Don’t let your LinkedIn content be spoiled by a poor user experience

Great content on LinkedIn can lose traction if not presented well.  In the famous words of Molly Meldrum, ‘do yourself a favour’ and check your UX.  So you want to ensure you don’t let your LinkedIn content be spoiled by a poor user experience.

It’s not just the quality and value of good LinkedIn content that matters. How it’s delivered and displayed impacts user experiences.  And good user experiences build trust, more followers and a promise of consistency and author  enjoyment.

CONSIDERING READERS 

Are you taking readers user experiences (UX) into consideration when posting content? As one of my first advertising managers said at a sales meeting many years ago, ‘the best sales information can fall flat with a lousy presenter’. Same here too.   

 A great UX saves eyeball and brain strain. This matters as we are all consuming a deluge of content and information.  Good UX helps readers digest the content easily and hone into key points quickly.

 Below is the main issues to be mindful of in delivering great UX for written content.

PARAGRAPH BREAKS  

Having a sea of words without white space and paragraph breaks just makes reading a dizzy headache affair spoiling good content and profiles.

It’s overwhelming to the senses when content is in a big block of words without any, or too few paragraph breaks to break up the wall of words.   It’s also cumbersome to read individual sentences that are overly long without a pause of sorts. 

Posts, profiles and articles without plenty of paragraph breaks are a right  PITA (pain in the ass) to read.   We are all time sensitive and the better laid out a piece of content, the easier to find the juice and value.

Using well considered paragraph breaks and plenty of white space makes content, articles far more inviting to read.  And breaks on personal profiles is essential to inspire greater focus and interest points.

Remember content on the Mobile App displays differently than desktop. So what looks good on desktop wont necessarily look as crisp and clear on mobile.

And don’t assume scheduling tools will transpose content and paginations correctly. You always need to go and double check (some scheduling tools don’t transfer tags, and hashtags either).

RECOMMEND: Have around 3 to 4 short sentences or 2 long (but not too long winded) sentences per hard paragraph break in posts and articles.

CHECK: The Mobile app how your content looks after publishing from the desktop and add more space if needed.

JOURNALIST TIP : Use headline titles to separate paragraphs. It makes reading much more pleasurable.  Think about a title that identifies the next few paragraphs topic points.  

FANCY FONTS

Don’t use fancy fonts, bold and in Posts as they are too risky for 100% readability.  Definitely do not use them in your headline or name field. This looks tacky and desperate and can impact search and keyword identification.

On some (older) mobile devices fancy fonts will be all garbled and unreadable. And on Screen Readers (used for vision impairment needs) they are not readable at all. 

I know that capitals can infer yelling BUT (ha see what I did), I suggest using capitals in a few words of a headline or sentence in Posts to draw focus.

NOTE: Bolding copy in Articles and Newsletters is perfectly OK (it’s an option on the publishing dashboard). Check out and subscribe to my Newsletters on LinkedIn here to see examples.

NAME & COMPANY TAGGING

This needs a moderation and appropriate focus.     Having content jam packed and splattered with a sea of big blue hyperlink tags makes reading hard to navigate to key points.

There may be many people that are relevant to the post but, if more than say (5) five, I recommend putting them in the comments. Or in moderation, put the names and company tags at the bottom of the post and just type the names within the copy body.

This tip is not for the engagement pod tactic nonsense but genuine tag relevance to the content itself (i.e. contribution, inclusion of topic). 

WARNING NOTE:  If you tag a person/s in a post and they don’t engage it can trigger the AI algorithm alert of a potential spam post.

HASHTAG STUFFING

Hashtags are very important for search and classification. But when they are overused the post looks messy and cluttered and your topic focus unclear.

Posts are not a Xmas turkey that must be stuffed to the brink of the carcass . Over stuffing with 15, 25, 35, 45 (yes I’ve seen that many often) hashtags makes the post look lazy and the topic hard to define and a bit hotchpotch.

LinkedIn is not Instagram and hashtags work very differently.  And a sea of hashtags or made up hashtags to highlight a word throughout the Post just looks yuk. Bring on the Visine eye drops!

RECOMMENDED : No more than 3 to 6 hashtags max.  

 DOUBLE DIP OF HASHTAG & NAME TAGS

This is where you want to just throw a brick at some pieces of content. It all feels like 50 elephants being shoved into a school bus (think about how that looks!)

Posts which are overstuffed with hashtags, name and company tags are a bloody eyesore. It becomes all a wall of blue haze. There is no care to the reader here and the actual content is horrible to read.  People think it will help reach, but the reverse is often true. Enough said.

NAME FIELDS – EXTRA INFORMATION

Name fields with extra information makes the Newsfeed cluttered and clunky looking.  Extraneous information draws the eye view across the feed and detracts from posts and headlines. When there are multiple people doing this, the Newsfeed is very congested looking.

Adding anything in the name field (apart from suffixes and certifications) looks desperate and tacky. 

It is also is against the LinkedIn User Agreement.  Many people (grrrr) do this gaming tactic for visibility and seemingly get away with it. But I guarantee that many also get caught and have their profile suspended and compromised.   

EMOJI’S

Emoji’s are really terrific in moderation (great to distinguish points, add fun and context).  But overuse and a swag of all different types looks like a children’s art class. 

Overusing and using lots of different ones in posts and headlines detracts from key points and can murky brand perception.

Creating great valuable content alongside factoring in user experience (UX) will increase trust and followers. This applies to all social media and website blog content also.