Formatting Content for LinkedIn

As a company or business, a primary marketing goal is to position your brand in a way that showcases the organization at its best. In a physical sense, this is done through marketing and branded materials such as brochures and business cards. Online, this is achieved primarily through your website.

With your website being the primary place to market your business, it becomes imperative that shared content on the site is formatted correctly. What do I mean?

We’ve all seen someone share an article or link and the preview box shows up incomplete. Sometimes there is a picture missing, or maybe the article title doesn’t pop up.

Ideally, when someone shares content, you want it to look like this:

Below is a Quick Tip on how to format your content for LinkedIn so that it is easily viewed and shareable.

*Here’s a tip within a tip: You’ll want to have a developer help you with this one. These tips involve finding areas of your website’s code that only a developer would know how to find and edit.

These three tips serve as a checklist, when having a conversation with your web guy/gal:

1. Make sure your website’s source code complies with Open Graph Protocol (OGP) which,  “enables any web page to become a rich object in a social graph” or, in other words, allows the preview box to pop up on sites such as LinkedIn.
2. Also, make sure you have the following og: tags in their correct format:
   • <meta property=”og:title” content=”Title of the article”/>
   • <meta property=”og:image” content=”http://media.example.com/ 1234567.jpg”/>
   • <meta property=”og:description” content=”Description that will show in the preview”/>
   • <meta property=”og:url” content=”http://www.example.com/URL of the article” />
3. Make sure your images meet LinkedIn requirements. The requirements are as follows:
   • Max file size: 1 MB
   • Minimum image dimensions: 80 x 150 pixels
   • Recommended aspect ration: 4:1 or 1:4

These three steps will ensure that your content is being shared and viewed in a format that best represents your brand on LinkedIn. I know that this language might as well be Greek to many. But trust me, if you simply ask your website developer to take a look, he or she will be able to steer you in the right direction.

For other Quick Tips and valuable information regarding LinkedIn, please visit our Intero blog.