First Impressions on Posting to LinkedIn Publisher

I took the plunge last week  and posted my first article on LinkedIn Publisher. It called five things to do before going live with enterprise software, if you want to take a look.

If you haven’t posted on LinkedIn yet, it’s surprisingly easy to put up a post. Here’s my impressions and some dos and don’ts on the initial experience.

1. To get to Publisher, click on the little pencil icon in the Share an update section of your LinkedIn main screen.

LinkedIn is still rolling out the Publishing platform to its entire user base so if you don’t see the pencil, you may not be set up for publishing yet. Be patient. It will eventually show up.

2. The LinkedIn publishing editor looks like a subset of the WordPress editor. It contains many of the same icons and if you’re familiar with WordPress, you won’t have any problems with LinkedIn publisher. Here’s what it looks like when entering a post.

As I said, it was fairly easy to enter and preview my post before publishing.

3. There’s no native spell-checker in LinkedIn Publisher . I contacted LinkedIn about that and they said they don’t have spell-check built into their Web site yet. Instead, they recommended I use the built-in spell checkers provided with most browsers. If you need help using spell-check in LinkedIn, click on this link provided by LinkedIn for how to use spell-check in a browser.

4. Graphics are little kludgy. I inserted my site giraffe (below) in the bottom of my post and it was difficult (or at least non-intuitive) to scale, add a caption, or provide other graphic editing functions that are fairly easy to do on other blogging platforms.  I was able to scale it to a size I wanted and center it on the screen. But when Linked gave me the option to auto-tweet a link to my Twitter followers, it didn’t use the same scaling in the tweet that it did for the article. So the auto-tweet from LinkedIn put out this enormous giraffe picture in the summary section of the tweet. It would be nice if LinkedIn could send out the scaled-down graphic along its auto-tweets.

5. I’m getting a fair amount of play from LinkedIn. So far, I’ve gotten 53 views and one like out of my roughly 900 LinkedIn followers. Which isn’t bad. I’m not a Richard Branson so I’m happy with that and expect I’ll get more.

And the judges say…

The end result is that it wasn’t too bad putting content out on LinkedIn. I’ll probably put some more posts out for greater exposure but I don’t expect that LinkedIn will replace my Web site anytime soon. For example, I’m more likely to experiment on my site than I would on LinkedIn, I’m more likely to put up posts on my site that point to other content on the Internet, and I’m more likely to put up reference material on my site (like this community post of IBM i hosting providers). And if I ever want to use advertisers for my content, I can’t control how ads are displayed on LinkedIn (or profit from them).

There are just too many things I can’t do on LinkedIn that I can do on my own Web site, and I like the freedom and ownership of having my own Web site. However, LinkedIn does give me a bigger audience and more exposure. So rather than relying on LinkedIn or my Web site, I may put content out to both of them as needed to supplement and support my on-line brand.