The Benefits And Drawbacks Of LinkedIn Pulse

With its initial launch across the business-oriented social networking site in 2014, LinkedIn Pulse has slowly built up more and more steam as thought-leaders and persons of influence use the publishing platform to its optimum – namely to promote an authoritative message to connections and followers.

Pulse was originally an independent publishing platform founded in 2010 by Akshay Kothari and Ankit Gupta while they were still students at Stanford University. The service initially started out as an iPad app but quickly developed a massive following prior to LinkedIn purchasing the platform for $90 million in 2013, with Deep Nishar, LinkedIn’s SVP of Products and User Experience, stating that the acquisition of Pulse was to “be the definitive professional publishing platform – where all professionals come to consume content and where publishers come to share their content.”

Since that time LinkedIn Pulse has become the de-facto app for professionals to find and read relevant content from trusted sources, bloggers and influencers, and in late 2014 the publishing platform was opened up to all its members so that everyone could publish articles.

So how does this benefit your business? And what concerns does it raise for digital marketing in 2016? Find out what we think are some of the benefits and drawbacks of LinkedIn Pulse:

The Benefits of LinkedIn Pulse

When it comes to digital marketing, it makes sense to get your content in front of many eyes as possible. This is LinkedIn Pulse’s coup de grace, but there are other benefits of using the platform:

• Pulse posts become part of your LinkedIn profile – this not only helps build credibility but also helps build you or your brand as a ‘go to’ voice in your industry.
• The posts have the ability to reach a large pool of professionals as your audience is essentially built-in and part of your industry. This targeted approach almost always ensures more hits and shares.
• Pulse works as an effective blogging platform without you needing to be a Content Management System guru.
• You get a lot of mileage out of your ideas – if you’ve noticed a blog post was particularly successful or you produced a white paper that had a lot of traction, turning it into a Pulse article can ensure the idea reaches colleagues and a much wider audience too.

The Drawbacks of LinkedIn Pulse

‘What drawbacks?!’ you may be asking after reading through the above but, while there aren’t many, the potential drawbacks are noticeable.

• Creating epic content isn’t an issue, but getting your voice heard over the clutter is becoming increasingly difficult. When Pulse was first launched, publishing was reserved for influencers such as Bill Gates and Richard Branson but since then the platform has been opened up to all users. With this in mind, there’s an argument to be made that LinkedIn has essentially eroded their own authority.
• There are concerns in the world of digital marketing that have yet to be addressed by LinkedIn regarding the Pulse platform – is cross-posted content classed as duplicate content by Google? Pulse articles can be very valuable due to their high search-quality rating, and for this reason it’s to be expected that Google will be quick to index the content for search results… but what happens if you’re cross-posting the content to your blog, your social accounts and wherever else it makes sense to communicate? While LinkedIn doesn’t state you should post original content, as with most questions surrounding Google’s search algorithm and indexing habits it makes sense to only post original content.
• Posting your best content to LinkedIn in lieu of your onsite blog is a double-edged sword – on the one hand it increases your influence and standing in your industry but at the same time it negatively impacts traffic to your site and potential in-bound leads. This is one of the reasons we prefer to publish the intro of a blog with a link to the full post in order to get the best of both, then the impetus is on our followers and contacts to click through if it’s of interest.

Have you seen any other benefits or drawbacks to using LinkedIn Pulse for enhancing your digital marketing offering? We’d love to hear your thoughts as this publishing platform continues to grow.