Since 2002, LinkedIn has dominated a niche over a period of time which has seen social media giants ascend, fall and pave the way for the next. And so on. 

Dwarfed in size and influence compared to other social medias such as Facebook and Twitter, but did you know that LinkedIn is 277% more effective at generating leads?  

Credibility plays a huge role. There is more than just a veneer of professionalism, and with 50% of social traffic to B2B websites coming from LinkedIn, clearly something is working here. 

While trust in Facebook remains at an all-time low and Twitter at times resembles a tinderbox of disparate opinions and vitriol, LinkedIn has remained just as what it was designed for: a platform for professionals with self-policing conduct guidelines. 

Because in essence, on LinkedIn, people are motivated to conform to certain standards by the need to be taken seriously by potential employers, recruits, and people they would like to do business with.

This leads to some exciting opportunities for marketers because when it comes to targeting an audience, what they are most desperate for is a good audience, one highly relevant and with enough income and interest to buy the product or service. It’s become clear that in 2019, LinkedIn is the place to go to reach many of these audiences. Here’s why.

LinkedIn has longevity

Much of the younger generation are not signing up to Facebook. Though they often remain tied to the company’s portfolio through WhatsApp and Instagram, a simple fact remains that these are platforms that users usually join because their real-life networks already exist there. Facebook has needed to acquire other tech platforms to maintain its reach across generations. 

But this isn’t a trend to worry about for LinkedIn which has a model founded upon business utility. A total of 39% of users happily pay for LinkedIn Premium while half of American college graduates use the site. Even highly specific, targeted advertising on other social medias doesn’t come close to what this offers, especially as it brings something they can’t: as noted earlier, credibility is the key word here. 

People on LinkedIn tend to imagine that their networks are filled with similarly professional people also looking to further their business interests and this helps the perception of sponsored content. Often on Facebook or Instagram, adverts are seen as frivolous.

People have come to expect value, and also recognise that they need to provide value to those who they engage with. Though not quite the same beast as other social networks, LinkedIn has proven far more useful in forming impressions with members.

How brands leverage LinkedIn 

Company page

An effective page for your business on LinkedIn has become a must-have. For those in the wider business community, as well as potential employees and customers, your company page will act as a splash page for communicating your brand and story. Neglect this at your peril.

Showcase pages

Dedicated pages can help extend your LinkedIn presence and cement the fact that you’re rather good at what you do. Again, the key word is credibility. Here you have the opportunity to show to prospects the companies you have worked with, what initiatives have driven value for your clients, and ultimately provide a proof of business competency in the public domain.

Post content

Long-form posts that engage, inform and educate can be pure gold on LinkedIn. Savvy digital marketers know all of the tricks – always remembering to use quality imagery – to use blogging to show industry thought leadership, as well as to genuinely teach others about the sector. The platform is filled with life-long learners so feed their thirst for knowledge and boost your brand at the same time!

LinkedIn Slideshare is great for visual content and presentations, and although it doesn’t boast the astonishing 70 million unique visitors per day that it did in 2016, it still holds incredible reach with an estimated 80 million visitors each month in 2019.

 Direct sponsored content on LinkedIn

Efficient campaigns to build an organic presence can be boosted in a big way by direct marketing through sponsored tools. Arguably one of the most versatile and cost-effective of these is LinkedIn’s sponsored content option, which delivers your post directly into users’ feeds, a place where they likely to be more engaged than anywhere else on the site. 

Can be customised further to focus on awareness and branding, or alternatively to implement direct response and lead generating goals. 

Sponsored LinkedIn InMail

Email marketing has never been so easy. This has proved to be a masterstroke from Microsoft who released the feature in the year following its acquisition of the social network. Not only does it bring this form of marketing to the inboxes of LinkedIn users, which by the way drastically improves its chances of being given a proper look, but there are a range of tangible metrics to be analysed. 

These include:

– Response rate and performance over time

– The types of candidates who respond the most

– How your response rate compares to industry benchmarks

Dynamic and text ads are your bread and butter

In the world’s largest professional network text adverts are still a fine way to get on the radar of people. Dynamic adverts furthermore help to build engagement and accurately target an audience with highly customised information. The dynamic option leverages information from user profiles and is arguably a large part of the success of LinkedIn in driving traffic to company websites.

People invest time on LinkedIn

We all know the perils of social media at this point, they are very well documented. Feeds designed to offer a quick hit of dopamine rather than any genuine value. It’s not exactly life-sustaining.

LinkedIn stands in stark contrast to this model and this means that people don’t just spend their time on the platform, they invest time. Brands are using LinkedIn to form real engagements with interested individuals and businesses. It often quite frankly provides much better ROI than any other social media platform. 

Because by creating outreach with an emphasis on professionalism and quality, on a platform geared towards the same, your brand will start to connect with people cut from the same cloth. 

Whether brands are looking to start a conversation with executive decision makers or recent college graduates, LinkedIn has revealed itself to be the best space in which to catch their attention in 2021.