Get More Visibility from LinkedIn Pulse

If you run a B2B business and aren’t already experimenting with LinkedIn Pulse, you could be missing a trick. Purchased by LinkedIn in 2013, LinkedIn abandoned its news aggregator LinkedIn Today, in favour of RSS App Pulse. While the integration of Pulse was controversial at the time, all Facebook and Twitter support was withdrawn, some businesses are seeing real benefits to taking advantage of Pulse. As LinkedIn’s own blogging tool, publishing via Pulse offers unique targeting opportunities for the right content.

Why B2B Businesses Use LinkedIn Pulse

There is a difference between Publishing on Pulse and personal LinkedIn updates. Personal updates on LinkedIn aren’t very visible and in my view aren’t sticky. There are, in fact, a bit like Twitter updates in that respect and are easily lost in the milieu.
Pulse on the other hand is driven by its own algorithm. One way to look at it, is, that its purpose is to find a relevant audience for quality content. If you are a B2B business this should be music to your ears.
It rewards engagement and extends the reach of quality publishing beyond a person’s immediate connections and followers. There are no guarantees of course, but a post can easily get thousands of views and shares. As a B2B profiling tool it’s hard to beat. Posts that meet LinkedIn Pulse’s criteria (via its algorithm) are shared in different categories.  As a result your post will find a relevant audience: The holy grail of marketing.

The Benefits of Using LinkedIn Pulse

Content marketing is all about selecting the right channels. Of course you want your content in as many relevant places as possible but it’s easy to get over-loaded. So why bother with LinkedIn’s Pulse?
It’s clear to me Pulse will only suit some businesses. LinkedIn’s purpose is to grow business relationships. While it’s possible to use other social networking platforms to do this, with LinkedIn Pulse, there’s no extraneous noise. Everyone on LinkedIn, to a greater or lesser extent is there to grow business relationships. A proportion will be business decision makers.  So, for example, if your business offers a B2B service you can immediately see why LinkedIn Pulse may be useful, if only there was also a clever way to find your audience.
That’s where Pulse does the heavy lifting for you. It sorts articles by category and theme and means good posts won’t get lost in the crowd. This segmentation of topics helps articles find the right audience.
But the benefits don’t stop there. When people read good articles they may well want to find out more about the author and you can find the process adds to your followers and ultimately helps build connections. Remember, this is why you’re on LinkedIn in the first place.
I never advise adopting a marketing strategy purely for SEO benefits. That’s putting the cart before the horse.  But a by-product of being published on Pulse is that just like LinkedIn profiles, articles will be indexed by Google and therefore will appear in relevant Google searches.

How to Get Started

To test the effectiveness of Pulse you don’t have to create a whole new series of articles. Rather, I would recommend reworking and adding value to articles you know have been popular elsewhere.  This makes it easy to get started. Don’t forget your audience. It also makes sense to study what’s published in the category of interest. This will give you a feel for style and quality.