Long gone the Twitter day of RSS link sharing. The outdated folks spam their followers with a link dumping.

Just paste in the link, and wish someone will open the link just because you shared it to read it.

That strategy does not work on LinkedIn.

LinkedIn network is professional oriented. And they want you to provide context. They are also fully capable of reading written words.

We will go through what to write on your LinkedIn posts when you share links.

Summaries of Articles

Do you see any statistics in the article? Once you know what to look for, they are much easier to share. Due to the symbolic nature of language, they are much easier to catch our eyes as well.

Some signs to look out for are: %, time (seconds, minutes, hours, days, months), $, people count, age group, and date.

Example sentences taken from the real LinkedIn data are:

• SEO strategy can boost 1,210% in traffic
• Optimization affects 3.5 seconds load speed
• December 2020 was the biggest shopping period with $18m spent (up 23%)
• In q2, we had 25% growth for those aged over 65 years

They are much more concise and easy to consume as information.

A small tip to find those information faster is to use CTRL+F (in Mac) to search for those symbols. You can easily use it with a dollar and percentage signs to quickly spotlight the factual information.

Rephrase

This is another trick to follow. You can take the article title you are sharing, and simply paraphrase it.

The blog and news headlines contain proper nouns. They are person’s names, locations, or brands. Keeping the focus on those names, simply reorder the sentence.

If the link headline is:

“Popeyes debuts highly anticipated chicken nuggets”

You can reorder it to:

“Popeyes’ chicken nuggets are highly anticipated and it’s debuting”

That simple rephrasing will still tell the message in a different manner.

Expand

The better yet is to expand the title. The average link title comes in 50 characters. Try to expand that in a complete sentence at the range of 150 characters. A trick is to describe the source, when it was published, and written by who.

For example, if the title is

“The competitiveness of fair trade versus conventional coffee”,

one can say

“A new research paper, the competitiveness of fair trade versus conventional coffee, written by Young Lang was published earlier this week in Sciencedirect.”

You will need to go deeper into the article. Browse through the publication (easy part), find the author, and the date,  They are not hard. If you are not a creative genius, this step is a sure and easy way to expand your status update.

Simple Prompt

A great way to get people engaged is to ask questions. It makes it inviting for someone to leave comments.

Here are some short liner examples:

“Do you agree?”

“Share your thought”

“Can it be right?”

“Who’s surprised?”

They are simple, yet effective content starter.

Call To Action

It’s tempting to share your opinion. But that’s dangerous for your professional image of LinkedIn.

You might not have a strong opinion about the subject. But try to hold it. Never shout out “this is stupid”.

Instead, guide your audience through what they expect from the link. If there’s a specific action they can take inside the link, that’s even better.

Here are some examples of CTA:

“For registration, click”

“Click here►”

“Read the full essay”

“Please check out”

“Grab the book here”

“Have a look at the website”

This simple restatement makes it feel natural to follow your links.

Combines

All of the techniques mentioned can be used in a combination. You can start with a prompt, followed by rephrase, content summary, and your CTA at the end.

Imagine we have an article that is titled “Why Every Business Needs an Excellent SEO Strategist”

For example:

“Who’s surprised?” (Prompt)

– SEO strategy can boost 1,210% in traffic (Summary)

– Optimization affects 3.5 seconds load speed (Summary)

– Marketing specialists have increased requirement to understand the web technicality (Summary)

People need to understand the impact of SEO strategy in their business (Rephrase)

Check out the infographic (CTA)

They are using different passages. By breaking them down per sentence, you can understand the structure of the typical LinkedIn post better.

Your Power in Hands

We have walked through different ways to introduce you links to your audience.

People will show your appreciation with a share and like engagement.

It is always important to provide values in your status update no matter how valuable that content inside the link is.

Inksprout can come in handy in assisting with your summary making. Check out its free Chrome extension.