How to add Word, PowerPoint and PDF documents to your LinkedIn posts
LinkedIn now lets you add documents to your posts. If you have the feature, you’ll see a document icon in the posting panel at the top of your home feed. It’s highlighted below.
Click the document icon and you’ll be prompted to browse your computer for a document to share. The supported document types are:
- Format: Word (DOC/DOCX), PowerPoint (PPT/PPTX) or PDF
- Max. length: 300 pages
- Max. size: 100MB
Once you’ve selected a document, you’ll see this screen:
As above, the document is previewed, and you can enter a document title.
The space above that is for normal post text, where you can introduce the document.
After you complete the post, it will show up in the feed with the document as an inline item, allowing people to consume the content without leaving the feed.
The document post contains back and forward page buttons (shown only on multi-page documents):
There is also a fullscreen button:
The fullscreen option offers two further features: accessibility mode and document download. These are shown in the top-right corner when the document is in fullscreen mode.
Accessibility mode simplifies the display and shows pages individually rather than side by side.
For PDFs, accessibility mode passes control to your web browser’s PDF plugin, and you should see common PDF controls on the right-hand side of the page.
The download button lets you save a copy of the document to your computer, so that you can view or print it offline.
LinkedIn document post stats
Document posts are still relatively new on LinkedIn. They were implemented around October 2018. To increase interest in them, LinkedIn seems to be boosting their reach.
In December 2018, one of my document posts received more than 200K views in just over a week. Thanks to Andreas Jonsson and the team at SHIELD INTELLIGENCE for these graphs of the post’s performance.
Some stats I measured manually for this post:
| Date | Views |
|---|---|
| 04 December 2018 | 82,544 |
| 06 December 2018 | 125,472 |
| 09 December 2018 | 197,134 |
| 10 December 2018 | 200,808 |
There’s no doubt that this sort of boost won’t last long, but if you’ve got the document post feature already then don’t be afraid to give it a whirl.
Remember: post only relevant, helpful content. Posting salesy or spammy content won’t get you far.
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Who wrote this?
John Espirian – the relentlessly helpful technical copywriter
I write B2B web content, blogs, user guides and case studies – all aimed at explaining how your products, services and processes work. I also offer LinkedIn profile critiquing and rewriting.
I work from home in Newport, South Wales and support the (formerly) mighty Liverpool FC 🔴⚽️