Wondering which social media marketing channel was rated most important in a recent BtoB magazine survey*? If you guessed LinkedIn, good for you. It beat out Facebook 27% to 20% among 577 respondents. So how can your company take advantage of LinkedIn’s social strengths? We uncovered five red-hot uses (besides recruitment).
- Use LinkedIn to support lead generation. For brand awareness or promoting an event, Facebook’s the place. If you want to increase website traffic, tweet. But for generating leads, go with LinkedIn’s professional network. As you become active in the LinkedIn community, you’ll find opportunities to offer up content as solutions to problems. Join groups (or start your own) and engage members with links to white papers and invitations to webinars. Everyone who responds becomes a lead to nurture.
- Use LinkedIn to promote your most important asset: your employees. Your corporate presence on LinkedIn helps support your image as an employer of talented individuals. Encourage your employees to showcase their skills and industry knowledge on LinkedIn and as their professional network expands, so do sales leads.
- Use LinkedIn to target a specific audience. LinkedIn’s base of 100+ million users may seem small compared to Facebook’s (estimated at 750 million), but if you want to reach business professionals, LinkedIn has no comparison or competition. With LinkedIn, you can place text ads in front of qualified prospects (CEOs, CFOs, Human Resources Executives, Fortune 500 Executives) and even target by industry.
- Use LinkedIn to build trust. LinkedIn users tend to trust individuals within their base of contacts, even if the connection is distant. Get recommended—and that level of trust grows even more.
- Use LinkedIn for Search Engine Reputation Management (SERM). If you want more control over your first page of Google search, it makes sense to take full advantage of your personal and company LinkedIn profiles. Google gives LinkedIn profiles high authority and generally ranks them well for searches that include a company name, brand or employee’s name.
*“Emerging Trends in B-to-B Social Media Marketing: Insights from the Field”
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