Getting Your Content on LinkedIn Today

LinkedIn Today can drive you tons of traffic — for free. But it takes more than just adding a “share” icon to your site.

After the economic downturn of 2008 gave LinkedIn a shot in the arm, it has become a popular way for people to network in their professional lives without parting the curtain to their personal peccadillos. In March of 2011, LinkedIn launched LinkedIn Today, a boon to digital publishers since it has become a great way to drive high quality traffic to your site for free.

Why Use LinkedIn Today?

A number of online publishers have seen a multi-fold increase in LinkedIn referral traffic since the launch of LinkedIn Today. In fact, Business Insider saw an exponential climb in referral traffic, which they attribute to LinkedIn Today. TechCrunch claims they get more referral traffic from LinkedIn than Twitter (although LinkedIn and LinkedIn Today are powered by Twitter–more on that later on). And LinkedIn’s Rohan Verma said that CNET and the BBC saw a 10-fold increase in referral traffic from LinkedIn once they added the LinkedIn share plugin to their sites.

In addition, because people use LinkedIn for professional reasons, they are more likely to share content that relates to their professional interests. In fact, 4 out of 5 LinkedIn members are the decision makers at their company or organization, according to a Webinar Verma gave to publishers in September 2011. So referral traffic through LinkedIn is not only high, it’s high-quality.

Best of all, it doesn’t cost money for a publisher to get their stories on LinkedIn Today — it just takes people sharing your content (which can be optimized through some savvy tricks below).

How LinkedIn Today Works

LinkedIn Today is a service LinkedIn provides to its users that aggregates shared content from anywhere on the Web in order to provide personalized “top” headline feeds to each user. The “top” headlines are different for every user.

LinkedIn Today also categorizes articles according to the industry of the person who shares your content. So, for example, I often see industry news on “Online Media” and “Management Consulting” because many of my contacts belong to this industry, even though I have indicated my industry to be “Writing and Editing.” According to Verma, LinkedIn has 37 industry categories that are pre-determined (i.e., I cannot create an industry like “Writing for Subscription Sites”). Technology, finance and higher education make up 30% of industries in the LinkedIn member base.

The “top” headlines that LinkedIn Today will display on a member’s homepage are chosen via a complex algorithm based on:

  • What people in a member’s network share
  • What stories are liked and commented on by people in the member’s network.
  • If a recent article is being shared quickly by a broad base of members. This last one is impacted by share activity on Twitter and StumbleUpon (see The Twitter & StumbleUpon Connection below for further explanation and see here for a case study from BNET on this phenomenon).

When LinkedIn Today pulls an article to its feed, it displays the article headline, image and source (your site’s main URL). When users click on the article, a new tab will open that takes the user to the specific page for that piece of content.

If you don’t have an image, it will offer the article with a blank blue image box, like this:

Where Do LinkedIn Today Headlines Appear?

LinkedIn Today’s top headlines appear in a number of places:

  1. The LinkedIn Today feature on each member’s homepage: Three articles appear as headlines with photos. These stories are different for each member, and change each time the page is refreshed.
  2. The LinkedIn Today homepage: Members can click on “See all top headlines for you” on the member homepage to view more articles shared by people in their network. Some users may also choose to bookmark this page as a stand-alone site (even though it is personalized for them).
  3. Member emails routinely contain “top” stories from the member’s industry.
  4. Mobile (Android and iPhone) applications contain article news stream.

If you have never used LinkedIn or LinkedIn Today, take a look at this article by SearchEngineLand, which contains a number of screenshots to help you become familiar with platform.

Will Paywalled Content Get Posted?

Paywalled content will be posted on LinkedIn Today, so long as it is shared by LinkedIn members. LinkedIn Today will scrape the article’s headline, image and URL, if you have a paywall that is customized for each article. If you have a generic paywall, it will scrape information from that page. Verma said that it is unlikely that paywalled content ever makes it into the “top headlines” on a member’s homepage since paywalled content is shared less frequently.

The Twitter & StumbleUpon Connection

LinkedIn Today is powered by Twitter, which means that LinkedIn members can “bind” their Twitter and LinkedIn accounts. Usually this means that members choose to have stories they share on LinkedIn cross-posted to their Twitter feeds, but not the other way around.

However, if you go to your member profile, you can uncheck the box for “Sharing only tweets that contain #in (#li also works) in your LinkedIn status” and that will feed all Twitter posts to your LinkedIn account. If a staff member’s profile is connected to the company Twitter feed, then all the company’s tweets will be fed into that staff member’s LinkedIn account.

In addition, StumbleUpon has a LinkedIn Share button in their browser, allowing StumbleUpon users to easily post stories to LinkedIn. LinkedIn also pulls top stories from StumbleUpon, offering LinkedIn users more articles in their industry.

5 Optimization Steps to Implement on Your Own Site

In order to take advantage of LinkedIn Today’s powerful platform and drive more high quality traffic to your site for free, subscription and membership sites should:

  1. Add the LinkedIn Share button to content pages. Send your Webmaster to https://developer.linkedin.com/ and tell them to download the Share plugin, which includes a few lines of code. According to LinkedIn and the publishers they’ve worked with, the best practice is to embed the button right below the article headline and also at the end of the article. They also claim the count indicator works best, but that is likely based on large publishers who can easily get 100s of likes in a day. If you suspect your shares are not that high (anything less than 100), use the button without the count indicator. You may also want to include a line of text, like “Share this with your peers.”
  2. Make sure free content has images. Content with images almost always get clicked on more.
  3. Optimize paywalls. If you have a generic paywall, implement a content specific paywall with the content’s headline/title, an image, and a blurb or preview of the text. See our slide deck on paywall optimization for more tips.
  4. Optimize Twitter shares for LinkedIn. Have your Webmaster prep your Twitter shares to always include the #in or #li hashtags (i.e., when visitors click to share a piece of content on Twitter, it should pull up copy that promotes the article, mentions your Twitter account, and has one of the hashtags above — see image). Then, when a site visitor shares your content via Twitter, it will simultaneously get posted in their LinkedIn feed, provided they have a LinkedIn account (and are signed in at the time).

  5. Optimize comments. Let people posting comments on your site also cross-post those comments to the LinkedIn accounts. You can do this one of two ways:
    • Let people login with a connected account to comment, as Forbes does below (you may want to limit your visitor’s social media options, optimizing for the platforms that serve your needs best).
    • Let people cross-post their comment in LinkedIn without logging in with their account, as the Huffington Post does (sadly, they don’t include LinkedIn as an option, and I couldn’t find another site that offers this option, but we think it’s very savvy as it increases your site traffic while reducing customer skepticism about logging in with a social media account):

4 Optimization Steps to Implement on LinkedIn Itself

Once you have optimized your site for LinkedIn Today, you can further optimize the amount of referral traffic you get through your activity on LinkedIn itself. Here are 4 steps to follow:

  1. Get a publisher’s page. After you have downloaded the LinkedIn Share plugin, you can email LinkedIn at [email protected] and request to get listed on LinkedIn Today as a source and have your own publisher’s page. You’ll need to send them the main URL of your site and a URL demonstrating that you’ve placed the LinkedIn share button on your content pages.

    Note: Only publishers with a LI share button are eligible to be listed as a publisher on the Linked Today page and as a “top” source.

    Warning: Even if you have a publisher’s page, it doesn’t mean that you’ll get headlines into LinkedIn Today. If nobody shares your content, you’ll end up with a publisher’s page like AdRants:

  2. Get your site visitors to “follow” your publication on LinkedIn. Have a LinkedIn button (different from the share button used on content pages) on your homepage that links to your publisher’s page on LinkedIn Today, so that site visitors can easily find your publication on LinkedIn Today and follow it.
  3. Maximize your staff’s profiles.
    Make sure your staff is listed under the industries you serve. So, even though your editor might be listed under “media” and “Internet,” if you’re writing about aeronautics, make sure they’re listed under that industry as well. Thus, anything they share from your site will get categorized as content appropriate for that industry.

    If you can, have them “bind” their LinkedIn accounts to your company’s Twitter feed, not a personal one (See The Twitter & StumbleUpon Connection below.)

    Lastly, have staff members post new content to their profile and in appropriate groups.

    Note: You’ll need to consider your HR policies around the use of social media, and we will be writing on this topic in the near future. Recently, the UK ruled that an employee had to forfeit his LinkedIn contacts, while the U.S. ruled in the exact opposite manner.

  4. Start a group specific to your industry. This takes ongoing effort, and our best practice recommendation is to moderate a group/forum on your site rather than through a third-party social media site. (A forum on your own site increases retention and gives you access to more member information — email addresses, credit card info, etc. — than social media sites do.) But if you have the time and staff, and find LinkedIn to be a valuable traffic-driver, a moderated group will help you rise in the rankings on LinkedIn Today.

The Takeaway

LinkedIn Today can be a powerful platform for driving new and targeted traffic to your site, so don’t make the mistake of dismissing it!

Online publishers are advised to include the LinkedIn share button above and below the fold on each of the content pieces, including content behind a paywall. Then, maximize your shares by visitors by including an image with each share, including the #in or #li hashtag on prepped tweets from your site, and encouraging visitors to cross-post any comments to their LinkedIn feed.

After that, publishers can further maximize their use of LinkedIn Today by getting their own publisher’s page, getting site visitors to “follow” their publication on LinkedIn Today, maximizing staff LinkedIn accounts, posting content in groups, and/or managing a LinkedIn group specific to their niche.

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