5 Reasons Leveraging LinkedIn is a Smarter Business Move

Leveraging LinkedIn

Leveraging LinkedIn for business growth is something lots of businesses are missing out on. Whether you are a freelancer looking for work, an agency looking for new business, a corporation looking to connect with existing customers or even a human resources manager looking for your next big hire; LinkedIn fills many different roles for a variety of users. Going from an online resume format that people created and forgot about just a handful of years ago, LinkedIn has been changing and is firmly on the social networking radar of every savvy marketer out there.

A 2014 Turnaround Story

Q2 of 2014 saw LinkedIn exceed expectations with its revenue growth with slightly disappointing numbers in the past.

The laggard in the social media race is finally up and running with multiple revenue channels – paid memberships, advertising revenue and recruitment revenue. Each one of these is on a steady upswing as LinkedIn beefs up its features and makes itself more and more attractive for the today’s connected professionals to be seen on.

It now allows users to connect via individual groups, publish their own long form content on LinkedIn, read and share news and feature articles via Pulse, stay on top of the list of all their contacts via Connected, search for job postings and even get updates on when a user’s contact gets mentioned in an article anywhere on the internet.

That these new features are working their magic is evident in LinkedIn’s rapidly growing subscriber numbers. It ended Q2 with 313 million users – a growth of 32% on their subscriber base in Q2 of last year.

A hands down B2B favorite; Not too far with B2C brands either

Despite being one-third the size of social media giant Facebook, LinkedIn still is the #1 preferred social network for B2B marketers. This figure in fact is not too different for B2C brands either, with LinkedIn coming in at #3 behind Facebook and Twitter, as per Social Media Examiner’s latest study.

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Small and medium sized businesses depend on LinkedIn even more, with its user share going up to 41% in this business segment.

An Extremely Attractive User Base

One reason for LinkedIn’s popularity with marketers stems from the profile of users that it boasts. 79% of LinkedIn’s US users are graduates or post graduates, with 66% of its users earning over $50,000 per annum and 17% earning over $150,000 per annum. So if it’s educated, well-to-do users that your brand needs; LinkedIn is the place to be.

According to a recent study by LinkedIn, its members are 86% more likely to stick with brands that they like and about 80% of them are willing to pay a premium for higher quality. Nearly 60% of LinkedIn users claim to be more interested in a product if it was shared as an update by someone in their LinkedIn network.

LinkedIn members also seem to be a trusting and engaged lot, with over 51% of them trusting information from publishers on LinkedIn vis-à-vis only 23% and 14% trusting information from Twitter and Facebook respectively.

LinkedIn Seen As an Enabler, Not a Time Waster

With 4 out of every 5 internet users in the US owning a social media account, almost every one of us is guilty of sneaking in social media (read Facebook, Twitter and Instagram) on the sly while we’re at work. Therefore none of us is a stranger to the slightly shamefaced expressions that we end up with on being caught using these sites during work hours.

The good thing about using LinkedIn is, that there is no associated guilt with this platform. Most working professionals look at LinkedIn as an investment into their professional lives – from staying updated with the latest industry news to connecting with important clients and building a professional reputation to engaging with industry luminaries via their LinkedIn accounts to even getting interesting job offers on the side; LinkedIn is definitely no time waster.

LinkedIn’s users are increasingly putting their money where their mouth is. Almost 1 in 5 of LinkedIn user accounts in 2014 are paid accounts, in spite of the option to have a free account. Engagement with other users on LinkedIn has seen a marked rise, with a third of users tending to be members of 1 to 9 professional groups on LinkedIn.

LinkedIn’s strongest suit has always been its feature of offering detailed professional information regarding companies and people across every industry. Its users confirm this fact with over 74% of them using LinkedIn as a sort of ‘professional Google’ searching for people and companies. It also plays a huge role in building new relationships with influencers and clients as well as reconnecting with old ones (43.5% and 72.8% respectively). An equal number of LinkedIn’s users (41%) use it to tap new customers as well as hunt for new career opportunities via the social network.

LinkedIn Benefits
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The Emergence of Long Form Content on LinkedIn

However, with the new feature on LinkedIn that allows users and brands to publish content on their pages, the consumption of relevant content via LinkedIn has shown a sharp upswing. Users look towards LinkedIn as a great content consumption platform for various reasons, including:

LinkedIn Content Consumption
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According to the same study, there are very specific forms of content that work well on LinkedIn. The most popular content formats that are clicked on and shared by users include

  • new research
  • breaking industry news and
  • real life case studies

Of the content consumers on LinkedIn, at least 61% find LinkedIn to be an essential tool for their professional success.

Lastly

LinkedIn has proven to be the proverbial ‘tortoise’ that has caught up with the many ‘hares’ of social media and is now giving them all a run for their money. Instead of looking at just quantity, it would serve your brand well to look at the quality of users you will be reaching out to via social media. And if it is quality you are after, it does not get better than LinkedIn at this point in time. More power to the underdog, I’d say!

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