Once upon a time, LinkedIn seemed destined to be the next Monster.com or CareerBuilder spinoff — but those days are long gone. LinkedIn has since evolved into the biggest B2B marketing tool available for marketers to utilize. Want to share hyper-targeted industry content to help establish yourself as an authority? Want to put your content in front of the biggest names in your industry? Are you struggling to find that perfect-for-you team member? These are just a few of the many B2B areas that LinkedIn excels at — both on a personal and company level.
Every social network is different, but each share one simple truth: optimized content is king, and LinkedIn doesn’t escape this golden rule of social media. What works on Facebook might not (read: probably won’t) work on LinkedIn, and really you shouldn’t expect it to. This doesn’t mean ideas can’t be shared between networks, but you should be optimizing the content per network!
Unlike Facebook and Twitter, the purpose of LinkedIn is to provide people with data about your personal life. What school you went to, jobs you’ve worked at, fields of study you’re interested in — which means the value and quality of the data available on LinkedIn for B2B marketing is much, much higher than other networks, and makes optimizing content for your audience much more effective.
The key in figuring out how to optimize your content for LinkedIn? Define your audience. LinkedIn offers a fairly robust native analytics platform that can provide you with a wealth of knowledge about who exactly your LinkedIn followers are, when they’re active, and what type of your content they engage best with. And once you define who already looks at your posts, you can then start building out audiences to boost your content to — after all organic reach is great but it’s not a secret that paid content wins the social media race.
LinkedIn is apparently aware of this opportunity for marketers as well, and they’re updating their platform accordingly. Those of us who are pioneers of LinkedIn know that video content and LinkedIn haven’t always gotten along. That all change in 2017 when LinkedIn introduced a native video hosting element for individual users. Flash forward a year, and not only does LinkedIn now allow businesses to share video, but they’ve also introduced video ads as well — which is no feat seeing as video content continues to be one of the biggest hitters for content marketing.
It’s clear that LinkedIn is starting to get extremely serious about it’s content and marketing capabilities, and with over 400m users worldwide, it’s definitely time for businesses (and brands!) to follow suit with their LinkedIn marketing strategy!