How Companies Can Benefit From LinkedIn’s 259 Million Members

How Companies Can Benefit From LinkedIn’s 259 Million Members

rayw
| 30 Oct 2013 |

LinkedIn yesterday announced it now has 259 million monthly active users. This figure is up compared to the 238 million users last quarter and 187 million users last year. With this bump in user-base, LinkedIn is currently ahead of Twitter (230 million active users). That said, LinkedIn is still lagging behind Facebook and Google Plus’ 1.15 billion users and 300 million users, respectively.
 
Here’s how companies can take advantage of LinkedIn’s growth in customer-base:
 

  1. Find B2B leads

    LinkedIn is purely a professional social network with professionals of all industries joining this platform to interact with each other. For companies that offer services business needs, this gives you the perfect opportunity to promote your products or services. Whether it’s an analytics program that helps marketers measure their digital marketing performance or a social media analysis tool that examines a company’s social media engagements, promoting B2B products or services on LinkedIn can be extremely effective. In fact, a previous study discovered that LinkedIn is 4 times better for generating B2B leads than Facebook and Twitter. This is likely due to the fact that LinkedIn is designed for professionals – not to entertain those who want to share pictures of their pets. To effectively promote your B2B products or services on LinkedIn, you can use the social network’s Sponsored Updates feature. With LinkedIn’s Sponsored Updates, companies can pay to promote a status to LinkedIn users worldwide, not just those who follow them. This allows companies to advertise their brand to those who are likely to become interested in their services. For instance, you can use Sponsored Updates to promote your new Twitter management tool to professionals who have listed Marketing Coordinator, Social Media Manager, or Marketing Director as their job titles.

  2. Recruit talents

    Your company's culture and your company's brand are really just two sides of the same coin. Your culture is your brand

    Tony Hsieh

    Finding diligent, creative people is key to your business’ success and you can do so through LinkedIn. By inputting specific keywords in the search box, you’ll be able to browse through various LinkedIn profiles to find suitable candidates to join your team. For instance If you need to hire a new Marketing Coordinator for your foods company, you can type in particular keywords such as “social media,” “online marketing,” “blog posts,” or “content writing” to find candidates suitable for this position. In addition, you can narrow the candidates down through geographic location to find candidates within your city or region.

  3. Share industry-specific content

    Sharing industry-specific content on LinkedIn can lead to an increase in web traffic and sales leads for businesses. By writing content that resonates with your audience’s needs and sharing them on LinkedIn, you’ll be able to establish a strong voice within your industry and encourage your audience to frequent your website. According to Social Media Today, LinkedIn drives 64% of all visits to corporate websites amongst all social media platforms. This in turn can help you entice your audience to become a customer of your products or share your articles with their colleagues.

  4. Monitor trends

    You can use LinkedIn to monitor your competitors’ activities. While you can use LinkedIn to drive web traffic, generate sales leads, and recruit talents, other companies can also do the same. By using LinkedIn to keep an eye on other companies’ online interactions, you can see who they’re poaching, what kind of content they’re writing, and trends you should expect in the future. This will give you a better idea of the types of articles you should write, the kinds of talent you need in your company, and how well adaptable your company needs to be in order to adjust to upcoming trends.

 
While LinkedIn remains relatively small compared to other social networks such as Facebook, it continues to grow and make its presence felt in the social media world. By using LinkedIn to share content and generate leads, you can connect with more professionals in your industry, share your ideas with the rest of the world, and ultimately help your company grow.


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