Draftly: The $1️⃣ 2️⃣ Tool Transforming LinkedIn Content—Is It Worth It?

EDITOR’S NOTE

Dear Nanobiters,

Welcome to another Product Spotlight edition of Nanobits.

LinkedIn is, without question, the most powerful content marketing platform right now. And I’m saying that in every way possible.

It’s a rare combination: scalable, relatively untapped (yes, you’re still ahead of the curve), delivers fast results, allows easy content repurposing, and is full of decision-makers. Connecting with them? Just a quick connection request or DM away.

If you’re on LinkedIn, you’re sitting on an immense treasure of potential, unmatched by any other platform.

Few people fully grasp this (you’re among the first). Even if you do, figuring out how to leverage it can feel overwhelming.

This spotlight will break it down for you.

In today’s newsletter, we're exploring Draftly, a tool designed to help you use LinkedIn effectively for content marketing.

We'll explain why LinkedIn is such an effective platform, how to leverage it for your business, and how Draftly can simplify the process and boost your results.

Alright, get ready to dive in and learn something new! Grab your favorite brain food and prepare to uncover how to use LinkedIn for social selling with Draftly.

You'll thank me later—and so will your network!

WHAT IS DRAFTLY?

Draftly is an all-in-one LinkedIn companion designed to enhance your professional presence on the platform.

It offers a suite of features to simplify content creation and scheduling, ensuring your posts reflect your authentic voice rather than sounding automated.

With Draftly, you can effortlessly transform content from various sources—such as YouTube videos, trending news, tweets, and blogs—into engaging LinkedIn posts.

The platform also includes tools for creating visually appealing carousels, maintaining consistent brand messaging, and scheduling posts in advance to maintain consistent LinkedIn activity.

By automating the tedious parts of content creation and scheduling, Draftly frees you up to focus on what matters most: building relationships and achieving your professional goals.

Who should use Draftly?

Draftly is suitable for anyone looking to optimize their LinkedIn strategy, save time on content creation, grow their professional network or business presence on the platform, and scale their revenue through social selling.

It's particularly beneficial for:

1. Business Leaders and Entrepreneurs: Those seeking to establish thought leadership and connect with industry peers.

2. Marketing and Sales Professionals: Individuals aiming to attract leads, reach B2B decision-makers, and expand their professional networks.

3. Content Creators and Influencers: Users looking to streamline content creation and scheduling to maintain consistent engagement.

4. Job Seekers and Career Changers: Professionals wanting to showcase expertise and attract potential employers or clients.

5. Ghostwriters and Brand Consultants: Professionals managing multiple LinkedIn accounts who need a streamlined content creation and scheduling solution across different profiles.

DRAFTLY’S KEY FEATURES

Let’s get started with Draftly!

You link your LinkedIn account with Draftly.

Then you provide additional details—about yourself, your preferred language, your target audience and their location, your focus areas (key skills, interests, and areas of expertise), and your brand voice (how should your content sound) so that Draftly can create customized content for your LinkedIn.

It asks for one piece of content (about 500 words) to create your brand voice.

I have created two brand voices—one based on my content and one on Justin Welsh’s content. For the uninitiated, Justin Welsh helps internet solopreneurs own their work and life. Over the last decade, he has helped build two companies past a $1B valuation and raise over $300M in venture capital. Now, he runs a one-person business that teaches creators how to identify, develop, and monetize skills they already have.

I'm concerned that the brand voice Draftly generated feels generic. This might be because it was trained on only one piece of content. 

In my experience, creating an authentic brand voice requires a larger dataset.

For example, when I build custom GPT bots for my clients, I use at least 15-20 pieces of content with varying styles and lengths to ensure the AI accurately captures their unique voice. 

Here are the salient differences between both the brand voices for your reference. If you're familiar with my writing and Justin Welsh's, you can judge for yourself whether Draftly accurately captured our individual styles:

Now, you are all set to conquer LinkedIn! 💪 

Personalized Content Creation:

Draftly helps you craft content that reflects your unique voice and ensures authenticity in your posts.

You need ideas for a LinkedIn post. To get one, simply enter a topic, and Draftly will generate a suggestion. Draftly also suggests post topics based on your interests, which you provide during onboarding.

I give extra marks since Draftly clearly showed how many credits this process consumes, allowing users to manage their usage more effectively—a great example of user priming.

When you find an idea you like, click "Create Post" to refine it. Draftly helps you:

• Find the right voice: Select a writing style that matches your brand.

• Boost discoverability: Add relevant hashtags to reach a wider audience.

• Polish your post: Create a professional and engaging final product.

Draftly lets you save post ideas for later use. These saved ideas are conveniently stored in the "Ideas" tab on your homepage.

Even better, Draftly keeps track of ideas you've skipped. This "Skipped Ideas" feature is a lifesaver when you want to revisit a previously discarded concept.

This is how the final content is going to look like:

While I liked the overall structure and writing, the opening hooks weren't particularly strong. The case study felt a bit thin and could have used more detail. Most importantly, the final product didn't quite capture my personal writing style.

I would rate this: 3 out of 5. What about you?

Draftly also helps you turn any content—blogs, videos, trending news, and tweets—into engaging LinkedIn posts supplemented with your insights. I couldn't test this feature because I used up my free credits exploring the basic features. This specific feature isn't available in the starter plan, which is the one I'm currently using.

Smart Scheduling Queue: 

Draftly’s queue feature is a lifesaver for those struggling to stay organized. You can either schedule your post for a specific time (thankfully, this doesn’t ask you to wait for at least an hour before the post can be published, which LinkedIn does), add to the queue (not available in the starter plan), or save as a draft for later.

You're not locked into rigid posting times; instead, you can tailor your schedule to match your audience's peak activity hours, significantly boosting your content's visibility and engagement.

Initially, the idea of pre-scheduling posts felt a bit robotic to me. I was concerned that an overly predictable posting pattern would be a dead giveaway that I wasn't personally managing my LinkedIn.

Draftly’s customizable settings allow enough variation to maintain an authentic feel.

LinkedIn Carousel Generator: 

Draftly offers a free AI-powered tool that creates eye-catching carousels, even for those without design skills.

Draftly lets you turn your existing content, like articles or blog posts, into eye-catching carousels for LinkedIn. However, it doesn't generate completely original carousels from scratch based on a given idea.

The customizable editor lets you personalize your carousels with different colors, fonts, and layouts, ensuring your brand's unique voice shines through.

Draftly Chrome Extension: 

This Chrome extension helps you write insightful comments on LinkedIn posts, boosting your engagement and visibility.

Why is this important? Because on LinkedIn, active participation in conversations is just as crucial as posting great content.

Here's how it works:

1. Choose a post: Select the post you want to comment on.

2. Get comment ideas: The extension analyzes the post and suggests different perspectives you could take in your comment.

3. Spark engaging conversations: These suggestions help you craft more insightful and relevant comments, leading to more meaningful interactions.

You can choose what stance you want to take and your preferred tone for the comment.

Here are some examples of comments generated by Draftly:

I don't know if the tool takes the user's preference for stance and tone into account because both comments seem very generic to me.

Draftly also offers a list of free tools that can enrich your LinkedIn profile:

My favorite is “LinkedIn Profile Photo Frame Creator.“

Remember how unemployed Gen Zers started using a #Desperate LinkedIn banner stating, ' How is anyone going to know that I need a job?’

Now you can create these custom badges for your profile with Draftly:

PRICING

Draftly accurately positions itself as a more budget-friendly alternative to Taplio.

While Taplio’s starter plan costs $32 a month, Draftly costs $12 (monthly billing; it’s $9 monthly for annual billing). Even the Pro plan is just marginally more expensive than Taplio’s starter plan.

I will compare Taplio and Draftly in detail in the next section.

The Pro plan offers some extra features, but they don't justify the significant price jump from the Lite plan. It would be more appealing if the Lite plan included at least one or two pre-built brand voices.

I recommend trying the Lite plan if you're unsure about a long-term commitment. The AI capabilities alone are worth exploring, and if it streamlines your content creation and improves your engagement, it's likely a worthwhile investment.

Hiring a ghostwriter for 10 LinkedIn posts per month would cost you at least ₹15,000 (about $200).  

Draftly, at $39 per month, is a much more affordable option, especially if you're willing to handle the research and other operational aspects of content creation.

DRAFTLY vs. TAPLIO

This table highlights how Draftly and Taplio differ in content creation, customization, analytics, engagement, and pricing, providing options for different LinkedIn content needs and budget levels.

NANOBITS VERDICT

My trial with Draftly was a mixed bag. While the platform offers some valuable features, there were a few frustrating aspects that the team could work on:

Room for Improvement:

• Onboarding: Since I already connected my LinkedIn profile, Draftly could have automatically filled in the "About Me" and "Top Skills" sections using that information. This would have saved me time and made the onboarding process smoother.

• User actions without confirmation: The tool carried out certain actions without first confirming with the user.

  • For instance, when I click on “Save Ideas“ or “Next“ in the idea generator pop-up, the tool automatically generates new ideas for me without confirming them first, which results in a loss of credits.

  • Similarly, when I wanted to remove the previously attached carousel from my post, the tool immediately started creating another carousel without allowing me to post without one.

• Unclear usage of credits for generating posts: I am unsure how many credits a post-creation process consumes. During my free trial, the last two credits were used to create the post, but I was not allowed to see it because the tool urged me to upgrade, and I could not close the pop-up.

  • I don't understand the pricing table's definition of up to X number of posts. For instance, if I need 3 credits to create a post (1 for idea and 2 for content), then with the 15 credits I was awarded upon upgrading to the Lite version, I can create only 5 LinkedIn posts. This caveat should be called out on the pricing table.

• LinkedIn's algorithm actively discourages automation, and posts scheduled through the platform often underperform. Even when using LinkedIn's built-in scheduling tool, posts scheduled in advance tend to get less engagement than those posted in real-time.

What Worked Well:

• It’s affordable.

• The quality of AI content generated is remarkably better than that of the current alternatives.

• There are a lot of free tools that one can use to improve one's LinkedIn profile.

• Pre-built brand voices of popular LinkedIn creators

• Content creation facility from multiple sources, like YouTube videos, Twitter (X), etc.

• Saves skipped ideas as well in its repository

• It has a mobile app too where you can create content on-the-go (best suited for all busy professionals)

Overall Assessment:

Draftly can be an extremely valuable tool for LinkedIn users if a few improvements/changes are made.

Overall, I would like to rate it a 7.5 out of 10. 

You can start your 7-day free trial on Draftly (you get ten free credits) and experience the product for yourself. As always, I would love to hear your thoughts on the product. Let me know in the comments below, or simply reply to the email.