LinkedIn Marketing & Social Media Business Strategy
Contrary to what you might think, LinkedIn isn’t just a place for hosting your CV or looking for a job online. Since its launch in 2003, the site has expanded considerably with a raft of new features such as polls, sponsored advertising and a Facebook-esque applications platform for third-party website integration (blogs, Twitter, etc.)
In terms of Alexa rankings, it’s one of the biggest stand-alone social networks on the web after Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and Flickr. The total registered users is also nothing to sniffed at, with over 50,000,000 members and rising.
By far the biggest and most interesting of all the improvements to the LinkedIn platform is LinkedIn Groups. Ostensibly a place for like-minded professionals to come together over a subject or interest, it can be a powerful tool for driving traffic to your website and online marketing if you know how to use it.
LinkedIn Marketing: How and Why?
Groups has some startling similarities to Facebook’s Pages functionality: members can become ‘fans’, group sections are sorted along the top of the screen in tabs, updates can be sent out to members of the group via e-mail, etc. As is also the case with Facebook, a group on LinkedIn gives you the ability to import RSS feeds, meaning that all updates for a given feed can be distributed inside a group, broadening the reach of your content to influential and like-minded people.
Of course, the above actions will only work if you’ve got a lot of members in your group. If you don’t feel like setting up your own group or don’t have many group members, you can always join one set up by someone else. The concept works in much the same way: join a group, join in discussions with other people and link them to your content (remember: hard sell is doomed to fail nine times out of ten in the context of Social Media – if you can’t add anything worthwhile to a discussion then it’s best not to bother.)
LinkedIn Polls also offers a way to perform quick and easy market research. Polls within your network (i.e. your connections only) are free. However, should you want to ask a different group of professionals (such as small business owners, software engineers, etc.) that you can target by industry, a pricing option of $50 (minimum) per response comes into play. In a similar vein, LinkedIn Answers works in much the same way as Yahoo! Answers, except the subject matter and responses are actually useful.
They key advantage of LinkedIn for the above activities as opposed to, say, Facebook Pages is the audience type. LinkedIn is targeted towards a more professional, business-minded user base, therefore reaching individuals with the same goals and interests on a professional level is far easier than on Facebook, despite the platforms being equally as ‘closed’ as one another.
Joining The Dots: LinkedIn Integration
It’s important to note that LinkedIn should be used in tandem with your existing Social Media content and marketing set-up. As useful as the various services such as Groups are, LinkedIn could never hope to replace the immediacy or openness of Twitter or the sheer size and popularity of Facebook.
In terms of platforms, Twitter and LinkedIn are currently the most friendly with each other, offering synchronisation between the two: if you make an update on LinkedIn, you’ll be presented with the opportunity to tweet it, and if you tweet using the #li or #in hashtags your tweet will appear in LinkedIn. There are also numerous apps available for Facebook, offering similar integration.
You can also integrate your WordPress blog with LinkedIn. By installing a couple of free plugins (the WordPress app on LinkedIn and the GD LinkedIn Badge or LinkedIn Resume on your WordPress install) you can pull through your most recent blog posts onto your LinkedIn profile, and display a badge to your LinkedIn profile or small feed of your CV on your WordPress blog. Other blog platforms can be imported using the RSS feed feature.
What are your experiences with LinkedIn? Have you found it a useful platform to work with for promoting your business or content? Feel free to leave a comment on this article and let us know all about it. If you’re a regular reader of our blog, we’d love you to join our very own LinkedIn Group, Pals of C&M.
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Peter Sabbagh
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