A guide to long-form posting on LinkedIn

Long-form posting on LinkedIn: what is it really about?

Long-form post publishing was, until recently, only accessible to LinkedIn ‘influencers’ – a selected group of users who LinkedIn identified as ‘thought leaders’.

Since February, though, LinkedIn has been rolling out long-form posts to its entire English-speaking user base. Impatient users can apply for early access.

What is long-form posting?

Long-form posts are essentially blog posts attached to their authors’ LinkedIn profiles. They can be used for anything from knowledge-sharing and showing off expertise to providing advice and provoking thoughts on industry-specific topics.

There is no word limit for long-form posts but LinkedIn says that it’s good practice to make them longer than three paragraphs. For more guidelines, see the LinkedIn page here.

It seems that through introducing this new functionality, LinkedIn wants to become the ultimate professional publishing network.

Long-form posting as proof of expertise

Long-form posts can be particularly useful for writers, bloggers and journalists. If you claim that you have good editing and proofreading skills, you can now actually demonstrate it by showcasing your work on your profile, alongside your list of skills.

The target audience of long-form posts

LinkedIn uses an algorithm to recommend the posts to users from outside of the publisher’s network who might be interested in the topic. These users can then follow the publisher without necessarily having to connect with them.

SEO implications

Long-form posts are searchable. This is true both for the LinkedIn search engine and Google. This fact might create temptation for some users to optimise their posts with keywords for better SEO.

However, you should remember that whatever you post will remain part of your professional profile (it will be included in the ‘posts’ section) and you probably don’t want to be known as a keyword monster.

A way to becoming a LinkedIn influencer?

It’s true that by publishing a long post you don’t automatically become a LinkedIn ‘influencer’. However, a number of opportunities may arise for those who decide to use the new publishing platform.