LinkedIn Contacts brings together all of your contacts from your address books,emails, calendars, and LinkedIn network, and keeps them up to date, integrating with simple CRM capabilities, such as notes, reminders, and tags displayed on individual user profiles for your LinkedIn marketing efforts.
LinkedIn recently opened its publishing platform to all members, offering the opportunity to contribute and share professional insights in the form of longer posts surrounding one’s expertise and professional interests. Posts you create are shared with your network and the LinkedIn community, and become a part of your LinkedIn profile.
LinkedIn just announced the retirement of the Company Page’s Products & Services tab (4/14), replaced with Showcase Pages, addressing specific company verticals, complete with unique URLs, images, and content, and designed to attract specific followers.
Related class: LinkedIn: Beyond the Profile and Into the Future of Digital Marketing
What’s It all About, LinkedIn?
In two words, content publishing. The meaning of these recent changes lies in the explanation of Ryan Roslansky, LinkedIn head of content products, who said, “One of our big, strategic bets…is to become the definitive, professional publishing platform…a place where members can become productive, successful – not just when you’re trying to find a job, or search for another person.”
For the busy marketer, it’s a brilliant little plan. Remember, each follower is unique. One member may follow your posts via the home page, another via your company page, and still another off LinkedIn entirely – say, by following your blog or Twitter feed. Now, by synergistically combining the forces of the Contacts tool, the publishing platform, and the Showcase Pages, you can reach all of your followers where they spend most of their time, with a minimum amount of effort on your part, satisfied that you’ve hit as many of your prospects and customers as possible. And this is to say nothing of the common Status Update or Group discussion postings!
Sharing = Earning…Followers and Sales
Imagine this: You have a very important topic to share. First, you’d like to share it with 48 specific first-level LinkedIn connections, your COI (centers of influence). They might be board members, sales managers, hot prospects…any group you designate. You want their feedback first, because they count the most in your world.
Following this, you are ready to share the news across your network (first, second, and third degree connections), and then across the LinkedIn community (every member), exposing your branding message to the world at large.
Because of the Contacts feature, you can quickly and easily share one branded message with up to 50 first-level recipients. Next, using the publishing platform, you can post an expanded version of this same content, complete with compelling title, image, and corresponding link, to build followers and readership and drive traffic back to your website, blog, landing page, etc. Finally, you use Showcase Pages to post and share highly targeted content only to those followers who have indicated an interest in receiving this specific product or services news. Since you can have up to 10 Showcase Pages per company page, the opportunity exists to drive each vertical with precise messaging aimed at deeply targeted groups of followers. (And we haven’t even touched on Sponsored Updates yet!)
Finally, each of these posting activities can link back and forth, inside and out, to ensure consistent, high-quality traffic to your core collateral.
Every time you share your content, regardless of the tool, you build your brand in the eyes of viewers who may be your direct connections or part of your overall network. Who can really say exactly how many times someone must see your brand name before interacting with it? It’s tough to say in today’s digital environment. But one thing is clear – using LinkedIn to spread your brand message can’t hurt, and these new tools truly offer a more integrated but less time-intensive method for doing so.
Watch Victoria's class, LinkedIn: Beyond the Profile and Into the Future of Digital Marketing, and learn the techniques on how to leverage LinkedIn to build and how to actively engage in the LinkedIn community to help you achieve your business goals.