Over the past few years, I’ve noticed a trend for people to publish posts on LinkedIn.
Not only two to three paragraph posts, but long posts with more than 1,000 words.
I’m not saying you shouldn’t publish posts on LinkedIn.
Their interface allows you to create a post, write your thoughts quickly, add a few line breaks to break up a wall of text, and press the “Post” button.
But I’m a big believer in owning your own content, rather than using Medium, LinkedIn, or Facebook to publish your content.
What surprised me is the folks publishing long posts on LinkedIn are people who have their own websites.
Their own blogs.
And they were strategically choosing to publish on LinkedIn.
Which puzzled me.
Why Publish on LinkedIn?
When I asked a few colleagues and friends why they chose to publish on LinkedIn, and not their own sites, the top two reasons were:
- I get more engagement on LinkedIn than my site
- My site is so old, I haven’t published anything on it for years
I get that.
We all want more interaction with readers.
Who wouldn’t get excited when 40+ folks comment on your LinkedIn post?
And with the rise of social media, it’s well known commenting on blog posts has decreased over recent years.
Speaking for this blog, I rarely get comments here.
I do get replies to my tweets when I announce my posts on Twitter.
But is that sudden thrill of engagement worth it in the long term?
I suspect LinkedIn posts could receive a lot of comments when they’re initially published. But over time, the post would disappear on the timeline.
Can people find a LinkedIn post in search results on search engines?
I didn’t know, so I did some research.
Are LinkedIn Posts Indexed by Search Engines?
I thought such a basic question would be easy to get an answer from LinkedIn.
No.
I searched LinkedIn’s online help and found nothing.
Three tweets to the LinkedIn Help account on Twitter resulted in them requiring my email address to get an answer.
Huh?
It’s a basic question. The answer should be available publicly.
Without requiring an email address.
LinkedIn Help’s past history on Twitter revealed they daily refer Twitter users to help posts in LinkedIn’s publicly available online help.
And didn’t require Twitter users to submit their email address to get an answer.
Next, I tried to find an answer in Google Search Console.
But my search in their help forum and community quickly took me down many rabbit holes.
A tweet to the Google Search account resulted in no reply.
Which is when I decided to reach out to my colleague John Espirian, a LinkedIn expert I met online several years ago.
John describes himself as a LinkedIn nerd and relentlessly helpful technical copywriter.
It’s a good description!
He regularly writes about content creation and improving your online presence on LinkedIn and your website.
And that’s when I learned: Google doesn’t regularly index LinkedIn posts.
John shared his own experience searching on Google for his LinkedIn posts.
And discovered about 10% of his short-form posts were indexed.
But it’s not clear how Google decides what posts are indexed.
Or when.
I asked John if Google ever officially announced they were indexing LinkedIn posts, and he replied that he’s not aware of anything officially being said.
My Own Experience Searching for LinkedIn Posts on Search Engines
When George Mount, one of the people I follow in Twitter, asked about people writing long-form LinkedIn posts:
What are people who write long-form LinkedIn posts doing to repurpose on their blog? Just copy-paste?
— George Mount (@gjmount) June 27, 2022
Based on what I’m seeing, they don’t do it at all. https://t.co/OLyZIwOc0r
I decided to run my own experiment to see if his post was indexed in search engines.
My findings?
Searching for his post on Google and Startpage (my default search engine) brought up no search results.
When I reported it, he replied:
My suspicion confirmed 🙃… good initial reach but ultimately ephemeral.
— George Mount (@gjmount) June 27, 2022
I’ll at least start w/a copy-paste and add some headers, etc. Maybe cross-reference them as well, and go from there.
Thanks for taking a look! I’ve been thinking more about how to repurpose b/w blog & LI.
I agree.
Seems clear to me that if you publish a Linked post, you may get a lot of comments initially.
But over time, the post disappears.
With search engines indexing only a small portion of LinkedIn posts (when they do index them), how are people going to find your post with helpful resources?
Or your post with a solution to an issue they’ve been troubleshooting for several days?
However, if you publish a post on your blog, it will be indexed by search engines.
And found by people searching for that topic, resource, tip, or how-to tutorial.
Speaking for myself, I don’t use LinkedIn to search for information. I use search engines.
Wrapping Up
LinkedIn offers a quick and easy interface to publish a post. You may find you initially get more engagement on LinkedIn than if you publish the post on your own site.
However, that engagement disappears quickly.
If you’re going to use LinkedIn to publish content, my recommendation is publish the post on your site first.
Then repurpose or redistribute your content on LinkedIn.
Own your content.
Have you found more engagement when you publish on LinkedIn? Are you publishing on both your blog and LinkedIn? Share your experience in the comments.
