7 Steps for Sharing a Blog Post on LinkedIn for Maximum Impact

For a content marketing program focused primarily on thought leadership, promotion is hugely important.

Why? One reason is that thought leadership programs aren’t as much about driving lots and lots of traffic to turn into leads and customers – instead, the goal is to make sure your highly targeted content finds the correct (but often small) audience when they most need to see it.

For many startups, the members of that audience are connected to your company’s leaders on LinkedIn. That’s why it’s so important for those leaders to share your blog posts on that site.

Here’s our guide to making sure those shares have the biggest impact possible on your startup’s bottom line.

(Note: if your startup’s leaders don’t know how to physically share a post on LinkedIn, this video can help!)

Step 1: Make Sure Your Blog Is Formatted Right

For best results on LinkedIn, you want your leaders’ posts to display the title of the blog post and a featured image. For that to happen, your blog has to be set up correctly.

At minimum, that means coding the title as an H1 (heading 1) and including an image that’s tagged as a featured image.

Step 2: Include a Comment About Why You’re Sharing

When your blog is formatted right, pasting a URL into a LinkedIn post will populate the post’s title and featured image – which should in themselves be compelling.

But for best results, leaders should offer a comment about why they’re sharing this post now or why it’s worth someone’s time to read the post (see Figure 1).

A few suggestions:

• Call out the most interesting stat in the article. This can pique curiosity and drive people to click for details.
• Tie the article to a current news trend or a recent conversation. This is a great way to spruce up older or evergreen content: “It was a volatile week for the NASDAQ. How should individual investors react? See my tips from the last time this happened (note: they haven’t changed!).”
• Whoever writes the blog post should write this comment. This saves your leaders time and maximizes the odds that your posts make their way onto LinkedIn with compelling, relevant commentary.
• Test comment length for performance. You’ve got maybe 20 words before LinkedIn cuts off your comment with ellipses. As you promote content on this platform, try comments of various lengths to see what performs best.

Step 3: Put the Link in the Body of the Post

A while back, some growth marketers ran an eight-week test to see which format drove more traffic to their sites: sharing a URL in the body of a LinkedIn post or sharing it in the first comment. The winner was including the link in the comment of the post.

In fact, you probably noticed a lot of that happening in 2021 and early 2022. That's because LinkedIn's algorithm at that time was (apparently) penalizing people who sent traffic away from LinkedIn itself, so posts got more views and engagement when external URLs were in the comments.

But people aren't doing this as much anymore.

And frankly, I'm glad. I found it kind of annoying. So go ahead and put links in the body of your post. You'll save your network some clicking and some hassle.

Step 4: Share from an Individual’s Account (Not the Company’s)

People on LinkedIn (aka people) are more likely to pay attention to something a person shares than something a brand shares.

Then there's the pure numbers consideration: if your leaders have more connections and followers than your startup does, sharing from one of their accounts gives your content a bigger reach.

But this advice comes with one caveat…

Step 5: Pay to Promote Your Post

If you’ve written a blog post about something and your startup’s leaders are sharing that post on LinkedIn, it’s important. So why not show it to more people in your target audience by paying to promote the post?

Never promoted content on LinkedIn before? Check out this explainer.

Step 6: Do More on LinkedIn than Share Your Company’s Blog Posts

Maybe this should be Step 1.

Either way, the best way to share a blog post on LinkedIn is to do more than share blog posts on LinkedIn. Your company’s leaders should be regularly reacting to, commenting on, and sharing other people’s content.

And yes, we know many startup leaders don’t have time to (or don’t see the value in) engaging on LinkedIn regularly. In that case, delegate this engagement to a trusted team member.

Step 7: Measure, Learn, and Iterate

Sharing blog posts on LinkedIn isn’t an end – it’s a means. To more credibility, more awareness, and ultimately more customers, investors, partners, or employees.

To figure out what yields the best results for your content and your target audience, track performance and iterate based on what works. Useful metrics include…

• Interactions on LinkedIn (likes, celebrations, etc.).
• Comments.
• Referral traffic from LinkedIn (and how those visitors engage with your site).

For Thought Leadership Content, Publication Is Just the Beginning

When the goal of your content marketing program is to establish your brand and its executives as thought leaders in your industry, hitting “publish” is just the start of the journey. From there, getting the word out – via LinkedIn, media pitching, email newsletters, and more – is essential to making sure your message gets in front of your target audience and inspires them to take action.

Interested in hearing more about getting the right message in the right places? Let's talk! 

Wondering about how to translate thought leadership into revenue? Hear how supply chain management software startup project44 did it.