LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a third place a post can go, alongside your Facebook Page and Instagram. One post, written once, goes to all three.

Important

A LinkedIn sign-in lasts 60 days. Somebody has to press Reconnect roughly every two months, or posts to LinkedIn fail. See The 60 day sign-in.

Connecting#

Under Posts > Settings, choose one:

• Connect profile posts to your own personal LinkedIn feed.
• Connect page posts as a company page. You have to be an administrator of the page you pick.

Before anything opens, Gene App shows exactly which permissions LinkedIn will be asked for and what each one lets it do. Read it, then continue.

If you administer more than one company page, the first is connected and you can switch pages from Settings afterwards without signing in again.

The 60 day sign-in#

A LinkedIn sign-in lasts 60 days, and then it stops working. LinkedIn does not give Gene App a way to renew it quietly in the background the way Facebook does, so somebody has to press Reconnect roughly every two months.

Gene App does what it can with that:

• The Posts settings page shows how many days are left.
• From a week out, the composer opens Post to by itself and puts a countdown next to the LinkedIn destination.
• Once it lapses, LinkedIn shows as Expired. The destination is greyed out and cannot be ticked, and posts scheduled to it will fail rather than silently disappear.

If you plan a month of posts, check the countdown first. A sign-in that runs out on the 20th will not send the posts you scheduled for the 25th.

What LinkedIn takes#

The same three shapes as everywhere else: one picture, several as a carousel, or a video.

Captions can run to 2,200 characters, the same limit Instagram sets, so one caption fits everywhere.

Words on the picture and the darkening slider work exactly as they do for the other networks, because the picture is flattened before it is uploaded.

What is different underneath#

Facebook and Instagram fetch pictures from a public link. LinkedIn will not: it takes the file itself.

That is invisible in use, but it means a LinkedIn post does not depend on your files being publicly reachable, and it is why a LinkedIn post can take a little longer to send than the same post to Facebook.

Statistics#

Likes and comments come back from LinkedIn and appear on the statistics page. Impressions do not: reading those needs an analytics permission Gene App does not ask for, so they show as n/a rather than as zero.

What this needs#

A one-time database update, and the deployment must be set up with LinkedIn app credentials. Without those the destination says LinkedIn is not switched on yet, and nothing else changes.