To start with, I have to admit – it wasn’t the app that first motivated me to publish, but a person. If you are here regularly, you know her for sure – her name is Karolina 🙂 .
When I was acting as a freelancer and recruiting for various companies – I used to laugh that I was recruiting in stealth mode. No one but me and the person I was speaking to knew that there was a recruitment process in place. It worked, but it was so much work!
Then, during my first conversation with Karolina, I heard the question “Why aren’t you publishing LinkedIn posts?”.
So many thoughts ran through my head – after all, I’m a psychologist, I have all the blockages, beliefs, syndromes and other tidbits worked out perfectly, and yet I don’t publish.
After a brief storm in my head, I had only one conclusion: it was time to start doing it.
Beginnings can be difficult
I needed a whole hour to write the first post. I’d review every sentence several times. If you’ve ever published a post on LinkedIn even once, you probably know what I’m talking about. At the end I clicked ‘publish’, and what did I see? A typo!
Sure, we can debate that it’s “done is better than perfect” but still, something went wrong.
And that’s where AuthoredUp came to the rescue, an app that is wonderfully simple and yet, in my opinion, all you need when publishing posts – no add-ons or integrations needed.
What features do I use when publishing on LinkedIn?
Scheduling content and saving ideas
LinkedIn has added scheduling capabilities for some time now, so you can write a post and set when it should be published. It’s a great feature but AuthoredUp gives you something more, which is the ability to save drafts.
Authentic, valuable publications have the greatest return on investment, especially in the long term. When you plan your publications in advance it can be difficult to predict what content will be most valuable to your audience and important to you at that time. And then sometimes a topic which seemed important to you at one point becomes completely irrelevant in the face of world events.
The scheduling function, combined with the option to save templates in AuthoredUp, allows you to quickly change your decision and set a new publishing schedule without losing the content you have already created.
In addition, when your goal is to publish regularly, you can save all your ideas or draft posts directly on LinkedIn. This guarantees nothing gets lost. And if your inner critic likes to sit on your shoulder, perhaps looking at the list of ideas, you will decide not to listen to him this time and simply click ‘Publish’.
Previewing your publication and formatting text
This is my favourite feature – I think if it was one I would also use AuthoredUp.
You prepare a post, add a link, a graphic. And you see how it will look to your audience. You have a preview of exactly how the post will look. If you want there to be no text between the introduction and the development – you can preview that too, even differentiating between the mobile and the desktop version of LinkedIn.
The biggest problem on LinkedIn is the graphics that are pulled from the links you add to your post. Sometimes these graphics are beautiful – but pulled from a link they reduce our reach drastically.
Additionally, if you need to bold a piece of text, or add italics or bullet points you can also easily add this from within LinkedIn, in a similar way to a text editor.
Analysis, statistics – conclusions please!
While you have to draw your own conclusions (at least for the moment), AuthoredUp collects the number of views, reactions and adds information such as time of publication, type of post etc. in one place.
Until now, I have been collecting such data myself, manually (ouch!). And although I can still see small shortcomings here, I much prefer this solution to a manual analysis 🙂
If you see that there are no responses under your content, the reach remains consistently similar. If there are no comments under the post – it’s worth taking a look at the stats and thinking about what you can do differently.
Help with the introduction line
AuthoredUp has prepared a ‘generator’ for topics as if from well-known news portals. You can smile here and say it’s silly…but if you really have writer’s block and don’t know what kind of introduction to prepare, or how to encourage your audience to click “see more”, there’s no harm in getting some inspiration.
If you decide to use a catchy beginning, remember to make the rest of the publication valuable so that your recipient doesn’t feel disappointed.
Does the tool sound interesting?
You can download AuthoredUp here and add the tool as a plug-in to your Google Chrome browser.
Remember – no matter if and what app you decide on, the most important thing is to define your purpose and understand your audience. Share what is interesting to them and be consistent in your efforts.
