LinkedIn Sharing Explained
In this article, we'll be discussing how LinkedIn users can amplify the reach of their company page content by sharing it out via their LinkedIn connection networks. Let's dive into the anatomy of the LinkedIn share.
The LinkedIn Company Page Admin Center
Company page administrators have access to an interface where they can make updates, edit the company page, view company page analytics, and see company page notifications. We'll use TSL Marketing's own LinkedIn company page in the examples below.
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Sharing ON a LinkedIn Company Page
Posting a link to your LinkedIn Company page allows you to post an update out to all your page followers. Page admins can do this via the "Admin Center" on the company page.
If you aren't an admin, you'll need to become one. You'll have to follow these steps to become an administrator of your LinkedIn Company page. If you aren't an admin, then these options won't be visible to you.
If you haven't already created a company page, you can follow the steps here to get started: Create a LinkedIn Company Page.
Read my next article for tips on how to create great content for LinkedIn.
Managing Your Company Page
To create posts from the public company page view, admins need to enter the “Admin Center” via the sidebar where your company is listed. Just click on your company’s name and it will direct you there.
When you create updates via the company page's admin center, you can make edits to the social media copy by clicking on “Start a Post.”
You can then draft your post in the space directly under your company logo. You can also edit the image that renders. If an image doesn't render, you can select a new one via the camera icon. You can also add a video or file to your post.
In the updates section, you can no longer update the headline and meta description. In fact, meta descriptions no longer appear in the LinkedIn feed.
Useful Features for Company Page Updates
@Mentioning People and Companies from the Company Page
An interesting feature for company page updates is the ability of company pages to @ mention people and other organizations. When you do this, the @mention will create a link in the post to the profile of the person you mentioned. You can also @ mention other organizations.
Unlike @ mentions on personal profile posts, the person or persons mentioned on company page posts do not receive notifications.
To do this, you just type the @ symbol and start typing a name or company name.
Once you've got your copy ready and you've added in your link, you can go ahead and hit the "Post" button. If you've not attached an image, your post will look like the example below (Notice that Brian is now mentioned in the post).
Additional Post Options
You'll also notice that there are icons that can further enhance your post:
- Celebrate an occasion, such as welcoming a new colleague to the team, recognizing an employee, sharing a new project milestone or celebrating a work anniversary.
- Share a profile with your network.
- Create a poll.
- Offer help, referrals, career coaching, resume reviews, introductions, and/or volunteer work.
- Upload a photo or video.
- Share a document from your local computer, Dropbox, or Google Drive.
How to Get More Impressions on Your Updates
If you are still building your page following, the rest of this article provides useful tips to amplify your company page content via personal LinkedIn updates.
First and foremost, don't try to go at this alone. Social media is best when your entire team participates in sharing and amplifying your content.
Sharing an update from a LinkedIn Company Page
A properly built LinkedIn Company Page is different than a personal profile. Although you will see people set up their company pages as profiles, this isn't the ideal set up. A company page, unlike a profile, cannot send connection requests, can't join or post updates in groups, and can't comment on the posts of other people.
Most importantly, unless your company page posts are liked and/or shared, then the only potential audience that your updates have are your company page followers.
Unless you're considering LinkedIn Sponsored Updates, there is a limited amount of ways to expose the company page itself to a wider audience.
Admins and company employees alike need to take part in this process in order to get your company page's messages to a wider audience than just your company page followers.
Liking and Sharing Company Updates
There are a couple of different ways to share a company page update:
Sharing from your LinkedIn Feed
- Go to your LinkedIn feed — this is your home screen on LinkedIn.
- Find an update from your organization.
- Hit the like and/or the share buttons.
The Difference Between a Like and a Share
A "like" shows your connections that you liked an update. You could consider this to be a very passive share. A share allows you to add in copy about the update that you're sharing.
A share also enables you with options to share:
- Publicly – with anyone on LinkedIn.
- Publicly and to your Twitter feed (if you have Twitter connected).
- To share only with your connections on LinkedIn – the post would not be viewable by anyone who you aren't connected with.
Under advanced settings you can now share and change the setting to allow comments on your post.
To share with individuals, you have to now click over the three dots in the corner of a post and select “send in a private message.”
Sharing From the Company Page Feed
Admins can like, share, and comment directly from the company page feed. This is a change from the previous setup, where if an admin performed an action on the company page, they were acting as the company.
Rather than searching through your feed for a company page post, it's probably easier to ask your team to go straight to the company page to help amplify your company page updates.
When I ask my internal team to help promote updates, I send them links directly to the company page. To make it easier, I'll even pin the update I'm directing them to the top of the page. You can only do this in the admin center now:
Once you find the page update you want to promote, then, just like in your LinkedIn feed, you hit the like or the share button of the update that you'd like to share with your network.
When you hit the "like" button, a notification will go out to your network that indicates that you liked the content.
When you hit the share button, you're able to share the update along with your own comment. We'll look at an example of this below.
When you share an update from a company page — or from a company page post in your home page feed — it renders differently than when you cut and paste a link or when you use a LinkedIn social share button.
Here is an update shared from via a company page share:
In order to show that this came from a specific company page, you'd need to @ mention the company page.
Using the @ mention for a company page can help you gain company page followers because more people have the chance to see and click on the link to the company page.
Posting to your Personal LinkedIn Feed
The easiest form of sharing happens when the page you want to share has social media share buttons. Sharing is easy when there is a LinkedIn share button present. Just follow these steps:
Step One: Find the content you want to share.
Step Two: Click on the LinkedIn Share button (you must be signed into LinkedIn).
Step 3: A window will pop up and it should allow you to:
- Share in a post – Select this to share with your LinkedIn connections, using the same options listed above.
- Send as a private message – You can search for specific connections and share the content along with a message.
When you share in a post, you may also choose to add your own comments similar to when you write a post. This gives you the opportunity to add your two cents about the post, or to call attention to a specific person or company by using the @ symbol.
Like the examples above, when you type @TSL Marketing, it allows you to select TSL and creates a link in the update that will direct anyone who clicks on it to the TSL Marketing LinkedIn Company Page.
Sharing Directly from Your LinkedIn Feed
Sharing Links directly from your LinkedIn home screen means that you have to copy and paste the link into the "Start a Post" section.
When you share an update this way, it may not always render perfectly.
While you used to be able to make adjustments to the way the updates looked, individuals no longer can control the image or headline that renders when they paste in a link. You are able to load your own image and link.
The Benefits of Social Amplification
When done in concert, liking and sharing a post can amplify your content out to a much wider audience. For example, let's say your company page only has 50 followers. Any post to that company page has a chance to be seen by those 50 followers, but in reality it may only get half that many impressions if no one interacts with the content — or none of your followers happen to be logged into LinkedIn.
If two LinkedIn users with 250 connections each find the update and like and/or share the content, now you've magnified your potential reach by ten times. This means more potential impressions of your post and more clicks to view your content.
If you want to get the highest amount of impressions, clicks, and conversions, then it's critical that you get your most well-connected team members to like and share your content out to their LinkedIn social network.
Not only do these actions help to grow the reach of the content, but also they can have the effect of making the content trend on LinkedIn.
Sharing Tips and Best Practices on LinkedIn
- Try to share early in the morning and middle of the week. LinkedIn has more traffic at this time.
- Add in commentary when you feel you can add insight to the post, e.g. "here is the newest blog article from the TSL team. An excellent primer on the basics of a LinkedIn Company page."
- Keep your commentary relatively succinct.
- When you "like" a post, that is essentially an endorsement and people in your network will see you took that action.
- When you "share," this gives you the ability to add a comment or not. This comment is also seen by your network of connections.
- "Send as a private message" may be useful if you're looking for specific people to see the post, or if you're trying to send to your internal advocates to get them to see and share the post. There are some limitations here because it goes to their LinkedIn inbox. Depending on their settings, they may never see this message if they don't check that inbox. When you perform this action, you can give your email a subject and a message.
- "Share with Group Members" can help you spread the message to certain groups you're a member of, but just make sure that the post isn't overly promotional. If it is, it may be rejected by the admin or moved to the promotions section.
- Remember that in order to share a post to a group discussion, you must be a member of that group.
- By adding commentary, you're doing more than posting a link. You're trying to get people to engage with your content by doing more than just clicking and reading the link. When someone posts a comment on your discussion, then that post has the chance to get more impressions and potentially more engagement.
Note on Images – You may add images to any update you post on the company page. Make sure that you have the rights to use that image. You can put your logo or any image elements from your website here. There are paid and free stock photo options as well. Images help your updates stand out in a sea of social media updates.
Visit https://www.tslmarketing.com/blog for future articles in this series, including information about the basics of using your LinkedIn company page, simple steps to optimize your personal profile, how and when to use LinkedIn advertising, and more.
Also, feel free to download our free eBook:
Tags: SEO, LinkedIn, advertising, social media marketing
