The social media network LinkedIn can grow into a fantastic resource for strengthening your own personal brand power. Honestly, the value of publishing content via LinkedIn’s platform is absolutely worth the effort if users have a content strategy lined up from the get-go.
But then this question always come up when users are considering to start publishing content on LinkedIn – ” Should I publish long article content or just a short post?”
When I got this question asked, I would always question them back, “Why not both?”. I don’t think this is an either or option.
They can exist together and in fact there is great synergy in leveraging them together. The right question we should ask instead is which one should we priortize more.
So, that’s why this blog is being created to outline the pros and cons so you can make a better decision.
Let’s dive in.
Table of content:
- What Are LinkedIn Articles and LinkedIn Posts?
- Pros of Writing LinkedIn Articles
- Cons of Writing LinkedIn Articles
- Pros of Writing LinkedIn posts
- Cons of Writing LinkedIn posts
What Are LinkedIn Articles and LinkedIn Posts?
LinkedIn articles are basically longer, in-depth blog liked pieces with characters limit at around 120,000 characters whereas LinkedIn posts are liked shortest format you can use on LinkedIn with characters limit being 3,000 for both your personal profile and company page posts.
Usually people would post and share content about:
- Thought leadership
- Professional experiences and anecdotes
- Industry insights and expertise
- Advice for other professionals
- Opinions on developments in your field
- Content marketing messages in support of your brand
To decide on which one you should prioritize on, here are few pros and cons to consider before writing articles and posts for LinkedIn.
Pros of Writing LinkedIn Articles
Here’s a list of the top pros.
1 – Become a Thought Leader
A significant portion of LinkedIn’s audience spends time on the platform to follow thought leader content. To become a thought leader, users have to publish in-depth and thoughtful content which article would be a great fit.
2 – Show Up on Google
Along those lines, LinkedIn articles can add another element to your reach because search engines like Google can easily crawl and pick your content to show up on search results.
The alternative is to develop a blog, which is expensive and time-intensive for most professionals, so they turn to platforms like LinkedIn.
3 – LinkedIn Provides More Analytics for Each Article Published
LinkedIn gives users access to metrics to gauge whether or not the content is engaging the right readership.
Facebook gives ordinary users no access to metrics unless they use the social network’s ad platform; Twitter at least provides a limited amount of engagement statistics, but LinkedIn gives more detail.
Still, there are several cons of LinkedIn articles too.
Cons of Writing LinkedIn Articles
Unfortunately, there are few downsides to LinkedIn articles as well.
1 – LinkedIn Articles Usually Have Less Reach Than LinkedIn Posts
Since your posts appear in people’s newsfeed, they can easily find your new posts when they open their LinkedIn. Instead for articles, you will need to also publish a new post about your article to let people know you have written one.
2 – It Takes Time to Write A Great LinkedIn Article
While a lot of people always say quality over quantity. But in the current digital media world, you need to balance both. Because with so much content out there, if you don’t produce quality content in a consistent and regular manner, you can be forgotten easier.
And because a good LinkedIn article will take time to produce, you would not be able to publish it as frequently as LinkedIn posts.
3 – Less Views Comparing to Medium
Since LinkedIn isn’t a platform built entirely for articles so compared to other sites such as Medium with blogs being their core feature, you can get less organic boost and views with the same long form content.
Below is a good example of book author Jordan Gross having 10.2K Medium followers and 26K LinkedIn followers but getting more than 8.9K engagements from his Medium content compared to 152 likes only from LinkedIn.
Medium post:
LinkedIn article:
Pros of Writing LinkedIn posts
While shorter in length, LinkedIn posts can be just as or even more powerful than LinkedIn articles.
Here’s how!
1 – Easy to Create
The best part about LinkedIn posts is that anyone can create them easily and quickly. In fact, a lot of users on LinkedIn published just text posts and were able to attract tremendous engagements and followers.
2 – Great Immediate Feedback
LinkedIn posts can be a channel for you to test your ideas because you can get immediate feedback to see if your audience would resonate or not. From content topic, podcast name to event ideas, you can leverage LinkedIn polls to gather some qualitative feedback before investing more time and effort.
3 – You Can Post It Everyday
Unless someone is a natural-born writer, it’s hard to publish full-length articles several times a week, but posts make it easy for you to publish one tip, one advice or one thing you learn everyday.
Cons of Writing LinkedIn posts
The main two cons about posting on LinkedIn are the character limit, and it does not have the long term impact that LinkedIn article has.
1 – Restricted by The Characters Limit
Although recently the characters limit of LinkedIn posts have increased from 1,300 to 3,000, but it is still far from being enough for you to publish anything really in-depth.
2 – LinkedIn Posts Are More Short Term
Usually LinkedIn posts would be booming in the first week then after that, it would be hard for people to find it again on LinkedIn. Whereas your LinkedIn article can still be discovered via Google or from your LinkedIn profile.
As you can see below, my post from 7th May 2021 stopped getting more views and likes after 15th May.
So How Should You Be Leveraging Both LinkedIn Articles and Posts?
The short answer is make LinkedIn posts be your priority. And when you publish an article, promote it with LinkedIn posts.
Posts can tease readers to click an article, and better yet, you can choose to pick out one tip or one insight from your in-depth article and do a post everyday.
Repurpose your content and leverage what you already have.
In the end, the general idea is to strike a balance between long and short form content to get the most mileage from a LinkedIn marketing strategy.
If you’re serious about leveraging LinkedIn for your business and turn your LinkedIn Connections into paid Clients, join me [in]side Linked Business Academy and start signing your first + next clients on LinkedIn.
