Pros and Cons of LinkedIn Articles vs Posts

LinkedIn is a great platform for professionals across a wide range of careers to use, and it comes with many tools that you can use to promote your business and brand to an audience of relevant followers. Understanding LinkedIn articles vs posts is very important to understand pros and cons of each. Two key tools LinkedIn provides include their article and post functions. 

These tools function similarly in that they let you share written and visual content with your network and followers, but they each have a handful of key characteristics that give them both advantages and disadvantages from each other. 

Let’s look at a few of the main differences between LinkedIn articles vs posts before diving into the pros and cons of LinkedIn articles vs posts

Differences Between LinkedIn Articles vs Posts

Understanding differences between LinkedIn articles vs posts is very important to understand the pros and cons of LinkedIn articles vs posts. LinkedIn articles provide users with a way to share long-form blog-style content through their social media network. Typically, these pieces have a limit of approximately 120,000 characters which you can share through LinkedIn’s built-in publishing tool.

These articles permit certain formatting functions, so you’re able to do more with them than traditional posts. For example, you can create headings and subheadings, and add bullet points, images, videos, and other kinds of content in the text.

LinkedIn posts, on the other hand, are much more restricted in the amount of content you can share. They have character limits that max out at a mere 3,000 characters, which is a significant increase from its previous 1,300 character limit.  

Pros of Writing LinkedIn Articles

There are several key benefits that come with writing and publishing articles on LinkedIn vs posts. This pros will enhance the understanding of LinkedIn articles vs posts. Let’s look at a few key examples:

They Help You Become a Thought Leader

One of the biggest reasons people spend time on LinkedIn is because the platform is filled with thoughtful content from intelligent professionals from a wide range of careers and lifestyles. The platform gives you the opportunity to showcase your opinions, critiques, and other thoughts to an audience of like-minded individuals who will engage with your content and help you reach an even greater following.

You Don’t Have to Market Them Much

When you write and publish articles on your own website, it’s entirely your own responsibility to find and engage the right audience, whether you do that by sharing your blogs on your social media pages or by enlisting the services of a marketing agency.

However, when you publish articles on LinkedIn, your blogs are automatically shared with your connections and those who follow you on that platform. And you can reach an even greater audience simply by adding a few key hashtags to your articles that will help them get in front of even more viewers or by sharing the articles to your other social media accounts.

LinkedIn Article Analytics Are Very Straightforward

LinkedIn’s built-in article analytics are very simple and straightforward. They give you relevant statistics on your readers, people who are sharing your content, how many views you get, and much more. You won’t be able to see cumulative stats or gain much in-depth knowledge through these analytics, but they serve their purpose well.

Cons of Writing LinkedIn Articles

While LinkedIn’s article feature comes with many great benefits, it also has a couple of drawbacks you may want to consider before you publish. This will allow you to understand pros and cons of LinkedIn articles vs posts.

You’ll Be Competing with Hundreds of Other Thought Leaders

LinkedIn is a very well-known, popular social media platform among business professionals and other thought leaders. This means that while you have the potential to get your content in front of huge audiences of relevant people, you’re also going to be competing with thousands of other skilled leaders who are publishing their own content.

It’s Difficult to Personalize Formatting and Design

Publishing an article on LinkedIn is very straightforward, but part of this is because the features included are very limited in what you can and cannot format. If you just want to add key bullet points, headers, and images, and don’t really care about the rest of your design, LinkedIn articles may be a perfect option for you. But if you want to make your articles stand apart from the competition with more creative freedom–or even the ability to change the sizes of your images–you won’t be able to do that on LinkedIn.

Pros of Writing LinkedIn Posts

Now that we’ve had a chance to look at the pros and cons of LinkedIn articles, let’s dive into LinkedIn posts starting with a few of their advantages. To understand the pros and cons of LinkedIn articles vs posts you need to understand the advantages of writing LinkedIn posts.

You Can Reach More People 

People like reading short-form content much more than long-form pieces–especially when they’re being inundated with content from hundreds of users on their LinkedIn accounts. Posts serve as a great tool here because you don’t have to write much to publish content–in fact, simple polls and question posts have great success among followers, and they typically feature very short content.

You Don’t Have to Spend As Much Time on Posts

Thanks to their very tight character limitations, you really don’t have a chance to spend a lot of time on a LinkedIn post like you would have to do with longer-form articles. Instead, you can draft a few sentences, and then publish them quickly and easily on your page.

You Can Generate Immediate Feedback

LinkedIn posts have the benefit of providing individuals with immediate feedback. This makes them an ideal tool to use when you’re looking to test out content, service, or product ideas with a relevant audience.

Cons of Writing LinkedIn Posts

Finally, let’s look at the top disadvantages of working with LinkedIn posts.

Posts Tend to Be More Short-Term

While LinkedIn’s articles can still be discovered in Google searches weeks after they’ve been published, posts are a different story. After the first week they’ve been live, posts tend to rapidly die out with minimal engagement and views after the seven-day-mark has passed.

Posts Are Restricted By a Hard Character Limit

While LinkedIn post character limits have increased by more than double their previous limit of 1,300 characters, they still don’t permit much room to create in-depth content. The current character limits sits at approximately 3,000 characters, so you need to be very intentional with your wording to make sure you’re taking advantage of every sentence you write.