A Marketer’s Guide to LinkedIn in 2018

LinkedIn has been one of the best marketing outlets for brands for the last 5+ years. It’s a social media platform that has revolutionized how we do B2B networking and advertising.

With some great conversations happening on LinkedIn, brands can engage with business heads and get their attention via marketing strategically.

There are many ways in which marketers can gain an edge on LinkedIn, chief among them being content marketing. Content marketing is further amplified with advertising, and sponsored emails. When a company has decided to invest in its business development future, LinkedIn has always been proven to be a solid partner.

LinkedIn’s Silent Growth

LinkedIn has silently grown to more than half a billion users over the last decade of its existence. It’s a premier job portal with an additional element of business networking.

Students come in young and fresh and leave as seasoned professionals.

LinkedIn is a part of their journey through and through. It’s no longer known as just a hiring platform, but also a powerful influencing and networking brand.

After the Microsoft acquisition last year, LinkedIn has risen in popularity gaining 100M users more this year. With over 100K new articles being published weekly, LinkedIn is a great website for marketers to promote their content.

Who’s on LinkedIn?

What’s really interesting is that LinkedIn has a diverse set of demographics. It has a range of young students hoping to get a job right out of college, and it also has a large number of millennials trying to switch jobs or networking with start-up entrepreneurs.

Like any social media, it’s packed with a lot of active users – which means that you have to invest twice as much to reach the demographic of your choice. However, with LinkedIn that’s not a bad problem to have.

With a great balance of 56:44 M:F ratio, diverse brands can advertise on its platform. Even more interestingly, higher educational requirements are portrayed on LinkedIn proudly. With over 50% of its users having a college degree. 44% of its users earn $75k+ and the average CEO having 900+ connections. LinkedIn is an active community of business peers, with a longer time span spent than most other social networks.

A Leader in Content

With over 100K weekly articles being published, content has taken centre stage on LinkedIn. What’s even more interesting is that the content app Pulse, started off as a Stanford class project focused on creating relevant B2B content developments.

Written Form

Before LinkedIn Pulse really took off, there wasn’t much of traction for LinkedIn influencers to enhance their content organically.

They had a few accounts posting relevant articles online, but not the wave of content that we’re seeing now. The written word has taken over multi-fold with tens of millions of people writing articles on the platform. Not only has LinkedIn become a networking platform, but a platform that promotes knowledge dissemination.

It’s a great outlet for anyone who’s looking to explore what their industry offers and what content is only available to the leader’s connections.

Videos

Videos frequently outperform text in cases where the posts are short in length. Videos are an effective marketing tool, in that they communicate what needs to be said in a creative format. LinkedIn’s native video tool has some great features including analytics so that you can get an estimate of who watched your video when.

Around 6 months ago, with the launch of LinkedIn native, videos have become the go-to platform for all things short form marketing.

Videos have been performing extremely well in the case of personal branding as well. Many thought leaders are speaking directly to their audiences through the power of LinkedIn, and changing the way we think about traditional businesses.

Engagement on video seems to be doing extremely well and the overall theme to these videos is that they’re content friendly. The more that these videos are focused towards the customer, the better they generally do.

An Influencer Platform

Sir Richard Branson has over 13 Million followers on LinkedIn, but we feel like we have a personal connection with him when we follow him. That’s the power of being an influencer on LinkedIn.

When we build a great personal brand on LinkedIn, we instantly become an influencer on the platform. We can talk about our content, our product, and our lives in a way that’s unprecedented.

No longer do marketers need to spread their message on expensive traditional methods. We can easily become an influencer on LinkedIn by leveraging content marketing and business development programs. Professionals on LinkedIn benefit from the activity as it’s an owned platform for their brands.

When they become influencers on LinkedIn, they can have a greater stake in their industry’s thought leadership.

Personal branding

Personal branding benefits via LinkedIn are multi-fold. You get to dictate your own rules on your own platform with your own voice. This adds a layer of freedom to your content, and your own network gets “activated”.

Everyone in your circle knows exactly what you’ve been doing and how you’ve doing without picking up the phone. They are aware of all the business-side activities and have more information about you.

This enables them to think about new ideas, business meetings and brainstorming.

About 70% of professionals say that networking is valuable for career growth, and that networking is enabled on LinkedIn. Personal branding is multiplied many times over with the power of LinkedIn.

Networking

Enough can’t be said about the power of networking. If we have the ability to talk to a million people with a click of a button, we’ve demonstrated the power of integrated networks.

Social media networks like LinkedIn have shown us the advantages of relationship building via the simple ability to send a request to someone. You should aim to post 2-3 times a day with relevant content that your community will enjoy, and you should comment and engage with other people’s posts at least 5-6 times a week.

This demonstrates genuine connectivity and interest in others’ areas of interest.

Conclusion

Investing time and effort into LinkedIn is a good idea for savvy marketers to get the most out of their marketing activities.

Engaging content marketing and advertising together allows entrepreneurs and business owners to become increasingly successful.