LinkedIn July 2013 updates: New Sponsored Updates and Company Page Analytics
Value: [rating=3]
Recommended link: LinkedIn sponsored updates and Company Page Analytics update
Here are a couple of LinkedIn announcements from July that are both useful for B2B marketers to be aware of. They're both related to company pages.
First, you can now sponsor updates to give them more visibility in people's feeds - like Promoted Posts on Facebook and Promoted Tweets on Twitter. Spotting a pattern here? In this case, they're Sponsored Updates.
All companies with a business page can now reach out further to members on the network, similar to existing paid advertising on LinkedIn, and reach a targeted profile of LinkedIn members outside of their Followers or groups who may not be familiar with them. These will likely get much higher clickthrough rates and so more revenue for LinkedIn compared to the existing incidental ads which are easier…
A Blueprint for the perfect LinkedIn Status update
This infographic from Salesforce on a 'Blueprint for the perfect LinkedIn Status update' is worth scanning whether you use LinkedIn for personal or business development. The value in using LinkedIn for engagement was shown by this LinkedIn research that found that:
50% of LinkedIn members are more likely to purchase from a company they engage with on LinkedIn'
Boosting engagement across any social media platform through engaging updates is key and their infographic provides some simple tips to do this. For more detailed advice, see our LinkedIn for marketing guide.
…
How to benchmark your LinkedIn 'marketing funnel'
For B2B companies now realising the phenomenal lead generation opportunities offered by LinkedIn, a bigger question now looms;
“How do I optimise my presence to make it efficient and effective”
LinkedIn success requires an investment of time and resources
Jan Vermeiren’s Four steps to getting more from LinkedIn reveals the intensity of activity required to harness the valuable opportunities on this business network.
Reading through his Ebook, you can see the detail and granularity required to achieve success. It becomes clear that, as you adopt these best practices, LinkedIn requires attention. You can't just dip in and out.
Like all social media, you need to devote constant and focused attention if you are going to succeed in creating value.
Recommended Guide: Smarter LinkedIn…
LinkedIn Answers and Events are no more, giving new impetus to Quora?
Importance: [rating=3]
A couple of relatively small changes in LinkedIn to be aware of if you use LinkedIn as a B2B marketer or for professional development. The two closures which were not announced by the blog since not positive news, but hidden away in the Help Centre are:
LinkedIn Answers - this closes at the end of January 2013. I personally haven’t used it so much recently and wonder whether the better categorisation, filtering and rating in Quora have been the death-knell. A reminder to take a look again at Quora - which has high levels of activity in some areas, for example SEO.
To help Answer Digital Marketing Questions try the Smart Insights Answers forum and Smart Insights LinkedIn Group where we have Q&A across the full range…
with new users being added at an average rate of two per second (or 172,800 per day)
Importance: [rating=2]
Recommended source: LinkedIn Blog
That's an impressive growth rate reminding us of the importance of LinkedIn professionally, or if we work in business-to-business marketing. It would be useful to know the number of active members and fake accounts to get a truer picture though. We find LinkedIn Group Spam needs daily moderation.
As is customary with user milestones, the company has produced an infographic celebrating the milestone. It shows the member numbers in different industries and shows that if LinkedIn were a country it would be the 5th largest in the world.
I recommend using the LinkedIn Skills feature to see the growth and key influencers in your sector.
Check out our B2B Digital Marketing Guide for guidance and examples from René Power on how to best use LinkedIn for Marketing. We will be…
A tutorial to check your LinkedIn Company Page works well with the latest LinkedIn updates
LinkedIn started in 2002 as a personal profile space where professionals could share their expertise, experience and connections.
Some people naturally wanted to showcase their business and wrongly used the personal profile as a business profile.
To address this need, LinkedIn created Company pages and September 2012 has seen an update in the look of company pages which more closely mirrors the Facebook company page, with a cover image at the top of the page, logo and company name above this (rather than below as on Facebook), followed by the latest news feed. Remember that the Company Activity status updates were introduced in October 2011 - are you using them yet if you're in B2B.
Here’s an example of the Dell company page with…
Using the LinkedIn Skills feature for career development or identifying influencers
Update: September 2012. LinkedIn now has 10 million users in the UK, impressive for a country with a population just shy of 60 million. LinkedIn say that's four out of 5 professionals. To celebrate, LinkedIn have produced this nice infographic we thought we'd share with a reminder to check our tutorial below for how many are in each specific business category.
LinkedIn Skills will show you how many professionals share your skills and who are the major influencers in your sector.
This is a relatively new feature in LinkedIn that pulls data from its now enormous user-base to create both an interesting and useful tool.
In this post, I'll first take a look at how the size and growth of…
The 4 most important tools for LinkedIn & your business
LinkedIn is the most important social networks for B2B marketers who are taking online marketing seriously, particularly in the UK and US. LinkedIn now has an array of tools to help bridge the gap between the network and your own website, they're getting better and better and I wanted to share them with you.
With 5.5 Million users in the UK alone (growing daily) there is an opportunity for all B2B businesses on LinkedIn.
As part of integrating LinkedIn on your website you need to also consider how you connect and interact on LinkedIn. You should checkout a recent post on Oatmeal that made us all chuckle, it highlights how so many companies take a very lame approach to Facebook, the same principal applies to LinkedIn. You have to remember…
4 steps to getting more from LinkedIn by LinkedIn expert Jan Vermeiren
November 7th update
When I originally did this interview with Jan in August, he mentioned that he was working on an updated version of his "How to really use LinkedIn". This update is just published, so this note to alert you that you that you can - download Second edition - How to Really Use Linked In. It's worth taking a look since it has over 200 pages of detailed practical advice which can help marketers use LinkedIn both for themselves personally and their company. It's also free - charity donation encouraged, so kudos to Jan.
Linked In Interview
I first heard Jan speak about how businesses can get more from LinkedIn in this podcast which is definitely worth a listen. I was interested in his practical tips on how businesses can use LinkedIn, so I thought it…
LinkedIn brings in status updates for companies
Value/Importance: [rating=5] for B2B!
Recommended link: LinkedIn announcement
Example of new LinkedIn "Company Activity" status updates
Our commentary on the new company status updates
If you use LinkedIn to market your business to other businesses you may remember that LinkedIn introduced Company Follow about 18 months ago. It allows you to setup a company page like in Facebook and others can follow it.
LinkedIn explain:
“Keep in mind your status updates can be up to 500 characters long and can support URLs with multimedia as well. Given that any LinkedIn member can comment, like or share your Company’s status update, this is a great way to build engagement with customers, potential employees and prospects alike”.
To switch on this feature - administrators should read this. I just added an update about this change to our page which…
