A (Better) Alternative To Sharing Posts On LinkedIn
One of the contradictions on LinkedIn is that while LinkedIn tells us we should share relevant content with our networks, the algorithm doesn’t really reward us when we do so. Every time I publish my LinkedIn newsletter, a handful of people will share it with their networks. When I go look at their “share”, I can see they get very little engagement, and this goes for both shares with and without an introduction as to why or how they found it relevant.
So it appears that LinkedIn does not distribute a shared post as enthusiastically as one that we have authored ourselves. But let’s say you find some content on LinkedIn – maybe it’s something really interesting in your industry – and you would like to share it. How can you do so without being penalized? Or at least doing so without feeling it’s a waste of time?
Actually it’s pretty simple: you make it your own post. It will take a bit more effort than just sharing the content, but it’s worth it. Following is the method I have used for the past few years.
Let’s start the same way you would if you were going to share or repost something: you found something on LinkedIn that was interesting. It could be a post, event, video, or a newsletter, but you like this content, or one aspect of it, or the way the author has expressed their thinking.
Find the key points that you liked or want to expand on and write your own post on LinkedIn, elaborating on your opinion of the other person’s post.
You make a point of talking about the original post in your post, making the proper attribution. Either include a link to their original article in the body of your post or say you will include it in the comments section of your post. Where you put it the link is up to you and whether you feel having it in the body of the post will hurt or help (for what it’s worth I don’t think it matters much). But, you need to have this link. You got the idea for this post from the original author and not crediting them is just slimy.
End with a call to action to invite comments and further the discussion.
What you have effectively done here is taken an article you would have shared and turned it into your own post. I think of these as “book review” posts. I am not plagiarizing the book, I am praising it, and actually linking to it.
When you do this, the LinkedIn algorithm sees you hit publish on a piece of original content and you get credit for it in terms of better distribution. If you write this as an article, it even gets attached to your LinkedIn profile and is also searchable on both Linkedin and via Google.
More work? Yes. Better results and more engagement? Also yes.
