How Marketers Can Take Advantage of LinkedIn’s New Targeted Updates and Follower Insights

Earlier this year, LinkedIn rolled out a “follow” button that allowed users to connect with a company with just one click. Now, LinkedIn is broadening its appeal to marketers, rolling out two new tools to help make the connections between businesses and followers more personalized and meaningful.

Targeted Updates

With LinkedIn’s new Targeted Updates, companies will be able to interact with their followers in a more effective and relevant way. In a nutshell, the new tool allows company page administrators to fine-tune how they share content.

Using Targeted Updates, content can be delivered to either “all followers” or to a specific “targeted audience,” and company page administrators can select those specific targeted audiences based on company size, industry, function, seniority or geography.

Adding even another level of refinement, LinkedIn also will provide impression and engagement metrics for the targeted post. This data will appear 24 hours after the content was shared, and from these results, marketers will be able to determine which content resonates . . . and which needs revision.

The goal of Targeted Updates is to increase engagement and brand loyalty –and it appears to work. According to LinkedIn, examples have shown a 66 percent increase in audience engagement as the result of targeted updates.

 Follower Statistics

Savvy marketers realize there’s tremendous value in tracking engagement metrics for social media fans and followers, and LinkedIn’s new Follower Statistics is designed to provide exactly that kind of detailed data.

The new Follower Insights dashboard provides follower demographics, as well as information about likes, shares, comments, total followers, number of new followers month-to-month, etc.

Seven Tips to Use LinkedIn for B2B Lead Generation

LinkedIn bills itself as the world’s largest professional network with more than 150 million members, including executives from every Fortune 500 company. With that kind of reach, LinkedIn is a B2B marketers dream. But what’s the best way to take advantage of all this social media platform has to offer? How can you use LinkedIn to put qualified leads into your pipeline?

Here are a few fundamental steps to make LinkedIn work for your B2B company:

Make sure your profile page/company page is up-to-date. This may sound like a no-brainer, but I’m always surprised to see how many marketers make the mistake of using the “fix it and forget it” approach. When customers and prospects visit your company’s LinkedIn page, they should learn what is happening at your organization now –not what was happening months ago.  Start with cleaning-up personnel mentions; obviously, your company page should only list current employees.  Next, you’ll also want to update descriptions of the services you offer, recent awards, recognitions, etc. The same goes for recommendations; keep those as current as possible, too. All the links included in your profile are clickable, so use this page to drive traffic to the company website, key articles, etc. Once you’ve finished this basic housekeeping, set a calendar reminder to repeat the process in a few months. By scheduling periodic revisions, you’ll maintain a profile that’s accurate and fresh.

Stimulate engagement with the content you publish.  Your company’s profile page is only the first level of engagement on LinkedIn. In order to start building meaningful relationships with prospects, you’ll have to start participating in LinkedIn Groups. Use LinkedIn’s new Group Search to help you find the topics you care most about. Join a few groups and start visiting them regularly. Once you’re comfortable with the format and a few of the contributors, begin adding to the conversations. Post compelling content. Respond to threads initiated by others. Start establishing a reputation as your company’s helpful specialist, the “go-to” person in your particular field. Just remember: You’re there to build relationships –not to sell. Don’t just talk about what your company has to offer. Be engaging and help solve problems.

Establish yourself as an expert. One of the easiest ways to develop credibility is to start answering LinkedIn questions.

Study Shows Consumers Bored with Social Media

Social media users can be fickle. Despite earlier studies showing that social networking is the most engaging online activity in the world and that social media users are increasingly influential as amplifiers of brand messages, now there’s new research suggesting social media has begun to lose its appeal.  Are social platforms becoming old school?

YouGov, an online market research firm based in the UK, surveyed more than 1,200 Britons and found that 41 percent are now bored with social media. On top of that, 23 percent stated they network less frequently on Facebook than they did a year ago, and one in five indicated they expect to use the site even less a year from now.

Based on these survey results, social media marketers in the UK may need to rethink their strategies. Nearly half of those polled (44 percent) reported that they are not influenced to purchase products that friends liked or followed on a social media site, and about the same number claimed they would not talk about a brand on sites like Facebook or Twitter, even if they had heard positive things about it.  Furthermore, 47 percent came out and said they actually do not like seeing ads that appear on their social media pages based on their profiles.

As sobering as that sounds, not all of the feedback gathered in this particular study pointed towards a downward trend. For example:

Which Social Media Brands Are the Strongest?

Many consumers use Facebook for online social networking. Others would rather engage via Twitter. Lots of the business professionals I know like LinkedIn the best. Taking all these different preferences into account, how would you rank the value of today’s social network brands?

Before you answer, consider for a moment what the brand value rating agency BV4 has to say on the subject. Just yesterday, BV4 released what’s being billed as the first-ever ranking of social network brands.

According to the analysis, the top four social media brands are:

Marketing Pros Prefer Facebook Over LinkedIn

For most people, LinkedIn is the social media site of choice when it comes to professional networking.

But, that’s not necessarily the case for advertising and marketing executives.

In fact, the social media site this group favors –and by a rather large margin — is  .  .  .  Facebook.

LinkedIn comes in a distant second.

By almost three to one (56 percent to 21 percent), the 500+ ad and marketing pros who participated in a recent survey voted Facebook as the social media site they would most  prefer if they could only choose one.

The Creative Group, developers of this new research, also found that some of those polled favor completely different social networks. After Facebook and LinkedIn, came Google+ (12 percent), Twitter (4 percent) and “other” (2 percent). (Five percent of those polled either didn’t know or didn’t answer the question.)

Perhaps it should come as no surprise that marketing and advertising execs prefer Facebook over LinkedIn. As Donna Farrugia, executive director of The Creative Group, explained, these pros are somewhat accustomed to blurring the lines between work and their personal lives.

“Those in the creative industry tend to blend their professional and personal lives, including interactions they have online,” she said.

Another survey question asked the execs what mistake they felt creative professionals made most frequently on their social media profiles.  Interestingly, the responses broke down like this: