Being the fourth largest social media website, it can still offer great potential to any business. It is still growing with 63% more pages being viewed on mobile and desktop versions in 2013, compared to 2012. Having more people active on the site, means having more potential to target and generate extra income. Smith came up with three uses LinkedIn could have for your business:
- Using the InMail system
- Use of Sponsored InMail
- Ad products
The first a second can merge together. So LinkedIn has its own email system where different users/companies can message other users/companies. To maximise the use of InMail, users need to have a paid subscription, however, LinkedIn's InMail are response-guaranteed. You get a certain amount of InMails' that you can send within a month which means you need to be much more specific with who you target with these emails. The idea behind this method is you only pay for the InMails where you receive a response. It is a way of decrease the amount of spamming on the site to people who really are not interested.
In contrast to a general InMail campaign, you can chose to go for a Sponsored InMail campaign. It is still a direct marketing campaign because these mailshots can be targeted to specific groups on LinkedIn. For example, you can target users who are located in the south east where their job title is Marketing Director. This is a lot like the services that Facebook and Google offers, with regards to targeting users by certain information on their account.
The final use that LinkedIn could have for a business is Ad Products. Like Facebook, LinkedIn does include an option where you can advertise on the pages of users, however LinkedIn has made it so it is much more personalised and natural to the user. As LinkedIn is a professionals Facebook (as I like to describe it), a lot of the adverts don't seem to be adverts seeing as the majority of products on offer are professional services that could be used by these users, and therefore do not foresee it as advertising. Again, these campaigns can be targeted to certain degrees, including Job Title, Industry, Geographical location, Company Size and many more.
The only downside I have thought of, and was mentioned by DM Confidential, was that LinkedIn still isn't thought of as a Marketing Platform so people do not necessarily think about going to LinkedIn in order to find specific products to buy. This is something that can be changed by the use of the above campaign possibilities.
I finally looked at a journal article published by Tara Hershberger, which talked about Using LinkedIn as a marketing tool within the banking sector (source detailed at the end). Tara also decribed three uses of marketing on LinkedIn:
- Enhanced SEO
- Brand Recognition and Perception
- Positioning yourself as a thought leader.
As LinkedIn is such a large part of social media (fourth most popular as said above), it will show up when your brand/company name is searched within a search engine. This means that people will be able to search you more easily if you have been struggling to make your website show high up in the specific results search. You can then easily make a link directly to your company website ensuring consumers find their way to your website, and look at your products, which is the end result you are looking for.
Tara went on to say that social media has become a great way of consumers to validate a company and to investigate them; I recently did it myself on a company that I was interviewing with. If you do not have a LinkedIn profile, sometimes LinkedIn will create one for you, however it will not detail any specific details about the company, meaning it could be off-putting for a potential customers looking into your products.
The final use is positioning yourself as a thought leader. Basically making sure you optimise all of the possible channels in which you can upload content to your company page where users will link with you, your Facebook page, YouTube channel (if you have one) and a company blog. Ensuring the content is uploaded regularly means that people can see that the company is active and will take more of an interest with your company. There is also possibilities of creating banner ads and under the Products/Services section of your page you can sell certain products and link to your website.
Feel free to visit my LinkedIn Account - http://www.linkedin.com/pub/doug-cox/5b/b74/a21
(Source: Hershberger, T. (2012) 'Using LinkedIn as a marketing tool'. ABA Bank Marketing, [Online] Vol. 44. Issue 5. Page 37.)
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