Meeting LinkedIn

What I learnt from the B2B social platform

I was lucky enough to recently spend a day at the LinkedIn offices in Farringdon to attend an immersion workshop. LinkedIn is a platform we are all familiar with and a go-to-channel for B2B. But it’s still a social platform which, you could argue, throws up some complexities and perhaps nervousness in how best to use it for marketing purposes – at an employee level for social selling through to large scale campaigns.

The session started with a statement of how they describe their purpose: ‘to create global economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce’. An interesting perspective and one full of promise but from a marketing perspective helps to focus your mind of how this platform can be better utilised as part of the marketing strategy. From brand building through to demand generation.

But first off… social platforms are busy places. Some key stats set the scene (all stats provided by the Linkedin B2B Institute). According to LinkedIn’s research the average person scrolls 300 ft of content a day – the same height as the Statue of Liberty and on an average day we are exposed to 4,000+ ads (often probably many more!). On top of that noise, 71% of B2B ads are likely to serve no sales. So how do we make the platform work best for marketing campaigns?

Here are some top tips from the experts at LinkedIn:

• Polls are an organic format but under-utilised. LinkedIn said that in fact polls can get 10-20% more engagement rate than other organic post formats. It can also be a great way to get your target customers to provide some real-world feedback on any particular topic that can feed into your content strategy.
• The visceral emojis introduced by LinkedIn have proven popular and given a more diverse way of people to interact and express their views on content. It’s subsequently proven that brands that show emotion in their posts and content see much higher engagement.
• A combination of organic and paid posts can lift conversation by +14%.

LinkedIn provides an open platform for business discussion and those leaders and brands that can provide value-add content with credibility will grow their share of voice. Further proven by the stat that 54% of senior leaders that are transparent on social media are considered more trustworthy.

The algorithm is built on relevancy so content that links back to topics of interest of your target customers will further increase success. Therefore, planning your content strategy with the decision makers motivations in mind and utilising a combination of approaches on LinkedIn will have a positive impact on your sales pipeline.

So, the next time you’re considering how to use LinkedIn, keep some of these top tips in mind to help steer your strategy planning. 

Helen Shafe,
Senior Account Director,
Differentiated