The benefits of posting 'OPC' on LinkedIn

Content from other sources, what I call OPC or “other people’s content,” can prove to be valuable when you are establishing your professional credentials on LinkedIn – either on your personal profile or your company page.

As the main venue for vetting business professionals and companies, it is critical to make certain your LinkedIn profile, and company profile, offers fresh information on a regular basis to your followers.

As most do not generate original content, the easiest way to do this is to leverage content from other reliable sources.

Too many people and companies post only about themselves, squandering the opportunity to become a trusted source of information about the broader market for your followers.

It’s an art to curate OPC that is relevant and bolsters your positioning in the market you serve, weaving it into a rich feed that includes what is happening, why it matters and how you or your company are in the mix.

I get multiple news feeds from Washington Technology, GovConWire, other GovCon sources, and several sources inside LinkedIn, especially from a few select LinkedIn newsletters. These newsletters are not written by LinkedIn, but by LinkedIn members leveraging the platform to get their message out.

I also set up Google Alerts for several topics germane to me, my clients and my network. The alerts provide me with a variety of articles and blog entries, many of which are quite good.

One benefit of posting OPC is that you do not commit yourself to a specific day for posting, like you would if you were publishing a newsletter. You simply post when you find something worth sharing.

It also depends on what stage you are in in your LinkedIn journey. When you are building a following, you have to invest more time to post regularly and demonstrate your value to followers.

“Worth sharing” brings up another critical issue: what is worth posting? There are still those on LinkedIn who post the equivalent of cat videos, little “feel good” pieces that add little or no value to your network or your professional status. My advice is to save those posts for other social platforms like Facebook.

Criteria for OPC that is “worth posting” should include:

• Is it relevant to my network
• Does it add value to the conversation(s) I wish to start
• Is it from a credible source
• Is it authored by or does it mention a competitor
• Will it help me build relationships with other thought leaders, media, partners, etc.

Things that are relevant to your network could include upcoming events (especially events where you and your company will be present); articles, white papers or case studies on your areas of expertise; published guidance and announcements from agencies, emerging contracts and the like.

Always read the content to make certain you are not highlighting the competition.

When posting an article or any piece of content from an outside source, you have two choices.  The first is to simply post the link and click “Post.” This lets the content speak for itself.

The second choice is curating before posting. I would recommend curating, putting your spin on the topic or highlighting a couple of salient points. This is more time consuming, but it shows that you are not simply sharing, but that you have read and thought about the content prior to sharing.

Either way, make sure to tag the source of content in your post. For example, if I share an article, I will reference and tag both the publication and the reporter/author.

Getting back to the benefits of posting on LinkedIn, the major benefit is that the more you post, your profile starts getting more “views” from people interested in what you post, and consequently, what you do. These views will come from both your first degree connections and those outside your immediate network. The more you post on your company profile,  the faster your “follower” base will grow.

Posting is one of the activities that helps build a subject matter experts (SME) position in our market, for individuals and companies.

Not that I have an opinion.