LinkedIn is rolling out LinkedIn Newsletters to members and company pages. Once you’ve got access, you’ll be able to create a newsletter within LinkedIn and invite your followers to subscribe.
You can choose to publish your newsletter daily, weekly, bi-monthly or monthly. Your followers will be invited to subscribe when you publish your first issue. Your followers and connections will receive a notification when you publish a newsletter, and your subscribers will see your newsletter in their feed.
To create a newsletter, you’ll need to turn on ‘creator mode’ in your profile. Then just click on ‘Write an Article’, and you’ll get the option to start your newsletter. Unfortunately, while creator tool access is rolling out, it may not yet be available to all members.
To access the newsletter function, you must meet specific criteria, namely:
Audience base – More than 150 followers and/or connections.
Original content – Experience creating original content on LinkedIn (For example, creating posts with text, images, or videos, publishing articles, etc.).
Professional Community Policies – A good standing record of abiding by the professional community policies.
Are LinkedIn newsletters a good thing to do?
The LinkedIn newsletter function allows you to share more insights with your connections and further demonstrate your expertise. If you have a large following, you’ve got a ready-made audience, and your content may attract others. It’s also another way to engage with your followers.
However, as always, my advice is to steer your customers and prospects back to an asset that you control. If you’ve got all our eggs in the LinkedIn basket and LinkedIn suddenly changes its rules of engagement, you could be left exposed. Rather than create the newsletter on LinkedIn, I think a better approach is to message your followers and invite them to subscribe to the newsletter you host elsewhere.
As with all new LinkedIn functions, I’ve been inundated with requests to subscribe to newsletters. It’ll be interesting to see where this goes.