LinkedIn Pulse: A Guide for Businesses

If you’re active on LinkedIn in an effort to grow your B2B business, you’ve probably heard of LinkedIn Pulse. 

But if you already have a website, what’s the point of publishing content on LinkedIn? 

A little-known fact that many businesses don’t realize is that Pulse is a great opportunity to grow your business and improve your outreach campaigns. 

In this post, we’ll show you how.  

LinkedIn Pulse isn’t the only feature you should consider when planning to grow your business on LinkedIn. Check out our guide on the Hidden LinkedIn Drivers Of Growth.

What is LinkedIn Pulse?

LinkedIn Pulse is a publishing platform where you can publish content directly to LinkedIn. Businesses use it to publish blogs, industry news, and insights for their audiences.

Once you publish a piece of content, it can be seen by your connections and LinkedIn will show it to users who are interested in your niche content, helping you grow your audience. 

Why You Should Use LinkedIn Pulse

If you already publish relevant content on your own website, you might be wondering why you would use Pulse, but it does have some key benefits.

• Better reach

Just like any social media platform, LinkedIn wants its users to stay online for as long as possible. 

If you share a link to a blog post you have published elsewhere, you’re taking users away from LinkedIn, meaning this post gets around 6 times less engagement.

Pulse articles keep users on the platform, so LinkedIn will show these posts to a wider audience.

• Built-in audience

If you don’t already have lots of traffic to your website, it’s difficult to grow that organically. LinkedIn has a target audience ready to read your content. 

This means you can grow your brand more quickly with Pulse content and help funnel that traffic back to your website. 

• Improves automated outreach campaigns

LinkedIn is the perfect platform for B2B lead generation since it’s filled with industry professionals and decision-makers.

But if you automate lead generation on LinkedIn, you need to make sure your profile is optimized for visitors (which you’ll get hundreds more of through automation). 

Publishing through Pulse is a solid way to make you stand out as an industry leader and improve the conversion rate of your outreach campaigns.  

How to Navigate to LinkedIn Pulse

There are two ways to access Pulse. The easiest is to select ‘Pulse’ from the ‘Interests’ menu in the navigation bar. 

Once you’re there, simply hit ‘Publish a post’ to get started. 

The second is to click on ‘Publish a post’ directly on your LinkedIn homepage, which will take you straight to the content tool. 

What to Post on LinkedIn Pulse

If you already have a website with a blog (which is important to boost your organic traffic), you’re probably wondering what you should post to Pulse. 

Duplicate content can have a negative impact on your website SEO, so it’s important to post to Pulse strategically:

Publish to your website first

If you’re going to post the same article on your website and LinkedIn, make sure you post it to your website first and give Google at least a week to index it. 

After posting the original content, post them to LinkedIn but change it enough so it isn’t flagged as duplicate content. 

You shouldn’t post the exact same article to both LinkedIn Pulse and your website – it could impact your organic rankings. 

Post ideas

Your post should be tailored to your industry and your audience, but here are some popular title ideas to get started with:

1. Latest industry trends and your opinions
2. Case studies from previous clients
3. News topics relating to your industry
4. How-to articles
5. How you overcame failure or adversity

If you have blog posts already on your website, consider writing spin-offs or condensed versions that then direct readers back to your website to learn more. 

How to Post on LinkedIn Pulse

• Add a featured image

When you’re in the LinkedIn Pulse publisher, the large gray box at the top is where you upload the banner for your blog. 700×400 px is best, and make sure it’s a high-quality image relating to the topic you’re writing about.

• Optimized headline

Next is a space to add the title of your post. This should be optimized with keywords to help it rank in LinkedIn searches, as well as be interesting enough for people to click the post to read more. 

We’ll look at how to write a catchy headline in more detail below. 

• The main content

The editor is easy enough to use. It includes different formatting options for titles, quotes, bold text, etc.

To add links or multimedia, you can hit the icons on the far right. 

You can write the article directly in the Pulse editor or paste it in from elsewhere if you prefer. 

Make sure your post contains the keywords you want to rank for, though don’t stuff your post full of keywords. Your top priority should be a valuable, well-written article that benefits readers. 

• Labels

This is the most important part of your SEO strategy. The labels at the very bottom of the editor tell LinkedIn what your post is about.

How to Build an Audience on LinkedIn Pulse

There are some quick strategies you should apply to every post on Pulse to help grow your audience:

• Keywords

The best way to get in front of a new audience is to optimize your post with keywords. LinkedIn only allows you to include three keyword tags, so do some research and be strategic. 

Some keywords are incredibly popular on LinkedIn but they will be much harder to rank for. 

On the other hand, more niche keywords may be less popular, but your post is much more likely to show up at the top of searches. 

If you start out by targeting these lower keywords, you can build up a steady audience from there. 

Make sure to pick keywords that reflect your topic as you only can use three. 

• Embedded videos

You can embed videos and presentations from Slideshare in your post to make it multimedia. 

Videos are continually growing in popularity (which is why going live on LinkedIn is another great way to grow your audience), so you’ll get significantly more post views and engagement if you can include a short video or slideshow in your post.

• Sharing

Don’t just rely on your audience to engage with your post and share it for you. Help it reach a wider audience straight away by sharing it as part of your marketing strategy:

• As a status update on your page
• In relevant industry groups
• On different social media platforms

Tips for Getting The Most Out of LinkedIn Pulse 

Here are some of our top tips for optimizing your posts on LinkedIn Pulse and getting the best engagement:

1. Keep the title short

If your title is too long, it’ll get cut off in the news feeds and readers will only see part of it. 

Keep it short while including your keywords and what the reader can expect from your post. The more enticing you can make it, the more clicks you’ll get. 

Here are some popular title ideas:

• A guide to…
• 3 things no one will tell you about…
• How to…
• Stop doing this…
• X vs X
• 3 mistakes to avoid when…
• A little-known trick for…

2. Avoid generic stock photos

LinkedIn is stuffed with generic-looking stock photos, so these are going to get lost in the noise.

If you have unique, branded images – use these as your featured image. If not, try to find images that are bold and stand out on the feed to grab attention. 

3. Get more LinkedIn connections

Your connections get a notification whenever you publish something on Pulse. So it makes sense to grow your connections to grow your audience. 

The more connections you have, the more likes, comments, and shares you’ll get on each post, which is the aim of this part of your marketing strategy. 

4. Set a publishing schedule

Just like any other social media platform, consistency is key. Posting once every six months won’t get you any results. 

Instead, set a publishing schedule and stick to it. Posting once or twice a week is great, but choose a schedule you know you can keep up with.

Eventually, your connections will expect a post from you on set days and when your content is valuable and informative, will be eager to see what you publish next. 

5. Get featured on industry-relevant channels

There are over 100 different channels on LinkedIn Pulse including Leadership & Management, Big Ideas & Innovation, Technology, Entrepreneurship, and Social Media.

Getting your post featured on industry-relevant channels is a great way to boost your engagement and viewership and improve your marketing strategy. 

To get featured, you need to write high-quality content that offers a solution and is relevant to current news. 

Don’t be disheartened if you don’t get featured straight away, keep trying with every post and eventually you’ll see progress. 

Conclusion

LinkedIn is a professional network with so many opportunities to make yourself stand out as an expert in your niche, but publishing quality content to Pulse is one of the best. 

Whether you’re just starting out with lead generation on LinkedIn or you’ve been doing it for a while and haven’t seen great results, a consistent Pulse content strategy will boost your efforts. 

Tired of doing lead gen outreach manually on LinkedIn? Why not give our LinkedIn automation tool a try.