Are you keeping up with LinkedIn? In the past few years, LinkedIn has moved from being an optional secondary network to one of the most essential social media platforms. This is especially true for business-to-business content marketers and avid social climbers.
Targeting an Already Receptive Audience
LinkedIn’s primary value lies within its already receptive core audience. People on Facebook are looking to waste time; people on LinkedIn are looking to connect. It’s no surprise, then, that LinkedIn has far higher engagement rates than other social media platforms. Those who are looking at LinkedIn are already actively looking for information regarding their industry, making it the best possible place to spread business-related content marketing links.
Creating and Leveraging Trusted Relationships
Content marketing on LinkedIn is inherently seen as more trustworthy because it branches out into your known network. Not only are these individuals that you have an existing relationship with, but they’re individuals that you’ve often worked with or even for. In this fashion, LinkedIn can be used to strengthen already existing relationships. Without LinkedIn, you might never know that a former employer is actively looking for freelance writers for hire, or that a former employee is looking for their next job.
Using Sponsored Posts to Bolster Existing Campaigns
Sponsored advertising has had a notoriously rocky relationship with social media platforms. Facebook’s advertising services have come under fire for being misleading at best and actively harmful at worst. But sponsored posts on LinkedIn are comparatively more straightforward. LinkedIn is used primarily as a business-focused communication avenue, so it isn’t littered with extraneous information that an advertisement can become lost in. Sponsored posts can not only fit neatly into a user’s feed but are often targeted to be relevant to what they want to see.
Taking Advantage of LinkedIn’s Building Popularity
But perhaps the most compelling reason to use LinkedIn now is because many are moving away from other platforms. While LinkedIn may not have as many users as Facebook, users tend to be more engaged with LinkedIn. Businesses are finding that advertising on social media is not as simple as it may have seemed; people on social media are looking to get away from the grind, not embrace it. And the social media market is fragmenting overall, with people leaning more towards using different networks for specific things rather than a single, all-encompassing network for everything.
All of the above doesn’t mean that there aren’t flaws in the LinkedIn platform. It’s more or less impenetrable for casual users and it’s only really useful for those who are looking to build up their business connections. But for those who do want to develop their networking skills or business-to-business content marketing campaigns, it’s become an invaluable weapon in the social media arsenal.
Jenna I is a freelance writer, cat collector and avid gamer. In her spare time she leaps from life to life, striving to put right what once went wrong, hoping each time her next leap will be… the leap home.
