Should You Share or Repost on LinkedIn?

To Share or not to Share. That is the question. But what about Reposting? Is either option going to be useful for you and your LinkedIn engagement?

For a long time, LinkedIn has offered the option to Share someone else’s post. However, many LinkedIn trainers such as myself have considered this feature futile.

The Problem with Sharing

Sharing is not always caring. The truth is that Sharing a post does no good whatsoever for you or for the original poster. Here’s why I don’t recommend using this feature at all:

For reasons unknown, Shared content gets very little engagement on LinkedIn. Perhaps LinkedIn users just don’t interact well with it, or perhaps LinkedIn’s algorithm doesn’t like it and doesn’t spread it very far.
Sharing a post means you take the conversation away from where it started, as opposed to sharing your thoughts in the Comments section.

More recently, LinkedIn has added a new option to its Share feature called “Repost”, and some are wondering whether Reposting is better or worse than Sharing. And there is definitely a difference.

Reposting on LinkedIn

Rather than Sharing a post, Reposting it is more beneficial to the original poster. When you Repost another LinkedIn user’s post means that any subsequent interactions and Impressions are still attributed to that user.

But you’ll probably be wondering:

“But does it benefit me?”

The answer – no, not really. Not unless your goal is simply to pay tribute to the original poster in this way.

If you ask me, the best thing to do – both for yourself and for the original poster – is to Comment. Adding valuable comments on the original post, adding more to the conversation, is more valuable than Sharing or Reposting it.

So, in short, don’t bother with either Sharing or Reposting on LinkedIn.

For more of my thoughts on Sharing vs Commenting, check out my blog post: