It’s Good to Share…

Top tips to make it easy for others to share your posts and updates.

Sharing is the essence of social media; “Sharing is caring”. We share with our networks the good things we are doing, we share the funny things we find, we share the not-so-funny, and sometimes the sad.

Photo by ChrisL_AK on Flickr

But where social media becomes powerful, really powerful, is when our ‘shares’ are then shared by others. We’ve all seen this with Facebook and Twitter especially, but it seems to be forgotten on that apparently rather dull network, LinkedIn.

However, you can share on LinkedIn, and you can “like” other people’s shares, in a similar fashion to Facebook.  You can comment on them, and also share them with your own network.

Just as retweets on Twitter can get you noticed by people outside your core social network, likes, comments and shares on LinkedIn get you on the radar of people outside your immediate network.

How LinkedIn Shares Work

You can share updates easily in LinkedIn by typing into the “Share an update” box at the top of your home page. Click the “Share” button and you’re done.

However, there’s more available – you can also paste in a link to a web page, and LinkedIn will go off and pull down the description of the page (if available) and place it into a secondary box – you then only have to enter some text yourself in the main share box, or you can even leave it blank (but personally I think it looks better with a “covering note”).

Here’s a summary of how these bits work:

and here’s how it shows up in the home page updates view of your network connections:

How Re-Sharing Works

The “share” link is the one to look out for – you can use this to share with your own network, and it works in a similar way to a retweet on Twitter – your connections will now see the update in the same way that you do, even though it was created by someone in your network, rather than their own.

If one of your updates is shared by someone in your network, LinkedIn will send you an email looking something like this:

Subject: Joe Bloggs shared your update: "my exciting news..." on LinkedIn
Joe Bloggs (IT Analyst, Consultant) shared this update with 431 connections

Likes and Comments

These work in a very similar way, and depending on how active your network connections are, you might see a few of these on your home page on LinkedIn. When someone Likes or Comments on an update, the fact that they have done so appears on their activity, and hence the updates on the home page of their connections.

The Temptation of Twitter

Many LinkedIn users connect their Twitter accounts to LinkedIn so that all their Tweets get fed into LinkedIn automatically. Some make use of the #in and #li tags in Twitter to selectively feed their updates into LinkedIn.  However, there are pros and cons to doing all this, but what I want to concentrate on here is what happens to your Tweets when they arrive in your LinkedIn profile. A typical update received via Twitter looks like this:

Notice that the options below the update are Twitter options, and not LinkedIn ones – there is no way to share this update on LinkedIn!

So, it doesn’t matter how interesting your Tweet is to your LinkedIn network, it will go no further, and will not be re-shared by any of your connections.

Remember what we said earlier about what makes social media powerful, that cycle of sharing? You’ll get none of that here, whereas if you’d shared your update directly into LinkedIn, it would have been shareable.

Share and Share Alike

Most of the people who feed Twitter into LinkedIn do so to save time, but this can lead to a deluge of updates which aren’t shareable, thus defeating the object of setting it all up in the first place.

So what’s the answer? Well, you could post updates in both Twitter and then LinkedIn, but there’s an obvious manual overhead in doing so, a much better approach is to use one of the several tools available to help you.

Recently I’ve been using Buffer, and although its primary use is for scheduling social media updates, it allows you to push the same update to both Twitter and LinkedIn. You can schedule your updates to the networks at different times, so you can avoid posting to Twitter and LinkedIn simultaneously.

The screens below show how to add an update to Buffer (in this example I’m using the Buffer extension for Firefox) and what the Buffer queue looks like for LinkedIn and Twitter.

Think about your Audience

Once you get to a stage where you’re using a tool like Buffer to manage your social media activity, you start to think about it more, and ask yourself questions like “what sort of update is this?” and “who is the likely target audience for this update?”

Since starting to use Twitter, I’ve been through the following phases:

1. Pipe all Tweets into LinkedIn
2. Pipe all Tweets into LinkedIn if they have the #in tag (I found I started to split my Tweets into two distinct categories)
3. Update to Twitter and LinkedIn separately
4. Update to Twitter and LinkedIn together using Buffer

Now that I’ve arrived at this stage, I still use Twitter on its own, but none of those Tweets are business related. Anything which has the wider audience is Buffered into both with no additional overhead. I know that if I strike a chord with someone who follows me on Twitter, they’ll retweet, and on LinkedIn they’ll share with their own network, or like, or make a comment.

Be Shareable! It’s Social!

Here are some takeaway points:

• Sharing drives social media networks.
• Your reputation grows the more your content is shared.
• Make your content as relevant as possible to encourage sharing.
• Make your content easily shareable!
• Understand each social network you use.
• Use tools like Buffer to help you manage your social media shares.

I highly recommend you check Buffer out for yourself. If you sign up via this link http://bufferapp.com/r/7424a we’ll both receive one extra space in our buffers.