get you a minimum of 3 to 5 comments.
4. Get people to share your article with a message; not just a simple share without any accompanying note; when you share a good article, you should say why you're sharing and @people (if you don't, it looks like a robot, or Pod did it, or even worse growth hacking tools like Jarvee).
5. Get people to @John_Smith in your comments: that means getting readers to invite others to read, comment, and share your article.
6. Get the word out that you have a new article to as many people as possible: use email, WhatsApp groups, Messenger, Skype, phone call, texts, social media, so that this first hour is a successful one!

?And in the next five hours, you should concentrate on the four following points:

1. Keep up with the six tactics we talked about above as much as possible. It is now more a marathon than a sprint.
2. Publish your article in relevant LinkedIn groups (no point in publishing an article about the future of organic farming 2021-2031 on a Linux 2.9 specialists group).
3. Send a message to your personal LinkedIn network to inform them that you just published a new article and try to add a personal touch each time… You don't mass mail your close contacts! As a matter of fact, don't use mass-mailing. The response rate is too low. ?
4. Do some (free) promotion for your article (see below).

After 6 hours, you can ease off: there is nothing more you can do to change your article’s visibility as defined by the algorithm. This was confirmed to me during a live exchange with Sandrine Chauvin (LinkedIn News Editorial Director for Europe, Middle East, and Latin America), hosted by Pauline Laigneau (founder of Gemmyo and Le Gratin) in December. You can see it here: (https://lnkd.in/d6PG5qG). Unless…?(yep, more Unless are coming, stay focused)

Unless you do a bit of promotion for your article!

I am not talking about paying to be seen, although LinkedIn offers it and gives you quite easily $50 to do so. I am talking about free and smart promotion! We will review five ways to promote articles, which are honest and bring some (and sometimes a lot of) visibility:

1. Publish in relevant LinkedIn groups, which are not always easy to find, and which will often require an English version of your article that you will need to publish almost concurrently.
2. Publish a link to your article as part of a comment for other authors’ articles or posts whose subjects are close or connected to your article. Hence the necessity to write a good article, well-sourced and without typos.
3. Send your article to some level 2 or 3 contacts through the Message feature; send a friendly message that contains a link to your article, but only if it's an excellent article, as you don't want to waste a contact opportunity…
4. Add relevant hashtags: think long and hard about the three hashtags that will accompany your article upon publication. Don’t put more, or the algorithm will think it’s spam, and you need to know how to be concise anyway.
5. Showcase your article in your profile under “Featured” (right under your “About” section, you can put up to 6 articles) and in the “Accomplishments” section (at the bottom, no limit). This will boost the visibility of the article and improve the SEO for LinkedIn and other engines. Just like Franck, founder of Streambox, did when he successfully launched his company, with only a LinkedIn page and two leading articles published over a week, each of which was read by more than 500 people, and shared more than 60 times, which is significant, considering his very B2B niche niche!

Unless you get noticed by a LinkedIn influencer…

LinkedIn influencers are like journalists. You need to get in touch with them and give them an article (a good one, that goes without saying) that is in line with their interests and those of their followers. If you don't do that, you are just wasting your time! There is a real incidence on your article's visibility when an influencer likes, comments on, or even better shares your article.

Unless you manage your message’s visibility on other media and in different languages!

Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, QQ, ... and 15 other social networks are here to help reinforce your article's visibility! It’s imperative that you publish a link/image and text that point to your LinkedIn article to create a bridge of readers from one social network to the other… Not everybody is on LinkedIn, but everybody can go there to read an interesting article!

Unless you manage comments accurately and smartly!

If somebody takes the time to write a sensible comment on your article, you have to respond and encourage a constructive dialog. Don't stay silent while you could start a conversation, do not think comments and shares are a due, a thank you/payment rewarding your article's quality. It's a sign of interest for sure and, more to the point, the beginning of a constructive exchange: we are talking about social networks. The purpose is obviously to be social and not to do some followers breeding!

Also, think of:

• Activating content distribution in your preferences

Change your public profile using the Settings and Privacy page to ensure your content will be distributed to your target audience. If you're visible by everyone and you clicked 'show' on Articles and activities in Public Profile Settings, your content is public and can be found on LinkedIn and elsewhere (https://www.dhirubhai.net/psettings/data-visibility).This means that even people with no LinkedIn account can see your content! Check this setting before you publish anything!

• Analyze the stats for your published articles!

Your stats are available two years after you create your article. You can find them through the button under the article, next to the views count in your activity/articles section.

Grouped under the title of the article, you will find the number of reactions, comments, views, shares and four sections: top 8 companies where your X readers work, top 8 jobs your readers hold, top 8 places your readers come from, and the number of times your article was found outside LinkedIn. I feel that many elements are missing (medium reading time, number of complete readings, etc.), but we have to be content with it! By cross-referencing specific data from these stats with comments and likes, you can sometimes identify future leads and get in touch with interesting people for a job or a consulting or training project.

• Never publish without proofreading first!

Before each publication, ask a friend or colleague if they think your article is relevant and don’t hesitate to improve it following their feedback, along with mistakes corrections.

If you want to send the article before publishing it, LinkedIn allows you to share it. In the editing menu, click on "Share draft" to get a link (top left corner) so that only those who you share the link with can read and comment on your article.

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The last word (finally!)

Quality articles published regularly will get you profile views, new professional contacts… and even orders!

Here is a screenshot of my profile's views and the impact of articles on the number of views per week. Depending on the article's success, we can easily see that each published article generates in the week of publication a wave of profile views. You can also see that when an influencer selects an article (or when your article is shared in somebody else's successful publication), it gives a new visibility to the piece, and therefore to your profile. Another interesting point is that each article that leads to a view of your profile also generates a small boost to your previously published articles!

There you have it, writing and publishing articles on LinkedIn can still prove useful in 2021, at least, I hope so, unless…!

I'm sure you have a few tricks to improve your articles' visibility on LinkedIn…

Let's share in the comments section!

║ Let's talk about COM #7 ║???Christophe Depernet?║?26 Jan 2021 ║ Title sticker illustration by?Lucie C.?║ English Version by?Veronique?║