LinkedIn recently rolled out their new “publishing” feature. It’s pretty interesting, and definitely something to explore. It is not designed to take the place of blogging, but can be a great middle-ground for those not quite ready to launch a blog, but have something to say, or those trying to expand their reach. For lawyers blogging on their firm’s blogs, I highly suggest publishing to LinkedIn as well, using the “post” feature for several reasons:

  1. It will provide you more traffic to your profile.
  2. As a “post” it will remain static on your LinkedIn profile, while “updates” disappear.
  3. If you should leave your firm, the marketing department will either delete your content, or cleanse your name from your blog posts. Publishing them to LinkedIn will provide you an archive of your content.

For those currently blogging on their own sites, such as The Legal Watercooler, publishing a post on LinkedIn is another stream for your content. A stream with a large reach, lots of eyes, and analytics. Robert Algeri over at Great Jakes recently tested it and liked the analytics: LinkedIn’s new blogging platform = massive traffic.

We’d been hearing a lot of buzz about LinkedIn’s new “Long Form Posts” blogging platform – so we decided to do a test. We uploaded a blog post entitled  The Disappearing Homepage, which had previously been published to our own blog. And within 24 hours of posting the piece, we saw massive traffic:

  • 5,400 pageviews
  • 131 LinkedIn “likes”
  • 25 comments on LinkedIn
  • Over 500 shares on LinkedIn
  • >Over 1,300 people were now “following” our content on LinkedIn
  • 21 tweets (on Twitter, an entirely separate social media platform)
  • 30 Facebook shares (again, a separate social media platform)
  • 12 Google+ shares (again, a separate social media platform)

Convinced yet? Hopefully yes. So where is this feature located? It’s right there on your profile page. Hidden in the “update” section. LinkedIn Publish 1 Click on the “Create a Post” pencil, and the publishing platform with launch. LinkedIn Publish 2 If you know how to use Word, or use any blog platform, it’s as intuitive as it can be: Just type, highlight, hyperlink, ad a graphic, and publish. It’s really that simple. I do have one WARNING: Do not publish every post. Right now, every time someone in my network of more than 1200 connections publishes a post, I get a notification. As of today, there is no way to turn these notifications off … so until you can, you don’t want to overwhelm and annoy your connections. So go publish a post or two, and let me know how it works for you.   UPDATE: LinkedIn is still rolling this out. If you don’t have the pencil, go here to sign up for an early release.