 Our engineering manager 8020Shorts are focused on providing aspiring or current engineering managers with management and leadership strategies. One of the actions you will need to take to be an effective leader is to put your thoughts and ideas out there and essentially be a thought leader in your field. To that end, we'd like to welcome a guest contributor this week, Carl Friesen from Thought Leadership Resources. Carl is going to show you how to become a thought leader by leveraging LinkedIn. Take it away Carl. Hi, Carl Friesen here from Thought Leadership Resources. This video is one of a series that shows business professionals how they can demonstrate expertise and sell their services to publishing thought leadership content on LinkedIn. In this video, we're going to look at the four different options that LinkedIn offers you for publishing content. I figure it's better to show you than rather than to tell you, so I'm going to use some examples from my profile. The first way to publish thought leadership content to LinkedIn is through posts, as you can see here. Now, these are short bits of content and if it's text, your maximum length is just 600 characters. You can also post photos, infographics, or videos. These are some of my posts and as you can see here, most of them are videos. I've also got some of what LinkedIn calls documents, which are sort of like a subset of posts. In my case, these are infographics that my graphic designer developed for me based on sketches I gave her. Posts can be a really good way to direct people to content you have someplace else, like on your website. To do a post, you need to be in your news feed, not your profile. Just click on start a post and LinkedIn will give you space to write your message. You can upload a picture, a video, or a document here. Adding hashtags makes it easier for viewers to find your post. So to summarize, posts are really good for text or graphics or video content. They're also really good for short messages to direct viewers to content you have somewhere else, like on your website. The second way to publish content on LinkedIn is through articles, as you see here. I'll just click on one that I published recently. And these are really good for long form content. You've got a maximum of 40,000 characters to work with. You can insert pictures and videos into your articles. And some people actually use LinkedIn articles as a way to publish their own blog. As with creating posts, you start writing articles from your news feed. Then you go into write an article and LinkedIn gives you space to put your article in text. And when I do an article, I always write it in Word first and then import it into this format. Because it's easier to edit and check your grammar and spelling when it's in Word. You'll need to add a picture and as you can see, it's a long horizontal format. So to summarize, articles are a great way to share long form content so you can provide in-depth evidence of your expertise. Now, those first two ways, articles and posts, don't appear directly on your profile. They just get published and then they vanish into this fast flowing river of content on LinkedIn. But your connections will see them. And I've had some really great engagement from my connections for articles and posts that I've done. If you use the right keywords and hashtags, your content will show up for people outside of your connections too. Now, a lot of people don't know how to find the articles and posts that they've published. But that's easy and I'll show you how. You can get there from anywhere on LinkedIn. Just go to your picture in the top right corner and click on the down arrow beside the me. Click on Posts and Activity and there you have your choices between looking at your all activity or articles or posts or documents. The next two ways I'll show you actually appear on your profile. So the third way to put content in your profile is through your Accomplishment section under Publications. So here's my profile and I'm going to scroll down to the section called Accomplishments. Here we are. You can see they're listed here and it's just a headline. So you really need a grabby headline to get someone's attention. They'll need to click on this down arrow here to get more information on each publication. When they click on See Publication, they'll get direct to the article on the publication's website like this. To add an article to publications, you'll click on the plus sign here. And LinkedIn asks you which of your many accomplishments you want to talk about. I'm going to click on Publications here and LinkedIn brings up a form you can fill out with the publication's URL. Now this works best if the publication actually has a publicly available unique URL for your article. I mean you can still use publications if you don't have a URL, but it works better if you do. So to summarize, Publications works well if you have your content published elsewhere. And anyway, it shows credibility if you can get your ideas published in credible media. So that's why this is a useful tool for demonstrating thought leadership. Now the fourth and final way to publish content to LinkedIn is through uploading PDFs of content you've published in what LinkedIn calls its featured section. You can use this option for publishing printed articles or a white paper or infographic or any other type of content. Here are some of the articles I've uploaded to the featured part of my profile. I like this method because it puts an image of the article on my profile and that adds a visual variety. It's a clickable image, so if someone sees it and clicks on it, they can maybe have my brilliant ideas right here. Clicking on the image will lead you to the article on why you don't want top results from Google. And let's just say I caught a fair amount of comment on this idea. To add to your featured section, you just click on the plus sign and then click on Media and you can then upload a document from what you have on your hard drive or in the cloud. To sum up, what I call the featured method is a good way to add some variety to your profile and it's probably the easiest way for people to learn about your expertise from your profile. So those are my four methods to publish content on LinkedIn. Articles and posts which show up in your news feed and then your publications and featured sections of your profile. And each of them has its merits. I mean I use all four methods as you've seen and I suggest that if you really want to get notice for your expertise, you do that too. So that's all for now. If you're interested in learning more about how to write articles for publication, get speaking engagements, and other ways to show a thought leadership, please see the helpful articles on my website.