Peter Wilkinson Panther Social Media
LinkedIn offers a different perspective on social media compared to social networks like Xing, Facebook or Twitter. While these sites focus mainly on people’s personal lives and are ideal for B2C marketing, LinkedIn focuses on the business community, enabling people to build a network of professional contacts, which means it offers an ideal channel for B2B advertising.
In fact, LinkedIn has become the top social tool for B2B marketing. A company profile on LinkedIn is a shop window for a company’s values and credentials as both an employer and a business partner. Consistently updating the profiles of a company and its employees – particularly senior managers – can be a real boost to a company’s marketing efforts. It ensures a fresh, up-to-date image, and also provides gateways to other B2B marketing tools by linking, for example, to business blogs.
A company page on LinkedIn is an important stepping stone to a company’s own website. People searching LinkedIn for information on a business seem to have a more serious interest in the information they seek, and are likely to spend longer on a company website than people who come through other gateways.
Apart from these more passive uses of LinkedIn, it provides an opportunity to be more proactive, mainly by joining groups. Through these groups a company can participate in discussions about important business issues, demonstrate its knowledge and expertise, and attract a lot of interest from the other members of a group.
An examination of how people use LinkedIn suggests that people use it to seek a lot of information about companies, whether as potential employers or business partners. Its influence on B2B brands can, therefore, be huge. It allows a business to back up its brand identity with demonstrations of its awareness of current business issues, examples of its knowledge and skills, and live out its brand values in front of an interested and informed audience of professionals.
LinkedIn is becoming one of the best places to generate B2B leads, so any company not actively involved in it should start now.
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