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I’ve been invited to participate in writing flushing out collaborative articles on LinkedIn. These articles are an interesting new way of collaborating, sharing your expertise, and maybe creating some decent content.
This article discusses the following:
- What are collaborative articles on LinkedIn?
- When should you participate in a collaborative article?
- How to find these articles on LinkedIn?
What are collaborative articles on LinkedIn?
Collaborative articles on LinkedIn are articles that are started by artificial intelligence and then are shared with industry experts who can add paragraphs of content to the sections that have been started. It looks like this:
Once in the article, click on the area where you want to add something.
Your content will show up with your profile picture and LinkedIn summary where you added it. Others can even mark it as “insightful.”
Each author’s section has to be a minimum of 120 characters.
Where these articles show up precisely for the wider LinkedIn network to see them is something I don’t know at this point. But with most everything new on social media, if it has potential, LinkedIn will undoubtedly show them to more people.
Read next: How do I know if I have LinkedIn audio?
When should you participate in a collaborative article?
The most straightforward answer is: When the topic aligns with your content tilt consider adding relevant content to the article.
Out of the gate, it will be hard to measure directly whether these work or not for your brand, but it’s worth trying to see what might come out of it. Plus, the contributions aren’t long with just over 120 characters.
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How to find these articles on LinkedIn?
I found the first one I contributed to in my notifications. So I assume LinkedIn targets specific people on LinkedIn for this content type. Not sure that I did anything else to get this notification.
To get these notifications, I imagine it’s good to:
- turn on creator mode
- set the right hashtags for the topics that you talk about on your profile in creator mode
- talk about specific topics
- once invited, add unique perspectives
Hashtags on your profile show up on the top:
They also show up in your feed, including when somebody in your network contributes to one. Here’s how that looks like.
You can also browse all available topics here.
Earning a top voice badge on LinkedIn
Once you participate in these articles and people like your contributions, you can earn badges. For example, I earned the top marketing strategy voice badge, which is on my profile that way.
But once you earn top voice badges in more than one category, you have to choose, as you can only display one on your profile.
In theory, these collaborative articles can end up creating some unique content, and if rolled out to company pages, companies could invite influencers and industry experts to participate. That could be a good strategy.
But, if contributions are opened up to too many people, this could also create articles that are all over the place. Just imagine: People add paragraphs with accurate (or made-up) information that don’t have much to do with the previously contributed sections. That reading experience is less than ideal.
It could be a good article, or it could just be an annoying comment section with disjointed comments and people spewing crap. Or it could turn into a Wikipedia-type library of content on LinkedIn.
It’ll be interesting to see how these articles evolve from a quality and distribution perspective. And, of course, if they are distributed well on LinkedIn, and you have a chance to participate in them, it can help you build your brand.
And now, LinkedIn is even adding expert badges to people’s profiles based on their submissions – so there’s real potential to stand out even more.
