What Happens When You Share Expertise in LinkedIn Articles?

by | Jun 17, 2018 | Learning, Social Media

There’s only one you in the world. No one else has traveled your exact professional path, experienced identical situations or learned the same lessons.

Of the more than 560 million LinkedIn users and counting, only you can tell your unique professional story.

That’s the big takeaway from analyzing 49 articles I posted to LinkedIn starting in May 2017. The top articles were largely inspired by my personal experience:

If you aren’t already posting LinkedIn articles, here are some reasons to consider it. And if you’re already writing articles, this may help you up your game.

Just over a year ago, I started an experiment on LinkedIn. I posted to LinkedIn every weekday for a month. Why? To test the data point that it takes 20 LinkedIn posts each month to reach 60% of your audience.

In developing an editorial calendar, one of the easy ways to share content was to repurpose my blog posts at carolineleach.com. This solved another problem – promoting my posts. Repurposing posts as LinkedIn articles reached a broader audience among my LinkedIn network.

In analyzing the data over the past year and reflecting on my experience, here’s what I learned in the form of benefits from regular article writing. By writing an article weekly, as I did, or probably even monthly, you’re likely to:

Create a sustainable writing schedule. When I began writing articles a year ago, there was a healthy backlog of blog posts. It was simply a matter of organizing the topics in a logical flow, making minor content updates to ensure timeliness, posting the articles and sharing them with my network.

Once the backlog was done, though, a weekly article needed to be written. With a busy professional position and an active family with two teens, where was the time going to come from?

Here’s one of the ways having teens can be a blessing. They generally sleep in on the weekends. That’s why early mornings on the weekends became my writing time. And the weekly article was ready to repurpose on LinkedIn during the week when more people visit it.

Committing to a weekly article pushed me to create a sustainable writing schedule every week. If you’re a lark like me, or a night owl like my teens, you can take advantage of early mornings or late nights. Or you could turn part of your lunchtime or your public transport commute into writing times.

There’s an ideal intersection. It’s between areas when you can carve out time and when your brain is operating a high level of efficiency. Look for those times.

Grow your network. My articles that attracted the most engagement have been those where I’ve done experiments and collected and analyzed related data. That made me wonder how my network grew between May 2017 and June 2018.

LinkedIn has a handy feature where you can download all of your connections into an Excel spreadsheet. BTW, this is a good practice to do every 3 to 6 months, so you always have an up-to-date record of your contacts. You never know when you might need it!

While I thought my network had grown over the last year, it was surprising to see connections were up more than 60%! There are many reasons for this, and I believe my weekly articles are a big one. Why? Because people mention them in their connection requests.

While connections went from about 1,900 to 3,160, followers also grew from zero to 440 in the same time period. The combined group is just over 3,600. That data helped me set a stretch goal for this year of 5,000.

Establish yourself as an expert and increase your influence. By sharing your professional expertise and your unique perspective, you can establish yourself as a thought leader in your area of focus.

How can you measure this? The growth in your network connections and followers gives you one indication.

You can also look at the trend of your profile views. How are they increasing over time? What’s the makeup of people looking at your profile? Is it the group you want to reach, whether it’s industry leaders, peers or recruiters?

You can also look at speaking requests. Because of my LinkedIn articles, I’ve been invited to speak to …

A highlight was joining the team of social influencers at the inaugural AT&T Business Summit in 2017. John Starkweather, Michelle Smith and I along with several others shared our experiences in LinkedIn articles. (Note: opinions expressed in this blog are my own.)

What’s next? This spring I did research on how people are using social media to boost their careers. That identified several people who are doing it well. I’ve begun interviewing people who are crushing it in social media and will start sharing profiles of them soon.

The ascendence of AI, artificial intelligence, and AR, augmented reality, are fascinating in how they are influencing social media. These are areas I look forward to researching and conducting experiments.

The best part about reflecting on that last year? Seeing a holistic view that added up to significant progress. Without pausing to reflect, the feeling of moving forward wouldn’t be as strong.

And having a sense of forward momentum is what creates “the best inner work lives,” according to authors Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer. They studied and wrote about the importance of daily action toward meaningful goals in The Progress Principle.

How are you making regular progress in sharing your expertise with the world?

The Secret to Fitting Social Media into Your Professional Life

by | Nov 12, 2017 | Careers, Social Media

Why doesn’t everyone have a social media strategy for their career?

There are two main reasons: not seeing the value and not having the time.

The value proposition has a simple answer. Our professional reputation increasingly influences how we get jobs, advance in our careers and navigate transitions.

The time equation is more difficult. We each have 24 hours in days that seem to get busier by the second. How can we make the most of our limited time to build our careers through social media?

Start by thinking about what you’ve done professionally over the last month.

Have you –

  1. Spoken at an event
  2. Attended a conference
  3. Taken a course, online or in person
  4. Traveled for a work meeting or event
  5. Joined a professional or trade group and attended a meeting
  6. Received an award for your work
  7. Completed a key project that can be shared in public
  8. Participated in a company-sponsored charitable event
  9. Seen an engaging video about your company or industry
  10. Found a valuable article about your company or industry
  11. Read a thought-provoking book about business or your industry
  12. Come across an interesting post by a colleague or your company

Why consider these activities?

VaynerMedia CEO Gary Vaynerchuk identified a simple and powerful strategy in his post, “Document, don’t create: creating content that builds your personal brand.”

Documenting is creating content, he says. It’s simply sharing your career journey and what you’re doing every day. And it’s easy to do because you’re “just being yourself.”

To look into the future of this documenting trend, check out the New York Times article Keeping Up, on Camera, Is No Longer Just for the Kardashians.

In everything you do professionally today, start by asking yourself if it can be shared publicly in social media. Make sure to never, ever share non-public and/or competitively sensitive information in social media.

When in doubt, err on the side of caution and don’t share. Even if you think something is okay to share in public, check that official company sources have shared the information publicly, or ask your supervisor for confirmation.

Career blogger Penelope Trunk said it well in her online course Reach Your Goals by Blogging. “Just don’t write anything near where your ‘security clearance’ goes,” she advised. While most people don’t have security clearances, this is an apt analogy to keep confidential information confidential. Don’t share it.

Once you’ve cleared that hurdle, then focus on what you’re doing, what’s interesting about it and why it could be valuable to your network.

What specifically in the course of your day, your week and your month could you share that builds the career brand you want to be known for?

Some of my colleagues do this really well. (This is where I remind readers that opinions expressed in this blog are my own.)

Here are just a few.

TeNita Ballard. TeNita is an enthusiastic champion of diversity and inclusion. She shares the events she attends, the people she meets and what she learns through posts in Instagram, Facebook and more.

John Starkweather. John is a big advocate for business customers. He shared his experience at the company’s recent tech conference The Summit in LinkedIn and Twitter. His posts make you feel like you were there.

Jennifer Van Buskirk. Jennifer leads the east region of the company. She shares leadership lessons she’s learned in her career in LinkedIn, along with the events she attends and speaks at in the course of her work.

Sarah Stoesser Groves. Sarah is a digital marketer who shares news and information her network can use. At The Summit she posted insightful video clips and sound bites from many of the speakers in LinkedIn and Twitter.

L. Michelle Smith. Michelle is a multi-cultural marketer. She’s a great source for the latest research and thought leadership on inclusion marketing through her posts in LinkedIn and Twitter.

Reflecting on the last month, here are some of the professional activities I’ve shared in LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram or Facebook. It only required taking a few photos and videos of the events and sharing key messages in my social networks.

They tended to be squeezed into the nooks and crannies of busy days as well as evenings and sometimes weekends, forming the public side of work-related activities that can be shared in social media.

Attended The Summit in Dallas as a marketing leader and participated on a team of social influencers to amplify the event’s messaging and reach, thanks to Sarah Groves.

Joined the Women’s Sports Foundation‘s annual salute gala in New York, thanks to Fiona Carter who is a member of the group’s board. It was inspiring to see so many strong female role models and spend time with colleagues.

Spoke at #WeGatherLA, the second-annual women’s leadership experience spearheaded by Otter Media President Sarah Harden, thanks to an invitation from Jennifer Cho and Katelynn Duffel. It was an amazing experience interviewing Helie Lee about her project Macho Like Me, when she lived life as a man for six months. Truly incredible!

Talked with visiting students from Howard University and North Carolina A&T University about how to build a career through social media, thanks to Grant Reid, along with John Willis and Kaleb Pask.

Participated in events at USC as a member of the USC Alumni Association Board of Governors and USC Annenberg Alumni Advisory Board, thanks to Leticia Lozoya and Ashley Cooper.

Beyond building your career through social media, there are other benefits to documenting your professional life in social. You’re helping to build the brands of your company and your colleagues.

Employees are a trusted and credible source of information about their companies, according to Shel Holtz. Take that responsibility seriously and be sure you’re communicating in alignment with your company’s values, brand and social media policy.

And as we approach the end of the year and you summarize your key accomplishments, your social media feeds are a powerful input. They document many of your key accomplishments. You can add to quantifying their impact by the reach and the engagement of your posts.

As you head into a new week, what are you doing, experiencing and learning this week that you can share in social media?