3 Ways IT Consultants Benefit from LinkedIn’s Publishing Platform

With LinkedIn’s new feature, professionals can build their personal brands by writing directly to the audience.

IT consultants savvy about small business marketing are no doubt excited about LinkedIn’s mid-February announcement that it’s expanding its publishing platform to allow all users the ability to create and share long-form posts.  A privilege previously available only to high-profile contributors like Martha Stewart and Sir Richard Branson, the ability to publish long, thoughtful articles will be available to all 277-plus million users by year end.

So why are many IT consultants energized by the expansion of LinkedIn’s publishing platform?  Because they can benefit from the changes in the following three ways:  

1. Increased visibility: Although posts each user makes will appear on his or her profile – making your immediate audience only as big as your current network – each of your connections can comment on and share the post, expanding reach to all LinkedIn users. The share feature opens the potential for your content to gain traction and eventually reach other distribution channels, increasing your visibility exponentially. Quality content is key here – it needs to be relevant and engaging to your target audience.

2. Expanded network: Since LinkedIn has so much data about members – industry, positions, groups, education – it will match those parameters to content, delivering relevant articles to users’ news feeds.  As an IT consultant you can author articles on a number of topics like data security, cloud computing, and software integration and post the content to your LinkedIn profile.  LinkedIn will then parse your content, run it through a proprietary algorithm, and push it out to the home pages of other members who are very likely to be interested. The proverbial cherry on top is that LinkedIn is now allowing members to follow each other without being directly connected. This feature can increase the efficiency of any content creation campaign making LinkedIn an even more powerful marketing tool.

3. Increased brand awareness: A major part of an IT consultant’s job is giving valuable and potentially crucial advice on their area of expertise to others. Being able to share a fraction of that expert advice coupled with their professional opinions and resumes on LinkedIn will drastically increase their brand awareness online.  We would even go as far to say that it could help validate their work and win an interested client over.

As with all system changes, only time will tell definitively how LinkedIn users react to and use the platform in light of these changes.  But for IT consultants around the world these changes represent an amazing opportunity to help others with original content while building their reputation – not just on LinkedIn, but globally.

The contents of this article and the linked materials do not offer legal, business, or insurance advice related to the needs of any specific individual business. Please consult your professional advisor. 

Kevin Kerridge is the director of small business insurance for Hiscox, a company that provides customized business insurance for IT professionals including consultants, project managers, programmers, developers, designers, and many more technology professionals.