Is LinkedIn the Missing Piece of Your Marketing Puzzle?

Angela Hausman, PhD

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Are you using LinkedIn? Why not? Even if you’re working in the consumer space, LinkedIn might be the missing piece of your marketing puzzle.

LinkedIn marketing opportunity

QuickSprout does a good job presenting the importance of LinkedIn as part of your marketing strategy (see infographic below). To prove my point, here are a few stats from the infographic:

• LinkedIn, the smallest of the major social networks, still boasts over 2.5 million members and growth of nearly 200,000 new users per day.
  
• More importantly as a marketing opportunity, LinkedIn is sticky with over 200 conversations and nearly 8000 searches per minute.
  
• Best of all, firms find 3X greater visitor to lead conversion on LinkedIn compared with its bigger cousins — Twitter and Facebook.

Increasing engagement on LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a large, engaged network, but are you getting your share of eyeballs?

Is LinkedIn sending enough traffic to your site?

Are you converting the traffic LinkedIn brings you?

If you need some tips to help increase you ROI from LinkedIn, check out this post about using LinkedIn for lead generation.

But, LinkedIn is a business site so, if you’re a consumer products company or work for a B2B company, driving traffic from LinkedIn doesn’t really make sense. So, maybe you’re not on LinkedIn. While it’s true you won’t use LinkedIn for lead generation, you should still have an active profile and build engagement on LinkedIn. Here’s why:

90+% of job search is on LinkedIn

Whether you’re a company who might hire new employees or an employee who might need a job someday, LinkedIn is your central hub. And, don’t wait until you need to hire or need a new job to join — engagement takes time.

Start now and begin building your community. Join groups. Upload content from your website. Be active by commenting in groups and on content posted by others.

LinkedIn as a learning tool

LinkedIn is very different from other social networks. Users have little patience with folks who upload cat videos and they quickly disconnect from folks who send annoying sales spam. LinkedIn recently experienced an uptick in spam that present fraudulent opportunities (offers to lend money, notifications that you’ve received money, etc) like those that plague email. I think the trend is declining as LinkedIn does a good job of eliminating these accounts.

While you won’t find LinkedIn as much fun as Facebook, you’ll learn a lot and have the opportunity to establish yourself as an influencer.

Pulse, a new feature of LinkedIn, is a one stop shop for professional news and updates. Here’s what LinkedIn had to say when they launched Pulse in Nov. 2013:

Pulse and LinkedIn technology have been fully integrated to offer a more relevant news experience with content tailored to your professional interests both on the Pulse app and on LinkedIn.com. This is just the first step of many we will be taking to ensure you’re getting a consistent and seamless content experience that is tailored to you. Starting today, LinkedIn Pulse will become the main vehicle for our social news experience across mobile and desktop and will replace LinkedIn Today.

Of course, LinkedIn added Pulse as a way to make LinkedIn stickier, and it’s working. Now, average Joes can publish long-form content (just like a WordPress blog) and it gets folded into Pulse, making it a great tool for users wishing to gain a reputation as an influencer in a particular field.

Connect for real world networking

When I travel for business, I hate eating alone and love to meet new people. I use LinkedIn to let my network know where I’ll be and invite them to meet me in person for coffee, a meal, or just to chat. I’ve met some really great people this way and built a loyal network from folks I’ve met in person.

• Loyal network members become brand advocates; sharing my content across multiple social networks and driving their followers to my website.
  
• Folks I’ve met through LinkedIn have recommended me for speaking gigs or introduced me to potential clients.
  
• Interactions with my LinkedIn connections generates lively discussions that often turn into content marketing ideas.

Your turn

Let me know how you’re using LinkedIn as a business professional — either for your brand or to market yourself.

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