With so many social media platforms available to brands it can be hard to choose which channels are worth your time and which ones are wasting it. You may have considered using LinkedIn, or you may already be using it but haven't unlocked the full potential of how LinkedIn can help your brand.
So why should you be using LinkedIn and what can it do to help you reach your brand's goals?
1. Increase Your Organic (Free!) REach
Organic post reach is incredibly high for LinkedIn Company Pages, with the opportunity to reach 60% of your followers if you post just 20 times each month. Organic reach has been plummeting for brands on Facebook for years, and much of digital marketing on social media has become solidly pay-to-play. This is a great opportunity for your brand to build an audience through posting quality content, performing outreach on the posts of other people and brands, and advertising. Once you've built that audience, you'll be able to reach the majority of them simply by posting 1 post per workday on average.
They don't all have to be your own original blog content either, so long as you find the right content mix for your audience.
2. Benefit from Superior B2B Ad Targeting on LinkedIn
LinkedIn is one of the most powerful B2B social advertising platforms available to you. While Facebook allows you to target people by job title and some select industries, LinkedIn offers much more granular targeting and people are much more likely to use their correct job title. They have more incentive to represent themselves professionally and accurately on LinkedIn, which leads to better targeting options and better results from the groups you target based on job title.
While you can expect LinkedIn ads to cost you a bit more than advertising on Facebook and Twitter, it's not as expensive as you might think to get started. With a $10 minimum budget per campaign, and a $2 minimum bid for CPC and CPM it's easy to start advertising even on a small budget.
Smaller budgets won't go very far towards getting you massive exposure to your audience on LinkedIn, but they can help you test content that you are considering posting to your LinkedIn Company Page or for smaller tests before a large campaign.
3. Get Insight Into Your Target Audience
You have a fairly limited number of searches on LinkedIn with a free account, but with multiple options for anything as short as a month and with prices starting at $47.99 for a premium Business Plus plan (the most basic and lowest cost option that includes unlimited search) you can use LinkedIn not just to reach your audience, but also to learn more about them.
We've already covered the methodology behind how you can do this in our step-by-step post on how to convert your personas into a LinkedIn targeting audience, but you don't have to stop at confirming your research (or assumptions) about your marketing personas. You can also use the tool to learn more about typical educational level, degree programs, years of experience, geographic concentrations, skills, and more for people with a given job title or who work in a specific industry. You can even get more granular by focusing on these same traits for people who work at a specific company.
You don't have to stop at just using LinkedIn search either. If you have more specific questions beyond demographics you can try asking your questions in a relevant group. Obviously the less personal your question is, the more likely you are to get answers. Asking "How did you get started in your career doing X?" is likely to get more responses than "As a senior director at company Y, what is your annual salary?"
4. Make New Connections Through Social Outreach on LinkedIn
When people think of social outreach, most will think of Twitter first and then maybe Facebook. However, LinkedIn is a great opportunity to get involved in relevant conversations and make new connections too.
- Comment on other people's posts on LinkedIn Pulse. Unless your post is getting significant exposure you won't tend to see too many comments on your LinkedIn Pulse content, so anyone who is interacting with you there consistently is sure to stand out.
- Look for LinkedIn status updates to engage with. LinkedIn Pulse isn't the only way to publish content to LinkedIn, both company pages and individuals can post status updates that you can interact with. Just like with LinkedIn Pulse, if you consistently engage with a brand or individual's updates, you will stand out and they will remember you.
- Find and join relevant LinkedIn Groups. Make sure you choose the right LinkedIn Group for you, and that you interact with others in a way that is beneficial to everyone (so don't just go spamming your own content or talking about your company and products all the time) and follow good LinkedIn Group etiquette.
5. Find Qualified New Hires
LinkedIn is obviously useful for more than job hunting, but there are qualified people looking for new jobs on LinkedIn every day. By associating your job opportunity with your LinkedIn Company Page not only will it be searchable under the "Jobs" section of LinkedIn, but it will also appear on your brand's page for any of your followers and other people who reach your company page to see.
According to workable.com you get the best value for your money from posting your job opening on your LinkedIn Company Page, and it's not a bad idea to post your job openings as LinkedIn status updates on your Company Page to get some additional free exposure for new job opportunities as they become available.
Whether you're learning more about who you're marketing to, reaching a larger portion of your audience for free, or filling your job openings, there are many ways that LinkedIn can help your brand reach your digital marketing and hiring goals.
