Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Android | RSS

In this week’s Inside PR podcast, Martin Waxman, Gini Dietrich and I talk about LinkedIn as a publishing platform.

LinkedIn has been pushing itself as a publishing platform, promoting links to new content and providing publishers with additional data on the performance of their content. LinkedIn’s efforts seem to be an illustration of “if you build it they will come.”

From the number of alerts I receive when I open LinkedIn, it appears to me that more and more of the people with whom I have connections are in fact publishing content to LinkedIn.

Martin, for one has been drawn to LInkedIn more often as the amount of fresh content has increased. However, while there is more content that he can find there, he observes that a large portion of the content is repurposed content that originally appeared on a blog.

Gini agrees with Martin that cross posting content from blogs to LinkedIn seems to be common. The question she asks is, what is the right strategy? Post on the blog first and then cross post on LinkedIn? Or do it the other way around. Which will give her the greatest engagement on both of her platforms?

The question for publishers remains, “Is it worth the effort?” Gini has a practical, hard-nosed answer. She points out that our job is to drive traffic to our websites, where it can be converted to benefit our business. Publishing to LinkedIn is valuable if it contributes to that.

We also talk about Chuck Hester’s approach to LinkedIn. Chuck, who hosts the Linked Conversations podcast on the FIR Podcast Network (Inside PR is also a member of the FIR podcast network.) Chuck relies primarily on LinkedIn to connect with potential clients. To do this, he publishes a post or updates his profile at least every week or so. He has observed an uptick in the number of people looking at his profile after each of these events. When new people do look at his profile, he sends them a message asking if they’d like to connect. And this has generated new business opportunities. (You can hear Chuck describe this approach to Sarah Lane and Tonya Hall during an appearance on TWiT’s The Social Hour podcast.)

We like Chuck’s approach and think it is worth exploring further. We plan to reach out to him and ask him to join us in a conversation on a future episode of inside PR. To set up this discussion, Gini plans to emulate Chuck’s approach to see what types of results she can achieve. And in a month, after she’s done this, were going to invite Chuck to a discussion with us about this approach and how others can pick it up.

We’d love to hear your thoughts.

How do you use LinkedIn? Do you publish content on LinkedIn to provide people with a reason to click through to your profile? Do you watch your LinkedIn stats so that you can reach out to these people? Has this provided any benefit to you?

Send us an email or an audio comment to [email protected], join the FIR Google+ Community, join the Inside PR Google+ Community, join the Inside PR Facebook group, leave us a comment here, message us @inside_pr on Twitter, or connect with Gini Dietrich, Joseph Thornley, and Martin Waxman on Twitter.

******************************************************************

 Thank you to the people behind Inside PR

Our theme music was created by Damon de Szegheo; Roger Dey is our announcer.

Inside PR is produced by Ashlea McGrath.