Three content marketing tips from LinkedIn on reaching its audience

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Posted 14 March 2013 14:28pm by Ryan Sommer with 0 comments

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Since launching over ten years ago, LinkedIn has grown from a Silicon Valley phenomenon and niche social network for business to a content powerhouse that makes corporations drool for its demographic data and targeted advertising capabilities.

Fortunately for marketers, the growth of this social giant also means dedicated networks, segmented by industry, hosting expert blog posts, forums (in the form of LinkedIn Groups) and even a dedicated news stream that can drive millions of pageviews much like the early days of Digg and current Reddit army.

Here are three tips on how to engage with content and track effectively from my conversations with LinkedIn representatives.

Understand LinkedIn Today as it relates to your business

LinkedIn Today was launched over a year and a half ago as a way to use data from 175M+ professionals to surface relevant stories in specific verticals on the LinkedIn platform.

If you are just starting out on LinkedIn, it's the best place to find influencers in your industry that you can follow for best practice according to LinkedIn.

Start by picking out around a dozen or so that are specific to your industry and watch the types of content they are sharing, liking and contributing. Chances are if you follow their lead, you are going to strike the right tone with your customers/audience.

Use Slideshare content ads

Slideshare is another niche social network built around sharing presentation that was acquired by LinkedIn last year. Here is an example of how one of my presentations on content marketing looks on the Slideshare platform.

Marketers with great content to put in front of their audience should rejoice over the LinkedIn/Slideshare match up – which let's face it, is made in heaven – because the first product of their union is a new approach to targeted advertising which combines traditional display ad inventory with presentations you can embed.

You can read more about this new form of advertising on LinkedIn's blog.

This is a win win for marketers and for LinkedIn because it means more time spent on their platform, and a much richer content experience.

 

Track metrics and lead gen from your LinkedIn Company Page

Company Pages have been on our head of social's radar for inbounds since they launched late last year. They are obviously great in a B2B context, and expanding quickly in what they can offer brands and companies across a variety of industries.

Your content marketing efforts here should focus on determining which types of offers work best to generate business leads, and it is great that Hootsuite recently integrated tracking and targeting from Company Pages including:

• Snapshot: Page performance analytics. Track the total followers, new follower metrics, impression metrics and engagement metrics of your LinkedIn Company Page.

• Company Update Engagement: Post performance metrics and comparison. View a granular, side-by-side comparison of post metrics that are not available through native LinkedIn analytics.

• Targeted Status Updates: When composing an update, you will have the option to target based on geography, company size, job function, seniority and industry.

By working closely with your social media department, defining a few metrics that matter from the outset, and following the tips I've outlined above, you'll be well on your way to a tailored content marketing strategy taking advantage of LinkedIn's 100M+ users.

For more content specific guidance on social, check out our Pinterest for Business Guide.