If you are looking for tools that could help you to grow your thought leadership reach on LinkedIn, you may have come across LinkedIn’s Creator mode. You may also have wondered if it is the right option for you, or if there are downsides that might make it less worthwhile. We’ve unpicked the basics to help you decide.
Understanding LinkedIn Creator mode
Creator mode is a profile setting in LinkedIn. It is a free feature, and you can activate it via your profile (via the profile resources section). Doing so gives you access to new tools, and some features that may help you to grow your audience on LinkedIn. The main changes and features are:
- The ‘connect’ button on your profile changes to ‘follow’. You can still connect with people, but you are likely to get fewer invitations. Instead, people may choose to follow you. If you wish to build your network, you will therefore need to go through your list of new followers and invite them to connect.
- You can choose up to five key hashtags as your focus topics. These should be the topics that you post and comment on most often. These hashtags are then shown on your profile, just under your main headline. This should make your top content more discoverable by potential followers, because they can search by hashtag.
- LinkedIn will highlight your posts on your profile. The order of content changes on your profile, and your activities will appear first once you are a Creator. This again makes it easier for your audience to discover your content.
- You can add a link to an external website to your intro card on LinkedIn. This might be a personal website, or a blog, or a company website on which you regularly post thought leadership content. It might also be a sign-up link for newsletters—or indeed, any other page that you want to highlight.
- You can publish a newsletter to your LinkedIn followers via your profile. This is probably most useful if you are already publishing an email newsletter, because it expands your reach to your LinkedIn followers. Otherwise, you need to consider what a newsletter will add to your existing thought leadership strategy and how it will help to meet your goals for LinkedIn. You also need to think about whether you really have the capacity to write and publish a regular newsletter.
- You can apply to host LinkedIn Live events. Only qualified creators and pages can host LinkedIn Live events. Becoming a creator therefore opens the door to you, although broadcast access is not automatically provided. You need to have at least 150 followers to be evaluated for access, and there are some geographical restrictions.
- You can access better analytics. Linkedin provides creators with up to 365 days of impressions and engagements data, which can also be downloaded for easier review.
Making a decision
Activating Creator mode, and becoming a LinkedIn Creator, effectively turns LinkedIn from (primarily) a networking tool to a publishing platform. This is great if you want to be able to publish lots of posts, and generally expand your publishing reach via LinkedIn. If so, Creator mode will provides useful benefits that could help you to build your following on LinkedIn. However, it is not for everyone, and there are some downsides.
First, if you are still in the process of building your network, and you want to use LinkedIn as a way to start conversations with potential customers, Creator mode may not be ideal. Some commentators have suggested that the ‘follow’ function supplied by Creator mode is less suitable for building your network than the ‘connect’ button available to ‘ordinary’ LinkedIn members.
The second issue is whether you will get full value from the tools on offer. For example, will you use the newsletter feature? Questions to ask yourself here include whether you have time to write and publish a newsletter every week or month, and what content you will include that would be useful to your followers. Crucially, you need a purpose behind your use of these tools. They need to be part of a purposeful strategy for thought leadership, and not just used ‘because you could’.
Finally, activating Creator mode sets a certain expectation about your activity. You will need to be relatively active in your hashtag topics. You will probably need to be on the platform at least once a week to share content, and comment on others’ posts. If you can’t commit to that level of activity, you are probably better off leaving Creator mode alone for now. You can always come back to it later.