How to become an insurance thought leader on LinkedIn
LinkedIn may offer the best opportunities among the many ways on social media to showcase your insurance expertise.
LinkedIn has become the de facto social platform for the professional. With more than half a billion users, it’s one of the most popular social networks while maintaining a taking-care-of-business sensibility that makes it a natural place for B2B marketing and networking. It was initially popular as only a recruiting and job searching tool, but LinkedIn has made significant strides to improve another aspect of its offering: thought leadership.
LinkedIn’s publishing platform allows users to create quality posts that are great for establishing expertise and sparking engagement with others. Here are a few tips on using the content you’re creating for your strategy to establish yourself as a thought leader on LinkedIn.
If you want to share information with your following and LinkedIn at large, you have two basic tools at your disposal: a post or an article, although it’s sometimes called a post.
Posts are short updates that are similar to a tweet on Twitter or a Facebook status update. You can create one easily from the home page by simply typing into the box that says “Share an article, photo, video or idea.” Posts are great for sharing curated content and things that you think others would also find interesting. You’re also able to add your own commentary to the post so you can put the item you are sharing in context.
Articles are similar to blog posts and should be treated as such. Most experts suggest making them longer than 500 words, though there doesn’t seem to be an upper limit. If you have 5,000 words worth of information to share on a subject, there is little reason to hold back. You can pick a featured image, create pull quotes and add featured slideshows, tweets, and Instagram posts to spice up your article.
Once you have written an article, share it in the form of a post. You want to get as many eyes on it as possible. You can even share articles multiple times through your posts.
Reusing content
One question that many people have is about reusing content you’ve created elsewhere on your LinkedIn blog as an article. This is a valid concern because posting duplicate content in other instances can result in Google and other search engines downgrading your page’s rank and making it more difficult to find.
Republishing a blog post on LinkedIn won’t have this negative effect on your traffic. One suggestion to help clarify the status for the search engines is to include the sentence:
“This post was originally published on [name of your website with a link to the original post]” at the bottom of your LinkedIn article. This will let search engines know that the original was on a different site.
Some people are also worried that if they re-purpose their content on LinkedIn, they’ll be forfeiting traffic that they would rather have going back to their own site. If your goal is to drive people from LinkedIn to your site, a good trick to use is a “Continue Reading” link. Instead of republishing the entire article, take the first few paragraphs and make them an article. At the end of the article, include the words “Continue Reading” with a link back to your original post. This will encourage anyone who wants to read the rest of your post to click through to your site in order to finish it.
This strategy can have a few downsides, however. A certain percentage of people won’t click through to your site. Now, not only have they not visited your site, they haven’t read your entire piece of content and are less likely to engage with you on LinkedIn.
Pressing ‘publish’ not the end
The strength of LinkedIn’s publishing platform is the increased amount of engagement that happens there. As long as your post has something to offer your audience, you’ll begin to get likes, shares, mentions and comments on your piece. It’s important that you continue to interact with people as they begin to contribute to your post. This is the lifeblood of any thought leader.
If you want to take things up a level, tag other influencers in your posts so they see when you share something you think they might be interested in. It is another great way to foster conversation among the people that you most want to be talking to on LinkedIn.
Your thought-leader journey has just begun.
Rick Fox is the president of Agency Revolution. He can be reached at rfox@agencyrevolution.com.
These opinions are his own.