Are you LinkedIn?

With over 300 million users, LinkedIn could be said to be the most 'professional' platform of social networking, among the ranks include entrepreneurs, CEO's, MD's and for businesses - CUSTOMERS. There are huge benefits of using the platform, since it's predominantly focused on B2B connections. Hershberger (2012) suggests it enhances your SEO efforts, contributes to brand recognition and perception, and allow for you to become a leader and a resource amongst your online community. There are endless ways to promote your company and it's offerings to a huge audience. So I've compiled a few things to help you get started, and to use the platform effectively as a marketing tool.

source: LinkedIn Marketing Solutions

Content Marketing Score

For businesses, the unveiling of LinkedIn's new Content Marketing Score is something you don't want to miss out on, and should be taking full advantage of. The tool is a recommendation engine that allows for businesses to 'quantify their impact', it measures the engagement between your content and your audience, and allows you to see how you compare to your competitors. Trending Content (click link for interactive infographic) allows for businesses to tailor their content specifically to match which topics resonate most with specific audiences. These two new tools are bound to have a positive impact on the way businesses market their products/services, and if you're not familiar - get familiar!

LinkedIn Groups

LinkedIn Groups can help generate leads for any business, joining groups within a particular industry or category allows businesses to not only find prospect customers and business leads, but help create a more influential presence for the company. Once part of a group, LinkedIn allows you to filter the membership list to find influencers and prospects based on different criteria. Nemo (2014) swears by personalising invites to connect, not taking the time to do this can make you appear as lazy, or even worse, a spammer.

LinkedIn Polls

This function has many great uses that would be a waste for any marketer using the platform. Conner (2014) lists a couple of the ways you can utilise the function, which I'll briefly sum up for you:

• Obtain quick opinion results for column and blog topics/trends.
• Obtain product/service feedback (an absolute essential, saves time, resources and can be beneficial to hear some new ideas).
• Conduct immediate market research - addressing the information you need quickly and efficiently.
• Link it to other social networking platforms - Tweeting/Facebooking poll results could increase your following and gain interest from additional people.
• Use polls to generate offers - find out what interests your prospects!

As far as I can see, the only drawbacks for the platform may be that for some businesses, their target prospects may not be LinkedIn potential, due to age mainly. Hershberger (2012) suggests one drawback is the time taken to initially build your profile, apart from that, the day to day running doesn't take much effort. Also, the social network isn't actually seen as a marketing platform quite yet, it's still in quite early days and looked upon as a professional Facebook, so to speak. 

REFERENCES:

Conner, C (2013) 'Five LinkedIn Strategies You Haven't Thought of Before' Forbes [Online] <http://www.forbes.com/sites/cherylsnappconner/2013/10/27/five-linkedin-strategies-you-havent-thought-of-before/> [accessed 8th May 2014]

Hershberger, T (2012) Using LinkedIn as a Marketing Tool. ABA Bank Marketing. Vol. 44, No. 5, p37.

Nemo, J (2014) 'Three ways to generate leads with LinkedIn Groups' Social Media Examiner [Online] <http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/generate-leads-with-linkedin-groups/> [accessed 8th May 2014]