LinkedIn has announced that users can now publish long-form posts known as Articles directly to their company pages.
Articles are much like blog posts in and of themselves. The difference is that Articles are housed natively within LinkedIn; blog posts are housed on a separate website such as the company’s site. Previously, Articles were only available to personal profiles, and they first introduced in 2014.
As with all social media options, there are pros and cons to using Articles. Among the pros are:
- They are another effective way to connect with your LinkedIn audience.
- They take advantage of an audience that may or may not be clicking through and/or reading blog posts on your site.
- They are another outlet to help develop a reputation for your company as a trusted thought leader in your industry.
- They allow you to encourage your audience to take valuable next-step actions, like following your company’s LinkedIn Page, clicking through to your website, or downloading a resource your company has produced.
- They provide direct access to detailed audience insights within LinkedIn to learn about the people reading and interacting with the content. In other words, you’ll be able to gather specific information about your target audience, and then refine your strategies and content to share the most appealing bits with the key decision-makers you want to reach.
However, there are some pretty sizable cons such as:
- They are not housed on your owned media. Should LinkedIn change the rules for Articles – or take them away completely – you’re at LinkedIn’s mercy. All of that work and content could be restricted or lost.
- Tracking what brought folks to your website from LinkedIn becomes much more complicated. You can potentially track exactly what brought folks to your website from LinkedIn, or an Article specifically, but it will require setting up appropriate tracking codes ahead of time. Without the knowledge or manpower to do that, your website data (from Google Analytics, for instance) may be failing you or leading you in a wrong direction.
Given this new outlet, it may be worth taking a glance at LinkedIn’s information regarding publishing there, weighing the pros and cons for yourself, and then deciding whether it’s worth it to give this a go for your business. We’d love to hear your thoughts!