5 tips to begin your journey towards building your brand on linkedin

I have been writing articles on LinkedIn for a few years now. The service is excellent. The editor they offer works like a charm and LinkedIn has its own ecosystem of users to which you are able to address effectively. Linkedin also has a marketing tool in its ecosystem that liked "Trending" by categories that continues to curate and recommend posts.

However, after writing on LinkedIn for these years, I can clearly see some of the pros and cons of writing on LinkedIn vs writing on your personal blog or website or other suitable mediums.
These days people have started to use LinkedIn more like Facebook where you even see people posting personal photos, their certificates, etc to capture attention. Its become like a personal networking site for professional circuit and a lot of people don't like it and are turned off by it, including me.



A significant number of professionals still look at and use LinkedIn for professional purposes. hence, in this article, I will share some pros and cons of writing articles on LinkedIn and then leave you with some recommendations on how to use Linkedin for effective engagement.

Pros of writing on LinkedIn

1. LinkedIn is a community where you have a focused & filtered out professional audience from the entire internet user base. Writing content for this community pays back.
2. There is still no parallel community like LinkedIn on the internet. Everyone in the professional or corporate world uses it.
3. The reach of this medium is unparalleled.
4. Linkedin offers an excellent writing medium, has great marketing tools in-built to promote high-quality content.
5. It works on the ripple effect. Every time you post something, someone likes your article or comments on it, their immediate circle of connections get to see that updates. It can open doors for anyone looking to make connections, land the next job, or make a new deal.
6. LinkedIn showcases your =your ability to communicate and writing effectively. This is one of the highly sought after skills. A lot of folks use video logs to get their message out, and that works highly effective too.

Cons

1. For starters, you don't really get any credits for all the incoming traffic to your article. This is in contrast to personal blogs where a very popular article could contribute tremendously to the writer, by way of impressions, ad revenues, and so forth.
2. You may not be able to write about anything and everything. In fact one may need to be cautious to post content that is professional in nature otherwise, it can have the opposite intended effect.

How to suitably use LinkedIn for effective engagement:

Considering the above, Its always best to consider the subject you want to write about, your intent behind writing these articles, and choosing the medium suitably.

Linkedin would work extremely well if you are looking to gain professional visibility, have something valuable to share with the professional community, however, if your purpose is to gain impressions, make money then it may be more suitable to use your personal blog. You can look at a larger audience on the internet as well as may have much more flexibility in what tools you can employ for this purpose.

Suitable Medium	Your intent	Type of target audience	Type of content	Conduct
Linkedin	Create Value. Gain Professional Visibility.	Professional audience covering your colleagues from work, influencers from different industries	-Technical Articles -Business Articles -Domain related Articles -Analysis of some form -Business or management	Professional. Sensitive
Other sites- blogs, etc	Build impressions. Earn money. Create value.	Based on the niche of your website. Can be an extremely wide variety of audience	-Hobby - photography, art, cooking -Passion - Travel, automobiles -Any type of content	Casual Nature

Your Turn 

Those are some advice from my end. 
How has been your experience using Linkedin to write articles? 

Share your learnings in the comments section below.