Question: How do you recommend companies use LinkedIn to share content? We keep hearing LinkedIn is great for B2B, but when we share stuff it gets very little exposure, shares or readership.
First, we couldn’t agree more that LinkedIn is a great way to market for B2B. The problem is that a lot of brands and businesses are doing it wrong.
What I most commonly see is companies joining LinkedIn and posting content on their company page and having individuals litter their stream with content such as blogs, slide decks, videos and other information. In theory, all of this sharing is a good thing, but the problem is in the audience and the execution.
In terms of the audience, too many companies on LinkedIn are sharing there content with nobody. If your page has only a few dozen or even a few hundred followers what do you think the real visibility of your content is? On Facebook the number is about 1.5% and I doubt it is much different on LinkedIn.
So what is the right way to use LinkedIn?
While there are always multiple ways to accomplish a goal, I have found the most successful way to get content moving on LinkedIn is for the leaders and sales executives (among others) to share the content personally in a strategic fashion. Here is what I recommend.
- Share the content to three specific areas. In your update, within your groups and to specific individuals
- For the broad update to your network make sure you write a few sentences as to why this article might make sense for the reader. Most people have fairly diverse (if not highly diverse) networks so the more you can help them understand why they would want to click the article the better.
- When updating to groups, try to at least make the update pertain to the group, by adding one or two keywords. For instance if you are doing an update to a locational group such as Chicago Marketers, mention Chicago in your update so people see that it is relevant to them and not just posted everywhere (even if it is)
- Select a few (3-5) individuals from your network and share the articles with those individuals. Curate the articles with a clear and useful overview telling the selected individuals why the article is relevant to them. Also, put a brief call to action in the note such as let’s catch up with a call or connect for coffee etc. This adds to the personalization and sets the expectation of follow up.
LinkedIn can be a great way for B2B’s to market, however the best successes I have seen are when individuals share targeted relevant content to their individual networks. This type of sharing makes the LinkedIn experience more personal and puts the content in front of more of the people who can take action on it.
How does your company use LinkedIn to build trust, market and sell?
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Daniel Newman is the co-founder of V3*Broadsuite and is an experienced C-level executive, serving as a strategy consultant for small and mid-sized businesses. He’s also an insight/analyst partner to four Fortune 50 enterprises and previously served as the co-founder and CEO of EC3, a hosted IT and communications services provider. Prior to that, he served as the CEO of United Visual, Inc. in Chicago Illinois.
He is a widely published writer who contributes weekly to Forbes, Entrepreneur, Huffington Post and industry publications such as Commercial Integrator, Sound & Communication and Corporate Tech Decisions. He’s also author of three best-selling business books including The New Rules of Customer Engagement, The Millennial CEO, and just recently Evolve: Marketing (^as we know it) is Doomed.
Daniel has established a reputation as a leading thinker in topics such as Social, Big Data, Cloud and Mobile. He has been named to many top influencer lists in all of these areas, including recognition by the Huffington Post as one of the 100 business and leadership accounts to follow on Twitter. He is also an adjunct professor of management at North Central College.