LinkedIn as the Content Marketing Hub

LinkedIn is gradually becoming a hub for professional content. 1.5 million publishers are actively using LinkedIn “Share” button on their sites to send content into the LinkedIn platform. There were 184 million unique visitors worldwide to LinkedIn in Q3 of 2013. According to a recent survey, “Content Managers spend 8 hours each week consuming professionally relevant content. 61% of them consider that professional content is necessary for success. 91% of them are using it weekly for professionally relevant content vs. 64% for online news sites and only 29% for Twitter and 27% for Facebook.”

Some quick facts about LinkedIn marketing:

Unique content: Create content that sparks the discussion. Increase the frequency of updates and publish unique content via LinkedIn. The opportunity to build programs around LinkedIn leverages content to drive engagement life-cycles and stimulate organic community building. Members are more likely to share professional content that builds their professional brands, strengthens their professional networks, or helps them sell to their networks.

Popular content: Emphasize on sharing popular content types such as new research, breaking industry news, case studies, content produced by business leaders, etc.

Sponsored updates: LinkedIn sponsored updates can increase the visibility of the content by many folds.

Optimized employee profile: An optimized employee profile can boost the visibility of the company and its content in the search results—both on and off the network. That’s because search engines like Google scour pages and URLs for keywords, and LinkedIn profiles offer many opportunities to embed keywords, such as within the LinkedIn URL, other URLs listed on personal profiles, job titles and descriptions, and content links the profile holder includes.

LinkedIn influencers: Connect with the LinkedIn influencers. Take advantage of discovery modules within LinkedIn to help you find more relevant content based on the people you’re following and the posts you’re reading.

Display ads: Make use of LinkedIn Premium Display Advertising and integrate display ads.

Follow company ads: Use “Follow Company Ads” to deliver personalized messages on the homepages of your target audience, establishing the relevance of your business to these members and building your Follower audience.

Make use of “Pulse”: Using LinkedIn Pulse, access full articles and rich graphics, from a wealth of resources and more than 750 publishers. Start liking the most relevant and share a few periodically.

Showcase pages: With “Showcase Pages”, you can build a presence and present a unique voice for every important part of your business. By creating dedicated pages for your more prominent brands, businesses, and initiatives using “Showcase Pages,” you can extend your LinkedIn presence.

Attract more followers: Cultivate a larger following with a multi-channel approach. Encourage employees to add a link to the company page in their email signatures and add a Follow button to your website.

Follow the 4-1-1 Rule: The 4-1-1 Rule was coined by Tippingpoint Labs and Joe Pulizzi of the Content Marketing Institute, originally created for Twitter. It can successfully be applied to company’s content marketing strategy using LinkedIn. The rule states: “For every one self-serving tweet, you should retweet one relevant tweet and most importantly share four pieces of relevant content written by others.” Instead of constantly bombarding your followers with demos, webinars, and whitepaper downloads, create a cadence of helpful insights relevant to your audience.

LinkedIn groups: Create more focused groups for the services and products category, encourage members to actively participate, and get aligned for community success.

Track the success/failure: Keep a track of your “Content Marketing Score” and the “Trending Content” to qualify your content marketing efforts on LinkedIn.

The real numbers behind your social media indices

According to a new survey by online business community Manta, Social media use is trending upward and nearly 50% have increased time spent on social media this year and nearly 55% say they’re using platforms like Twitter and Facebook as the most important tool for either acquiring new customers of generating sales leads. It is very praiseworthy that more and more companies are getting involved in social media, but few are able to report its real value. According to eMarketer, only 13% of marketers feel they are "very effective" at measuring social media efforts. In terms of measurement and accountability, social media should be treated the same as email, search, display and other marketing channels. If you want to see social media's true impact on your business, you need to have a system and framework for pulling real meaning from the data and trends that emerge from your measurement and monitoring.

You need to build a social media measurement strategy that aligns with business objectives, exhibits the business value of your social media program, and provides the insight that enables you to optimize for maximum impact. Put meaning behind the data you gather from social media.

Why it is so that few businesses have a framework in place to measure the real value behind social media? You need to align your business objectives with social measurement.

1. Monitor and react to social media 24/7:

Every minute is vital when it comes to preventing a Social Media crisis. 24/7 moderation protects a brand’s reputation and alerts them to developing issues as they occur.

2. Moderate and remove unsuitable content such as racism and pornography immediately:

Seventy-five percent of Facebook users believe pornographic and racist comments on a brand page are completely inappropriate. Sixty-six percent users would ‘unlike’ the brand and 39% would never buy the product again.

3. Implement strong threat detection and escalation processes:

You need to react immediately to your Twitter account being hi-jacked on a holiday. As we saw with the recent hacking of a fast food chain’s social media account, it is critical to be alerted to a hacked account as quickly as possible. In this instance, it resulted in 53 hijacked tweets that were retweeted more than 70,000 times.

4. Monitor your campaign sentiment:

A badly thought out Social Media campaign can spread like wild fire. A quick reaction to negative sentiment will make all the difference. A recent example involved the banking sector using charitable organizations in their campaigns receiving a huge social media backlash.

5. Influencers need to be responded fast:

A celebrity tweet complaining about your product or service will only go one way if it’s not dealt with fast. Conversely, a quick and proactive response can do wonders for your brand’s reputation.

Through today's technology, your business likely has increasing access to information about how customers and potential ones behave especially online - consuming media, interacting with friends, indicating interest in products, and of course making purchases. Needless to say, this data is a source of competitive advantage that your group, large or small, can and should leverage to predict future behavior and better position yourself in the marketplace. The challenge, for many businesses, is in lacking the tools, know-how, and resources. Once you've found the data you know matters, you can analyze and make interpretations that means to all parts of your business planning and practical execution, which will help you to take actionable decisions on a day-to-day basis.