People often ask, “Hey Jason, how do you post an article to LinkedIn? And, what’s an article on LinkedIn vs. a post, and can a company post an article?” OK, let’s investigate this whole “article” business on LinkedIn. I’ll assume you already have a personal profile on LinkedIn; if not, of course, you need one of those. Related to this, Company Pages can NOT post articles to LinkedIn, only people can. So if you’re a company – hold on, I’ll explain what to do in a moment.
Click to watch How Do You Post an Article on LinkedIn?
First, let’s step back and understand the difference between an article and a post or update on LinkedIn. A “post” or “update” is merely a short little blurb, often with an outbound link to another blog post as on your own personal blog, company blog, or news source. An example would be a post that stated, “Did you know that LinkedIn hashtags are really cool? Check out this article on how to use hashtags on LinkedIn at https://jm-seo.net/1530c” That appears as a post, and it’s short, sweet, and simple. It can also just be a status update, like, “Happy Monday! I can hardly wait till Friday – what about you?” That’s a post, so what’s an article?
Articles on LinkedIn
An article is something meant to be beefier, more substantial, more like a short essay on a topic and – most importantly – an article is “native” to LinkedIn. It lives natively on LinkedIn, and is essentially a blog post to LinkedIn’s internal blog platform (fun fact: formerly called “Pulse”). 
Guess what? Because an article is “native” to LinkedIn while a post often links outwards OFF the LinkedIn platform, the marketing mavens at LinkedIn… well, they prefer and promote articles far more than posts. “Native content” whether native articles or native video gets far, far more organic promotion than things that link outward and take you off of LinkedIn. And articles, unlike posts, are externally available to search engines like Google, yet another benefit.
OK, so now that you know the difference between a “post” and an “article,” let’s dig into how to post an “article” to LinkedIn. So, after you’ve logged in, the second step is to click on “Write an article” to open up the “article” interface. Back up a step here. It’s better to have your article pre-written like in Word, or on your actual blog, (yes it’s ok to post both to your own blog and to LinkedIn), before you do this including a nice-looking photo for the background. You can do a Google search for a photo and select Image Search > Tools > Usage Rights > Labeled for reuse to find royalty-free images. OK, so third, now that you’ve clicked into “Write an article,” you simply click on the image and upload your image. Click on “headline” and write your headline, and then where it says “write here” copy / paste your article from WORD or your blog over. You can then clean it up a bit and ad images. It’s very similar to WordPress in that you can bold, italicize, add links, insert images, etc.
Third, here are some pro-tips. Include some LinkedIn hashtags that are relevant to your target customers in your article, and select some keywords after you hit publish. LinkedIn will automatically share it, but you can also copy the URL and share it to your company page. Which brings us full circle. Fourth, if you want to know how to post an article to a Company Page, you can’t. What you CAN do is have an employee such as the CEO post it to his or her personal profile and then share the URL via your company page. And, finally, as for metrics, you can see them in your LinkedIn Profile by clicking Me > Posts and Activity > Articles > View Stats.
Resource Links
- Creating Articles on LinkedIn
- Differences Between Posting Updates and Publishing Articles
- Sample Article by Jason McDonald on LinkedIn, here.
