LinkedIn; Posts Not Articles, Part Two

I’ve done a good bit of experimenting on LinkedIn over the past few years. In 2015 I wrote an article titled Writing Articles That Gain Attention On LinkedIn, after I’d started posting full articles there. Some were brand new; some were edited pieces of older blog posts, mainly from my business blog.

business marketing lol

It started out well, and I thought it was the panacea I was looking for to help me breakthrough the noise, to draw more attention to what I could do for my particular business audience. Then… it wasn’t anymore. I went from thousands of views to ten’s of views, and I decided it was over when the last article I put there got 21 views; I do better than that leaving everything on my blogs.

This year, once the pandemic put more people at home, I had an epiphany one day to try something a little different. I’d talked previously how, instead of writing articles, writing posts seemed to do much better. I even shared some information from the experiment, which proved that writing specific posts as opposed to just popping in a blog or YouTube link also works better.

Truth be told, it’s oddly time consuming. You wouldn’t think so, but it is. Let me share something with you:

Me: Why did you reduce your billing department by 6 1/2 people?

CFO: A consulting company came in last year and said we were overstaffed by that many.

Me: Was that before or after you got your new computer system installed?

CFO: Around the same time.

Me: Were your staff trained before the new system went live?

CFO: The director was going to train them, but she left 3 months later.

Me: Is your system working?

CFO: I don’t know; the director was handling it all.

Me: How’s your cash looking?

CFO: It’s down 30% from last year.

Me: Your cash is down, you don’t know if your billing system works properly, and I know your days in unbilled receivables is around 16 days. You need to hire most of your original staff back.

CFO: The other consulting company was adamant that we didn’t need them.

Me: They were wrong.

The ninth health care revenue cycle lesson is that stats don’t lie and information is key. It costs less to hire people to bring in the money than it does not having enough staff to do it, let alone not knowing whether things are working properly or not. If your primary thought is to always cut expenses, you’re doing a disservice to your facility.

#healthcare #medicalbilling #revenuecycle

This is a post I put on LinkedIn a couple of months ago. It took a lot of rewriting and editing because what I originally wrote was twice the size of this, and posts have a limit on how many characters you’re allowed to use. This post… got about 6,500 views (or impressions; I’ll come back to that). That’s not shabby!

You see this was my 9th tip. My first tip got just under 1,000 views. My latest tip, #15, so far has just under 300 views. I also paused 3 weeks to do some other things before I wrote and posted it. Out of the 15 posts, half have more than 1,000 views. The hashtags are critical in reaching the audience you want; all of the posts in this series are geared towards health care finance… mainly hospitals. It’s not the largest group of people on LinkedIn, so the numbers aren’t bad.

Here’s the thing. From the first post until the 14th, I’ve been contacted by 6 different entities for possible projects. One person found me via SEO instead, so we’re down to 5 people from LinkedIn. I had to turn down 4 of them because I can’t travel these days (taking care of my mother). The 5th… I didn’t get it, but I haven’t lost it either, as they’re working on another project they want to finish first before coming back to me.

Understand, LinkedIn can be a crapshoot, but it’s also still the only place people in business can find an audience; it’s certainly not going to happen on Facebook… at least not without advertising (even that’s a crapshoot). Coming up with a style, then selecting the right keywords for your particular audience, might help you reach more people you’re actually hoping to reach.

It’s worth a shot, right?

Now, I want to clarify something I mentioned that I’d come back to. I’ve been using the term “views”, when I should say “impressions” instead. Views means people are actually seeing what you’ve posted; impressions means it’s showing up in their feed but not that they’re necessarily reading it.

Likes and comments are more indicative of who’s actually reading what you’ve posted, but getting a lot of impressions isn’t bad because it means that certain people liking what you’ve written ends up getting shared to people you’re not connected to, who might take a gander at what you’ve said. It’s never a bad thing reaching a new audience that you never knew about.
 

8 thoughts on “LinkedIn; Posts Not Articles, Part Two”

  1. This is a cool experiment. You’ve given me some ideas!
    However, I strenuously disagree with your broad dismissal of FB.

    I have engaged with many businesses, via their FB pages: from a local doughnut guy who drives a truck to different spots and posts his whereabouts, to Excel communities that choose to expand their paid offerings beyond their websites.

    The currency of Likes does help certain business attract followers, even without ads!

    Cheers,

    Mitch

    1. Maybe you have, but in general FB pages are junk; yeah, I said it! lol I think a few local businesses might work nicely, but for people like me it totally failed. Also, many sites end up with people spewing a lot of hate at each other because the moderators don’t moderate. Groups are a different story of sorts, but for business still a major waste of time. And it cost me money to learn that.

  2. Your short, specific, industry-targeted posts are simply more engaging. You are using storytelling skills (dialogue) for a very tightly focused problem > solution > takeaway message format and it is crystal clear. I think that unless it’s a big media outlet with advertising dollars on the platform, original text (that by extension brings the platform more eyeballs via search) will always do better than a link.

    1. Thanks Holly. I have to admit I was shocked when I first noticed the attention those posts were getting. It can be challenging for someone like me (and you) to have to edit so much when you’re used to telling it all. Still, it keeps me in check, and if someone wishes to ask more about what I’ve posted it’s all good.

  3. Hi Mitch

    This is certainly great advice.

    Long-form posting can be very effective IF (and isn’t this always the case?)… IF it is helping people solve their problems.

    I recently wrote about publishing articles on LinkedIn vs. posting.

    I have to admit, though, I was thinking about normal, one-line posting.

    What you’ve demonstrated here is an interesting way to go, and I might try to copy you 🙂

    PS: one of the nice things about doing LinkedIn articles is that you can share them on other platforms, but even if you link to them on your LinkedIn posts, they get much better traction.

    -Donna

    1. Thanks Donna. Truthfully, wring long form content on another platform was a bit tiring. I’m actually glad LinkedIn forced me to shorten the content as it applies to posts, though I’d never write like that on my blogs or anywhere else… well, except for Mom stories on FB lol

  4. This is quite a good number, Mitch. I personally have never had more than 600-800 reads on my articles on LinkedIn, but I have to admit that I haven’t pushed this strategy a lot. Probably, I haven’t been very consistent, but to be honest, I don’t know, how discoverable is the article content there. Pretty much the umber of reads from my stats match the number of my contacts.

    1. Hey Carl! Remember, I said posts instead of articles. There’s something about the articles that LinkedIn eventually suppresses, but the posts are there for people you’re connected to, and if enough people like it or comments those posts will go further. I’ve never seen any of your posts in my feed; have you seen any of mine?

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