How to Promote Your Blog in LinkedIn Groups

LinkedIn can provide many opportunities to build your professional presence online.  In addition, you have an even greater opportunity to build new relationships by joining LinkedIn Groups, where you can expand your network further around your niche markets, passions, and interests.  The question is, how should you go about promoting your own content in order to gain visibility without appearing to be overly promotional?

Consider your goals when promoting your blog posts on LinkedIn

Is your goal to drive traffic back to your blog?  Or is your goal to enhance your visibility and credibility within a group?  My take is that the latter will not only help you build new connections, it will also ultimately drive traffic back to your blog.  You should always be thinking first about how you can add value to your connections before thinking about promoting your own content.  Whether you are submitting your own blog posts or even 3rd party posts through a status update, or within a group, you should do so in a way that attracts readers through your added commentary.  An example of this would be posing a question that is related to your article, or asking for feedback.  LinkedIn Group Managers are not looking for their discussion boards to be cluttered by blog articles unless they can provoke group engagement and discussion. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve deleted posts in the group that I manage because they did not initiate any kind of discussion and were simply promotional in nature.

Post your blog articles first as LinkedIn status updates

Undoubtedly you should post your best blog articles as status updates.  Not only can your articles be viewed by your direct connections, but they have the potential to be viewed by many other individuals who are on LinkedIn due to the sharing functionality.  You will just want to make sure that your articles are relevant to your connections, and don’t abuse the posting frequency.  A good rule of thumb is to only be posting and promoting your own content 25% of the time or less.  This applies across the board in social media.  Additionally you will want to manually update your status, rather than posting from an outside service, in order to pull in an image and a description.  Status updates with images and descriptions have a better opportunity for click-throughs.  Finally, add your own commentary to the update.  The commentary section is what gives you the opportunity to drive engagement and encourage sharing.

Posting your blog article as a status update

Avoid using the “share” button from your status update to post your article to LinkedIn Groups

Help LinkedIn Group Managers help you!  If you use the “share” button from a status update to post to LinkedIn Groups, it will automatically go into the “Discussions” section in all the groups that you post it to.  What’s the problem with this?  If you lack creativity in generating discussion around your post, you could be setting yourself up for failure within those groups. Simply posting links will not help you build visibility or credibility within LinkedIn Groups.  (Managers have the ability to flag those posts as promotional and move them to the “Promotions” tab, or they can also simply delete your posts)

In the Wired Advisor LinkedIn Group, for example, we are beginning to move many of the blog posts that were initially posted as discussions to the “Promotions” tab, unless we feel that the post itself, and the commentary attached to it can generate dialogue and engagement from the group.

If you are simply posting articles (your own or 3rd party posts) without initiating any discussion, group managers and members may find you to be overly promotional and chances are you’ll be moved to the “Promotions” tab.  It’s one thing to get visibility as a spammer but quite another to be someone who posts interesting articles and gets group members engaged.

Consider Adam Verchinski who posted an article from his blog, Everyday Tenacity, as a discussion in the Wired Advisor LinkedIn Group.  Even though the article he posted came from his blog, the dialogue he used to engage discussion was a key factor in adding value.  If a post like this is going to engage group members (10 comments thus far), I am much less likely to move it over to the “Promotions” tab where it probably would not be seen by many.  In fact, I even made this discussion post the “Manager’s Choice”!

10 comments were generated from Adam's "blog" post

Use creativity and selectivity when posting to LinkedIn Groups

John McTigue over at Kuno Creative makes a good point about this.  I really like his idea of making your blog post a part of the commentary within a discussion. John suggests that you post the central theme of your blog post as a question or comment and include the link to your blog post in the comments you make related to an existing discussion.

Ultimately, it’s a good idea to save you best posts for promoting in LinkedIn Groups.  Post selectively to relevant groups that you belong to, and get creative on engaging members to comment and discuss your post.  Before posting one of your articles a second time, make sure you’ve generated ample discussion in previous posts.  Otherwise, you should simply take the liberty to post your articles under the “Promotions” tab within the group.