LinkedIn Pen

Working in the B2B space, I spend a lot of time on LinkedIn as that is typically the preferred social network of the audience I’m looking to engage with. With all of the time I spend on the site, it’s not surprising how many blunders I see people make, especially with their Linkedin posts. Things like posting personal photos or sharing blurry images are just some of the more common blunders I see being made.

Here are my top five pet peeves on LinkedIn. Are you guilty of any of these?

5 Mistakes to Avoid Making with Your LinkedIn Posts: Click To Tweet

1. Posting too often

LinkedIn is a professional social network. It isn’t Facebook and it’s certainly not Twitter, yet some people still post as often (if not more) on LinkedIn as they do on the other social channels. The typical user logs in to their LinkedIn accounts to see what their contacts are up to, whether their connections have changed jobs or posted a status update recently. People don’t want their news feeds filled up with 3-4 articles being shared by the same person.

It’s great that you keep up-to-date on what is happening in the news or in your industry, but space your postings out. If you have a lot of content to share, I’d suggest posting once a day or better yet, once every other day.

Posting multiple times on LinkedIn will slowly grate on people’s nerves and will likely get you, or your posts, blocked.

2. Posting chain mail

Remember back in the day, when your inbox was filled with forwarded emails threatening bad luck if you didn’t forward the mail on? Or the emails telling you about a poor child with a rare disease who couldn’t afford medical care unless you kept the email going, because every email sent meant 10 cents would be raised?

Eventually, those types of messages made their way onto Facebook. Instead of passing it on, it became “let’s try to get a million likes on this picture of orphaned dogs in a third world country.” Or, “only 3 people per 1 million can solve this logic problem. Can you?!”

It seems that there are less of those types of posts on Facebook nowadays. Why? Because they’re being shared on LinkedIn. I can’t believe people still post, “Let’s see how fast we can get this to x million people” on LinkedIn.

LinkedIn isn’t the place for puzzles, chain mail or other types of “keep this going” posts. Do you really want your boss or future boss to see that you’ve participated in sharing that type of content?

LinkedIn isn't the place for puzzles, chain mail or other types of *keep this going* posts:Click To Tweet

3. Posting blurry photos of quotes

Pinterest is full of quotes that people have pinned. On Pinterest, people share quotes about anything, really; getting over heartbreak, working out, song lyrics. Any variation of words that have been strung together have been made into pins on people’s boards.

What’s happening on LinkedIn is that those large, clear quotes from Pinterest are being shared on LinkedIn. The problem of course, is that LinkedIn resizes the image to 600 pixels which leads the letters to become blurry. Instead of an impactful photo of Steve Jobs accompanied by a quote about the power of perseverance, it ends up looking like a bunch of blurry text not to a squished Jobs.

People need to understand that the image dimensions of each social network are different. You can’t take a picture that looks great on Pinterest or Facebook and expect that it’s going to look exactly the same on LinkedIn.

4. Posting Baby Photos

Babies are amazing, aren’t they? Their arrivals into the world are very special occasions. Everyone expects to see baby photos on Facebook. LinkedIn? Not so much.

I can’t stress this enough; each social network is different. People seem to understand that you wouldn’t post a recipe on LinkedIn because it doesn’t match what your audience is expecting. Yet, they don’t have a problem posting pictures of their children.

When it comes to posting something on a social network, think of it like this, would you want a recruiter to see those posts? What do those photos say about your level of professionalism?

5. Posting Hashtags

Every time I see a hashtag used on LinkedIn, whether it’s in a status update or someone’s name, I cringe. Using a hashtag in a post once should be enough to show you that it does not have the same impact as it does on Facebook or Twitter.

Hashtags on LinkedIn don’t become hyperlinked so when you use them, it just looks messy. Worse, it makes it very evident that you just copied your Tweet and pasted it into LinkedIn.

To Sum It Up

All of these gaffes are easily remedied, people just need to understand that not all social networks are the same. If a particular type of post works well on one social network, that doesn’t mean it will translate to another social network.

One thing you should always keep in mind when posting to social media is, “how will this post impact how people view me?” Do you want to be known as the person who posts chain mail or blurry quotes?

Top image courtesy of Sheila Scarborough