LinkedIn: Job Board Or Content Marketing Platform?
Should more marketeers publish content on LinkedIn?
Over 675 million people have a profile on LinkedIn, the “professional social network.”
In December 2016, Microsoft bought the platform and it began to transform from an online CV network to something more: a publishing platform.
Even before then, articles were surfacing online about how to use LinkedIn to market your business, and today the platform enjoyed a powerful advertising suite.
Whilst Facebook and Instagram remain the primary social media platforms of choice for Business-to-consumer (B2C) businesses, Twitter and LinkedIn are most popular with Business-to-business (B2B) organisations, especially in the sales, marketing, and recruitment sectors.
Anyone that has been listening to GaryVee in recent years knows his opinion on the ‘free’ real estate LinkedIn is currently granting us.
Why is LinkedIn so powerful for content marketing?
LinkedIn has so many benefits for your marketing that it’s impossible to list them all, but some of the major features that will be useful for your efforts include:
- Multimedia support — you can post videos, images, text and more
- Business support — you can create a business page alongside your personal profile
- SEO benefits — the links to your website can provide referral traffic and search engine authority
- Group support — it’s likely that an active and engaged group already exists for your target audience
- Powerful search and targeting for ads — the LinkedIn Campaign Manager offers easy and affordable creation of effective, highly-targeted ads
- Articles — you no longer need a company blog, you can publish articles directly to LinkedIn and enjoy higher engagement and visibility by remaining on the platform
- Credibility — your audience will expect you to have a presence on LinkedIn and may not take you seriously if you don’t
- Authority — the rise of Thought Leadership as a topic has meant it is easy to position yourself as an expert and build a following on LinkedIn
- Powerful analytics and insights — LinkedIn can tell you how many people viewed their posts, where they’re from and even what their job titles are
- The audience — Social Media Examiner suggests that up to 20% of members (over 100m) are senior executives and decision-makers that can directly engage with you and your content
It’s easy to set up a profile and start posting, but over the years users have become accustomed to being sold to, so when creating content for LinkedIn you should aim to educate first, and ask for the sale second.
In recent updates to the platform, LinkedIn can now directly use both Hashtags and Slideshare to further boost the visibility and functionality of your content.
Let’s take a look at a great example from a befriended company (Bothrs).
What we see from Bothrs is no sales pitch regarding their main services. They are not even mentioning chatbots or design sprint processes. They do however focus on questions coming from their clients and prospects and try to answer them in a visually appealing way. While given an answer they provide some points of reference as well as an open invite to discuss the topics with them.
I think of these slide-decks as thought leadership reminders.
Another example comes from the Belgian keynote speaker Steven Van Belleghem that uses Linkedin amongst others as a weekly recap platform.
Both of these examples show a relatively low rate of actual engagement, as in comments, yet here we should remember that most people that are influenced by an ‘ad’ are not clicking or commenting on it.
We are trying to install ourselves as thought leaders or making sure we stay top of mind.
The intent of these articles and posts is to build a solid foundation of good content that makes us relatable, searchable and a preferred option for a future need.
