Kim Jordan After launching in 2003 and gaining momentum in 2006, LinkedIn initially entered the social networking scene as a business-oriented service, where users could post their resumes and search for jobs. Now, with more than one billion members, LinkedIn has emerged as the place for companies to spotlight products, customers and employees.
Research shows that LinkedIn users have double the buying power than the average web audience. Whether it’s B2C or B2B that a small business is targeting, LinkedIn’s power can be leveraged to any marketing strategy’s advantage.
Let’s discuss some of the initial steps for optimizing a company’s presence on LinkedIn:
Your copy is how you differentiate your business, so it’s vital to make the most of all your posts. Creating engaging content that highlights your employees, your services and your customers encourages viewers to interact with your posts. The goal is to include keywords or phrases that directly relate to a business, its expertise or its industry—in hopes that LinkedIn users may search for those terms and receive that particular company page as a result. Moreover, about a third of company engagement comes from its current employees. This positions LinkedIn as a unique platform to connect a business to its employees, boost company culture and generate company celebrations both internally and externally.
Just like any other facet of a marketing strategy, content is king! LinkedIn is no exception. It’s important to remember that LinkedIn users are on the network for professional purposes and therefore, are more receptive to business messages.
The following factors and statistics have been proven to increase a post’s success:
LinkedIn offers a powerful and free feature that serves content to a segmented audience within a company’s existing followers. Targeted company updates only appear to the intended audiences in both the member’s homepage feed and on the Company or Showcase Page.
LinkedIn’s targeting tool can come in handy when content may only be interesting to certain audiences within an industry. Targeted company update filters include company size, industry, function, seniority, geography and language preference. A business can also specifically reach non-employee followers with these same targeting criteria. Keep in mind, targeted audiences must include at least 100 followers, and you should avoid hyper-targeting since using more than two to three targeting parameters may put your initial campaigns at a disadvantage.
Additionally, LinkedIn has a paid targeting platform intended to extend the number of existing followers a business reaches with its posts (also known as “organic reach”), as well as expand into new categories, increasing engagement and follower counts.
LinkedIn lets marketers target ads to users, using important B2B demographics such as job title, skills or even focusing on members of particular LinkedIn groups. This is different—and arguably better suited for B2B—from Facebook ads, which typically target users by lifestyle interests (such as photography, music or home decor). Marketers can create an ad on LinkedIn with a minimum spend of $10/day or a $100 lifetime budget that is structured using a cost-per-click or cost-per-impression bid.
Interested in learning more ways that you can take small business marketing to the next level on social media? Read our recent Facebook Best Practices and Instagram Best Practices articles for tips on how to maximize your efforts on those platforms as well.
