When you think about the website LinkedIn the words that might come to your mind would be: jobs, employment, recruiting, and networking. LinkedIn is truthfully all of that, but it’s more. It’s a content promotion platform, it’s a brand marketing platform, it ranks really well in Google, drives brand trust and it’s one of the largest websites online. With this in mind it’s true to say that businesses should have a strong and powerful presence on Google. The question is are they? Here’s some interesting stats to show why I’m crazy about this social platform:
- LinkedIn has 300 million users worldwide. The United States population is 317 million.
- The majority of LinkedIn users are adults. Adults have more money than kids.
- LinkedIn makes just below 100 million in revenue quarterly from premium memberships. Meaning users are serious.
- LinkedIn reports 187 million unique monthly visitors.
- LinkedIn purchased Slideshare who get’s 60 million unique visitors a month
- LinkedIn is growing and has a goal of 3 billion users, that’s almost half the world’s population.
If you’re not actively marketing your brand on LinkedIn, you’re missing the boat on some very exciting growth. When it comes to content marketing, companies tend to focus on publishing blogs and promoting them on social media sites like Twitter and Facebook. Well, LinkedIn is an excellent place to promote content too. In some way or another business’s need to market to adults. It may not be for product purchases, but it could be for employment. If not for employment or services it can be for investment. The main point is adult are an important audience with any campaign and adults are on LinkedIn.
Another social media marketing truth is not everyone is one Facebook. It might seem like it with Facebook’s massive global user-base but some people just aren’t on and they will usually be on LinkedIn.
To promote content on LinkedIn it may seem easy and simple, all you do is post and let the rest do itself. That’s false and not the case that we’re pitching. Simply posting content to the brands page isn’t enough. We’ve selected a few great tips and tricks for marketing content on this powerful social network, so study up to step up your content marketing game.
Get a Following and Present Your Content
Even if you have to pay for it. Then jump on board with the LinkedIn Publishing Platform – Companies that learn the LinkedIn Publishing Platform tend to be the most successful with their content marketing efforts. It’s easy and simple enough to use, but LinkedIn offers a wealth of resources and tools for making the most of it. Designate someone at your company to learn the ropes.
Refresh Your LinkedIn Profile
Your content marketing efforts will fall on deaf ears if your company profile is bland, generic and stale. First and foremost, make sure it’s branded to be consistent with the rest of your company’s image. Nu Skin does an excellent job in this regard, they post frequently but not to the point where it’s spammy. Make sure the LinkedIn page has the same look and feel as its website and other online profiles, so people instantly know they’re reading content from a trusted source. Also, consistently update your company page, and make sure to engage in plenty of LinkedIn activities so visitors can see that your business is active and ready to go. Nu Skin gives us a great example of this.
Create Exceptional Content
The world is filled with boring content. Creating great content for LinkedIn is mostly about providing your audience with informative, compelling, interesting information that they can actually use. Therefore, you’ve really got to understand audience and be willing to provide it with content that dovetails with its needs and expectations. Avoid generic, fluffy content at all costs. Avoid rehashing the same ideas again and again too. Sure, it’s tricky coming up with fresh, interesting content on a regular basis, but doing so will help your star rise on LinkedIn and increase the odds of it being featured prominently by the social media giant.
Give LinkedIn Showcase Pages a Whirl
Targeted content will always outperform content that’s delivered to a much broader audience. IBM does a great job with this. Through LinkedIn Groups, of course, you can target very specific users based on criteria like industry, company size and even job title. If you have specific product lines or other offshoots you’d like to promote, you can’t go wrong with LinkedIn Showcase Pages. They are basically niche pages that serve as extensions for your overall brand, and you can post content directly from them to deliver engaging information to highly targeted audiences.
Avoid Hard-Selling at All Costs
Whatever you do, kill the promotional, salesy language. It’s annoying and no one likes it. Large companies don’t do this, so you shouldn’t. We don’t sell or promote their services at all with their LinkedIn posts. They’re a great example. People aren’t that passionate about brands where they will share promotional content like that. It’s frowned upon on most social media platforms, but it’s an especially major faux pas on a site like LinkedIn. People are there to make connections that will enhance their careers, so pushing the hard sell onto them will only alienate them and make your company look bad.
Conclusion
Invest time, money and resources into your LinkedIn. It will come in handy. It truly is a powerful content marketing platform, and it takes serious work to start reaping the success that can come from it.