What LinkedIn and The Wall Street Journal Have In Common

The Wall Street Journal is, in media relations world, the holy grail. A neutral-to-positive story on B1 delivers instant awareness among an incredibly tight audience of highly relevant professionals – competitors, investors, and potential investors, partners and market makers – to any business. Back in the day (ok, last Tuesday) when we asked prospective clients what success looked like, invariably the answer was “front page of the Wall Street Journal.” (Of course, most companies will never qualify for coverage on A1 or B1 – it’s called the WALL STREET journal for a reason.)

Today, to reach an incredibly valuable audience to your business, LinkedIn can deliver incredibly viral awareness at scale in the same fashion and with much higher trace-ability. Not by publishing your own articles on a personal or company page (although every communication plan should incorporate this strategy), but by being interviewed and included in a story published by one of the growing legion of journalists employed by LinkedIn to publish business news on the platform.

Why? Because in the LinkedIn ecosystem, LinkedIn reporting ranks supreme and shows up most in the over 500 Million members’ feeds and includes in-story links to those people interviewed (and their companies) – something that the Wall Street Journal will never deliver.

Is The LinkedIn Interview Worth Your Time?

Case in point, I was interviewed by LinkedIn’s George Anders for his recent story on Boomerang employees. George’s almost 200,000 followers were served up the article, along with thousands of others that the magical algorithm chose; as of today 1,600 people had liked it, and almost 200 had shared it. And the number of people who followed me on LinkedIn jumped almost 15% in two days. Who’s George Anders? The Senior Editor at Large for LinkedIn, a published author, and a former writer at Bloomberg, Forbes, Fast Company, and The Wall Street Journal. Bona Fides.

YES.

Another case in point for the importance of LinkedIn to business reporting is how business media use it to amplify their own reporting in the LinkedIn ecosystem. For example, The Wall Street Journal has 4,703,899 followers. Since 12:01 this morning, WSJ has posted 11 of its stories to its page. That’s 11 times 4.7 M people have had the WSJ appear in their feed (yes, you have to scroll). And to that add the reporters who post their stories onto their published pages, another set of thousands of people, add to that the sharing that happens within the network and the chance that you’re going to see something you’ll find interesting or relevant from the WSJ dramatically improves. 

Compare that to the 66.42 Millions visits WSJ got last month as measured by SimilarWeb. Dig down to see referring traffic to note that only 8.56% of referring traffic comes from LinkedIn.

So, the next time your media relations people want you to be interviewed by someone at LinkedIn, don’t say “is it worth it?” ask “when can you brief me?”