LinkedIn Publishing Platform

It allows a direct line of communication to professionals that follow your business online.

Gives a company a dedicated space for their company to display whom they are, and what they do.

Contributes to keeping your company relevant by posting content.

I was never a fan of the way people connect on the platform. For example, if I want to connect with someone I have to at least know them or their email address. There are situations whereas I want to connect with people whom I do not know.

The platform is slowly turning into Facebook. More and more I see people posting things that do not belong. Linkedin is supposed to be a professional platform, I wish they would be more clear about that. People can and do post whatever they want, however some kind of reminder to people who use the platform would be nice.

I like how it lets you publish long form content.

I love how it lets me copy and paste words and links from my WordPress website, and it all comes over without me having to reinsert the links.

As LinkedIn rolls out its new interface, the Publishing Platform is losing some of what made it awesome before. Especially re: images. I've lost the ability to resize my graphic by clicking the resizing arrows that appear on the border of most applications. Now I'm stuck with the default size of the image, and all I can do is select whether it's left-aligned, right-aligned or centered.

Another thing that seems to be getting worse is my ability to quickly see who's viewed, liked, shared and commented on a blog post. This inhibits my ability to engage with my readers. I had a client express surprise that I hadn't acknowledged her reaction to my article. The weird way it's set up now, I can't even see her comment.

I used to be able to click "My articles" and see a checkerboard with tiles of a summary of my articles: Images + headlines + # of views/likes/shares. This checkerboard showed 3 - 4 of my article tiles per row. This was something I used regularly before publishing a new blog. It let me scan quickly to make sure I wasn't going to use the same image or headline as in a previous post. Now, when I go to view my articles, I have to slowly scroll though a long list that shows 1 image headline at a time, and doesn't let me see my analytics. It takes a lot longer to scroll through my 90+ articles. #Frustrating

For some reason, I get a lot fewer views than I used to. On average, I used to get between 50 - 80 views per article. I even have one post that's grand [total is] 140,000+ views. Sadly, my most recent posts have gotten 8 - 20 views. My writing's gotten better over time, and I follow the guidelines LinkedIn offers in its Help section. And last year I aligned some of my content with LinkedIn's editorial calendar. I wish I knew what's driving the reduction in views. Is it me? Is it LinkedIn's new approach to Pulse and the Publishing platform? I'm starting to question whether publishing here is a good use of my time.

It would be great if LinkedIn could give us a roadmap of what's changing and why - BEFORE & DURING the change. A few years ago, LinkedIn did a lot to encourage people to use the Publishing Platform. So I did what they asked, and got into the habit of publishing an article almost every week. With all its capabilities, I'd think LinkedIn could do an analysis of who's used the Publishing Platform seriously, frequently and ethically -- and communicate directly to us to let us know what's working well (and not-so-well) for them - and ask us what's working well (and not-so-well) for us. That could lead to some mutually-beneficial brainstorming of how to optimize things for everybody.