One of my clients recently posed this question to me. The company is in a very networking-intensive field and had felt the pressure to establish a more polished LinkedIn presence to promote the business. But beyond this basic necessity, they were really trying to understand how the page could be part of a more powerful, integrated marketing strategy. They asked me: what’s the value of having a LinkedIn business page? What does posting updates on the page do for us? Does anyone really see them?” Here’s what I told them:
First, having followers on LinkedIn (while not exactly like having them on Facebook with a continuous scrolling news feed) nevertheless can reach a significant portion of your audience. Some stats:
- If you post at least 20 status updates per month you can reach approximately 60% or more of your unique audience each month.
- 20% of your followers will typically be reached with one (i.e., with each) status update.
Because LinkedIn is still a bit underutilized by companies as a marketing tool (many companies have no LinkedIn page, or only a bare bones one) this means that there are far fewer updates being posted now, so every update you make has higher visibility. Personally, I don’t have time to scroll through 250 Facebook updates every day, but I can quickly scan the 20-30 LinkedIn updates in my feed to see if there’s anything interesting. This easy visibility will change over time, but at least for the next few years it gives you an edge.
And just like on Facebook, if your updates are particularly interesting or relevant and a user comments or shares them, that automatically magnifies them and gets them out in front of other LinkedIn users – helping (slowly but surely) to build awareness. And ideally your employees will regularly share your updates to their networks, which can exponentially expand reach.
I also sensed that embedded in my customer’s query was a larger question about the value of marketing in general. (Because social media is just one form of marketing, and LinkedIn/Facebook are just tools for doing social media marketing.) So I went on:
This next paragraph may be a “duh” for many business people these days, but you’d be surprised how many folks still think of marketing = advertising, or marketing = sales.
The rock bottom value of marketing is essentially twofold: awareness (getting people to know who you are and what you do) and positioning/branding (getting people to know what makes you special/unique, and what they can depend on from you). If people are aware of you and your capabilities, they may not buy something from you today, but at some point in the future when they need it (or when they are talking to someone who needs it) they will think of you.
The value of social media marketing is that it can provide extremely cost effective, broad-reaching ways to keep your name in front of people (“top of mind” awareness). And at the same time, assuming your status updates are quality/high value, they will keep reinforcing and expanding people’s understanding of what makes you special, what you do well, what capabilities you have that they might not have been aware of before.
Good principles to keep in mind as you are thinking about your own company’s marketing strategies. And now, following my own advice, I’ll be setting up my CorningWorks LinkedIn page!