What are articles and posts on LinkedIn?
Articles on LinkedIn are longer, in-depth blogs with a character limit of about 120,000 characters, while posts on LinkedIn are the shortest format you can use on LinkedIn with a character limit of 3,000 on both your personal profile and company page.
Typically, people post and share content about:
Work experience and anecdotes
Industry insights and knowledge
Advice to other professionals
Feedback on events in your field
Marketing content to support your brand
To decide which one you should prioritize, here are some pros and cons to consider before writing articles and posts on LinkedIn.
Advantages of writing articles on LinkedIn
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 need to publish in-depth and thoughtful content, of which an article would be a great fit.
2. show up on Google
LinkedIn articles can add another element to their reach, as search engines like Google can easily index and select content to show up in search results.
The alternative is to create a blog, which is expensive and time-consuming for most professionals, so they turn to platforms such as LinkedIn.
3. LinkedIn provides more analytics for each article published
LinkedIn gives users access to metrics to assess whether content is engaging the right group of readers.
Disadvantages of writing articles on LinkedIn
Unfortunately, there are also several downsides to articles on LinkedIn.
1. articles on LinkedIn tend to have less reach than posts on LinkedIn
Since your posts appear in people's newsfeed, they can easily find your new posts when they open their LinkedIn. For articles, you need to publish a new post about the article so people know you wrote it.
2. writing a great article on LinkedIn takes time
Although many people always say quality over quantity. But in today's digital media world, you have to balance both. Because with so much content, if you don't produce quality content regularly, people will forget about you
And since a good article on LinkedIn will take a long time to write, you wouldn't be able to publish them as often as posts on LinkedIn.
Advantages of writing posts on LinkedIn
Although shorter, posts on LinkedIn can be just as or even more powerful than articles on LinkedIn.
1. ease of creation
The best part of posts on LinkedIn is that anyone can create them easily and quickly. In fact, many users on LinkedIn publish text-only posts and still are able to attract huge engagement and followers.
2. immediate feedback
LinkedIn posts can be a channel for you to test your ideas, as you can get instant feedback to see if your audience will respond or not. From content topic, podcast name to event ideas, you can use LinkedIn surveys to gather some qualitative feedback before investing more time and effort.
3. you can publish them every day
Unless someone is a born writer, it's difficult to publish full-length articles several times a week, but posts make it easy to publish one tip, one piece of advice or one thing you learn every day.
Disadvantages of posting on LinkedIn
1. limited by character limit
Although the character limit for posts on LinkedIn has recently increased from 1,300 to 3,000, it's still far from the amount to publish something truly in-depth.
2. posts on LinkedIn are more short-term
Typically, posts on LinkedIn will flourish in the first week, and then it will be difficult for people to find them again on LinkedIn. While your article on LinkedIn may still be discovered by Google or from your LinkedIn profile.
So how should you use both articles and posts on LinkedIn?
The short answer is: make posting on LinkedIn your priority. And when you publish an article, promote it with posts on LinkedIn.
Posts can encourage readers to click on the article, or better yet, you can pick one tip or one insight from an in-depth article and make it into several posts.
Reuse your content and leverage what you already have.
In the end, the general idea is to strike a balance between long and short content to get the most out of your LinkedIn marketing strategy.
