Why and How You Should Share Knowledge on LinkedIn

Like any other social network, LinkedIn offers valuable benefits when you produce useful content other people enjoy. As a statistician, I have been writing on LinkedIn for many years and have reaped those benefits handsomely. While sharing insights and engaging with my peers, I have grown professionally  and formed meaningful connections with other professionals in statistics and beyond. Here’s what I’ve learned—and how you can do the same.

What Type of Content Should You Create?

LinkedIn is a social network for professionals. Thus, I strongly encourage you to create content for professional purposes, especially within your domains of strength and knowledge. In my newsletter and LinkedIn writing, I focus on statistics, communication, and career development—three domains I know well. I earned a master’s degree in statistics, I volunteered as a career adviser for five years, and I have spoken to post-secondary institutions to share career advice about working in data and analytics. I pay attention to the latest data and trends in these areas, and I have built my wisdom on a lot of experience. When I write something about these topics, I can back it up with substance and confidence.

Why Should You Share Your Knowledge on LinkedIn?

At first, the notion of sharing your knowledge on LinkedIn seems bizarre. You don’t get paid, and you don’t get credit for an academic publication. This  begs the question: Why would you bother spending the time and energy to create content on LinkedIn? After all, isn’t a solid profile sufficient as a branding tool?

The most immediate benefit is attracting the attention of recruiters, hiring managers, and potential clients. If you write accurate and insightful information, your contacts will “like” your post, share it with their network, and comment under it. Pretty soon, their contacts will start engaging with it, too. Your reach will gradually expand, and some readers may find your expertise to be valuable to their own companies. They may want to hire you as an employee or a consultant. As a result of my writing, many recruiters have contacted me about employment opportunities.

How to Create Compelling Content

On LinkedIn, the easiest way to create content is to write a post; the text editor is immediately available to you on your main feed. Anything you post will become viewable to your network’s main feed. You can also write an article, which has a higher word limit and allows you to expand your ideas with nuance and detail. If you write articles on a regular basis, you can turn them into a newsletter for your followers to subscribe to. (I have chosen to use Substack to host my newsletter, because it allows me to monetize my content through paid subscribers.) Finally, you can join a group and write posts within a group, but note that your post will only be visible on the group’s homepage and not on your feed.

On LinkedIn, the most compelling content has images or videos that immediately draw a reader’s attention. Using pictures and video is an effective way to stand out among all the other content on LinkedIn. You can attach your own photos and videos, or you can choose from copyright-free sources such as Pexels or Wikimedia Commons. (It is good practice to credit the authors of these photos in your LinkedIn post.)

When I write about technical statistics, I often post images of mathematical expressions, which I create with an online LaTeX editor such as Lagrida and save as PNG images. (An example is my recent post about the multinomial distribution.) For more creative options, I use generative artificial intelligence to create an image that captures a certain social situation. Then, I insert that image into Microsoft PowerPoint and add my own captions.

Within my text posts on LinkedIn, I sometimes use subscripts, superscripts, and special characters (e.g., 𝜇 and 𝛽). For emphasis, I often use italic and bold fonts. Since LinkedIn’s text editor is plain, I cannot write any of these natively. Thus, I must write that special text in other editors, copy my desired output, and paste it into LinkedIn’s editor. LingoJam and Compart Unicode allow me to do this.

I strongly encourage you to write your text posts with proper spelling, grammar, and punctuation. To my dismay and surprise, there are many posts with broken English, bad word choices, and unclear sentences. It is rare to find someone who commits to writing LinkedIn posts with clarity and correct mechanics on a consistent basis. If you can do this, you will stand out.

Finally, I urge you to make sure your content is factually accurate or supported by evidence. Unfortunately, there are many people who post wrong or hyperbolic information on LinkedIn; some of them are sloppy,  and some do this intentionally to be bold and attention-seeking. On LinkedIn, people tend to avoid confrontation and criticizing others. This makes it a polite platform, but the trade-off is less fact-checking by the community. If you consistently post correct and accurate content, you will attract attention. (Notice I did not write “sophisticated” or “complicated” content. You should write what you know well. LinkedIn has hundreds of millions of users, and there will always be an audience for your level of expertise.)

Writing on LinkedIn takes work, so you should write at a pace that works for you. I choose to write Monday through Friday, which is extreme. Once or twice per week is more common. As long as you write engaging and accurate content with proper English on a consistent basis, you will start to attract a steady readership and build your professional network on this platform. If you need examples, take a look at my earlier posts about parties and casual romance in the workplace, warning my American clients about my upcoming Canadian holiday, and plotting a matrix of histograms and scatter plots for continuous variables with Python’s Seaborn package. 

Eric Cai

Senior Data Scientist, Acosta

Eric Cai is a statistician from Toronto, Ontario, Canada. He works as a senior data scientist at Acosta, where he measures the value of Acosta’s retail services for suppliers of consumer packaged goods. Cai earned his Master of Science degree in statistics from the University of Toronto and has been a prolific writer on LinkedIn for many years; he currently has roughly 19,000 followers. He recently began a free newsletter called The Data Copywriter on Substack, where he writes about statistics, communication, and career development.