Unmetric share their insight on how brands are utilizing the power of Linkedin as a source for content and analysis
How Brands are Leveraging LinkedIn as a Publishing Platform
If you’ve been thinking that LinkedIn is just a professional social network to connect with your potential employees, you are wrong. LinkedIn, which used to be called the boring social network, has now progressed to become a publishing space and ripe opportunity for B2B marketing. According to Inventis IQ’s Audience Insight report, LinkedIn drives more traffic to corporate websites than all the other social networks put together. Brands have started to leverage LinkedIn to publish updates, long form articles and sector related developments on their LinkedIn pages turning them into content-rich overviews of the brand.
LinkedIn has certainly come a long way from being the social network you only visited when looking for a job. Now even consumer brands are running exclusive campaigns on LinkedIn. Mashable recently published an article about innovative LinkedIn marketing campaigns. Using the newly released LinkedIn Analytics feature of the Unmetric platform, I delved deeper to find out how these campaigns fared on the social network.
Interestingly enough, apart from the Weinstein Co, Callaway Golf and Citi, none of the other brands mentioned in the Mashable report posted any status updates related to the campaign on their LinkedIn page. Brands like Van Heusen, Double Tree Hotels, Microsoft and Fruit of the Loom have separate landing pages for these promotions and didn’t care to promote via their LinkedIn pages. Given LinkedIn’s advertising options to push a status update to more people, posting about the campaigns is really worth the effort as these posts drive engagement. Brands like Weinstein Co, Callaway and Citi have leveraged this really well.
Callaway Golf promoted its ‘Hit the Links’ campaign, which asked LinkedIn users to select a team of four to win a golf business trip that included a custom club fitting at the Callaway Headquarters, on its LinkedIn page by posting a couple of updates.
These posts engaged well with its fans as shown by the chart below which plots the engagement levels on a given day. The ‘Hit the Links’ update, posted on April 24, had the highest engagement score (934) among the 18 status updates analyzed during the time period and the post garnered 120 likes and 68 comments. The overall engagement score was 234 during the time period analyzed.
The sporting goods company also constantly post regular updates around ‘Callaway Office Tips’ and ‘Callaway Talks Podcast’ which are well received among its followers.
Citi seems to be very active on LinkedIn compared to other brands, thereby creating flurry of activity on its page. Its updates range from tips for startups and entrepreneurs to career advice. The banking and financial services company posted around 470 updates during the time period analyzed and the updates with links and images engaged the best with its followers as shown below.
Citi’s updates had more people liking and commenting about it than the other banking and finance brands.
Citi launched its professional women’s network on LinkedIn and promoted it by posting around 22 related updates on its page between June and October, 2013. Of all the admin posts, the 22 professional women’s network related posts engaged well with its followers with an average engagement score of 28, while the overall average engagement score of 21.
The Weinstein Company ran a sweepstake, ‘Path to Success’ as a part of its latest release ‘The Butler’. Three lucky winners will enjoy an all-expense paid trip to NYC to meet with a career dream team – a top recruiter, an executive, and a renowned career coach who will provide professional advice to the winners. The multimedia production and distribution company posted 8 updates around the sweepstakes and the following post was the most engaging post with 235 likes and 27 comments.
LinkedIn is fast becoming a publishing platform akin to Facebook and Twitter. Posting updates about campaigns and running an exclusive campaign on LinkedIn definitely go a long way in creating awareness and driving engagement among a brand’s followers. Moreover, most of LinkedIn users are decision makers (as opposed to the younger demographic on other social network sites) which makes it a platform of choice for B2B marketing as well.
Methodology:
Unmetric compiled this report by sourcing data from its own social media benchmarking platform. Data and Insights on LinkedIn campaigns were analyzed for the time period between April and October, 2013.