Effective Marketing on LinkedIn

More and more professionals are using LinkedIn nowadays, to connect with colleagues and business contacts. However, one comment we hear over and over is that many people don’t know exactly why they’re using it.

The NLC team has been experimenting with LinkedIn this year, in order to see what kind of value the service can offer from a marketing perspective. We were able to present some of our findings at SES Toronto this year (You can download the presentation here). Following is a summary of some the strategies that you can use for marketing on LinkedIn.

Because there is a lot of information here, you can skip down to the section you are interested in:

• What is LinkedIn?
• What You Can Do With LinkedIn
• Things to Keep in Mind Before You Begin
• Building Your Network
• LinkedIn Tools
• Marketing Strategies
• Example of Branding Success
• A Short Case Study
• Summary

Oh, and before we begin, we feel it’s important to let you know that we are not affiliated with LinkedIn in any way, and nor are we promoting their service… LinkedIn is simply a tool we have used with some success, and this is how we did it.

What is LinkedIn?

LinkedIn is a professional niche social networking site. On LinkedIn, you can connect with professional colleagues, meet new people, find recommended services and find new contacts in your current network. Currently, you can reach “more than 11 million” professionals on the service, including all of the Fortune 500 companies.

What You Can Do With LinkedIn

It is important to remember that LinkedIn is a good tool to reach specific people; it is not so good at mass market broadcasting. If you want to reach ten million people, then this may not be your best avenue. If however, you want to reach the specific person who may be interested in your service, then LinkedIn can definitely be a very useful tool.

Even looking at LinkedIn from a very high-level point of view, there is much you can achieve with the service. You can see who your friends know, in order to take advantage of your existing network. You can also find out “who you need to know” to reach your goals. For example, if you sell paper products, you can find out who is in charge of purchasing these supplies at the company you want to do business with.

Aside from these basic uses, there are other uses for LinkedIn. For example, by using LinkedIn effectively you can:

• Increase the visibility of your business and brand
• Pursue direct sales
• Generate traffic and support your SEO efforts

We will be outlining some specific strategies you can use to achieve these goals as we go through this article.

Things to Keep in Mind Before You Begin

Before we get into some of the nifty things you can do with LinkedIn, let’s have a little discussion about “the other side of the coin” - possible risks. There are a few issues you may want to keep in mind before launching a campaign on LinkedIn:

• Security - If you have a high number of employees with LinkedIn accounts, there may quite a bit of information about your company in the system. For example, what positions you employ, what kind of education and experience the people in those positions have, and perhaps an outline of your internal corporate structure. It may be worthwhile having some internal discussion on how you want to approach this issue.
• Recruiting - LinkedIn is known to be a bit of a playground for recruiters. While the service may make it easier for recruiters to find your employees, it’s also true that headhunting happens offline, as well.
• Don’t Spam - Remember that everything you do on LinkedIn happens under your real, professional, and company name. So even though the service may be “faceless”, it is wise to behave professionally when using the service. Remember - not only are you easily identifiable, but everything you say and do on LinkedIn is recorded publicly and indefinitely.

As well, there have been some other concerns about the access to information that LinkedIn provides. While these issues can be true for any social networking site, they are something you may want to think about before launching a LinkedIn campaign.

Building Your Network

When you first sign up with LinkedIn, it may seem a little… quiet. If you only hear the echoing sound of your own voice when you sign into LinkedIn, it’s not that there’s no-one using the service, it could just be that your network is quite small.

Let’s say you have 30 contacts in your LinkedIn network, and they all have an average of 30 contacts, and they all have an average of 30 contacts… this means you have about 27,000 people in your network. While 27,000 people might seem like a good number of possible contacts, it’s actually quite small if you are looking for a local accountant, or someone who can write code in a somewhat obscure language.

Which brings us to one of the main questions surrounding LinkedIn: how do you build a wide enough network without sacrificing the overall quality of your network?

The answer is actually quite simple, if you are willing to compromise, just a little. Here is a screenshot of my account near the beginning of June. As you can see, I had only 45 contacts, and yet had free access to almost 2 and a half million other professionals:

How is this possible? Simple math. There are people known as “open networkers” on LinkedIn, who tend to link to as many people as possible. By inviting a few of these “power networkers” to my network, I have access to all of their first degree and second degree contacts. Therefore, my 5 or so contacts with about 20,000 contacts each give me access to about 2,000,000 additional professionals.

There are a few ways that you can easily find these “open networkers” on LinkedIn. The first is simply to do a search on LinkedIn for “LION“. This acronym stands for “LinkedIn Open Networker” and doing this search can find many people who have this flag in their profile. Many open networkers tend to also have their email address in their LinkedIn profile name, to make it easier for people to invite them to their network even if there is no connection.

The other way to find high volume LinkedIn networkers is to visit TopLinked.com. Here you can find who’s available as an open networker, and you can also frequently see how many people they are advertising as being in their network.

Remember - it is always a good idea to check the person’s profile first to see how they want to be contacted. Even though someone may be an open networker, they may only be interested in people from a specific industry. So it’s always polite to check first.

LinkedIn Tools

LinkedIn offers a few tools to help you reach other people and interact with them on the system.

LinkedIn Answers

Basically, “Answers” is just as it sounds - anyone can ask a question, and anyone can answer. The nice thing about this tool is that you can interact with people who are not in your network - which helps you meet new people and make new contacts.

When you ask a question in the “Answers” area, many people can answer you. When the question closes (automatically after a few days or when you decide to close it), you are asked to choose the “good” answers. Out of these “good” answers, you are asked to choose a “best” answer. The person who is chosen as having given the “best” answer gets an “expertise point” that shows in their LinkedIn profile.

“Answers” offers a great deal of opportunity to display your expertise. If someone is looking for help on a topic where you have expert knowledge, your answer not only shows what you know, it also opens a conversation with someone in need of your expertise. And if you want to keep up to date on what questions are being asked in your category, you can always subscribe to the RSS feed.

At the same time, asking a question can also be helpful. Your question may be read by many people who have an interest in the topic. This can be a good place to announce new ventures and look for new business partners.

Visit LinkedIn Answers

LinkedIn Services

“Services” is basically a system where you can find services that are recommended by others. So for example, you might be able to find a local accountant who is highly recommended.

At the same time, by getting your own clients to recommend you, others who are searching for your services can find your business. The more recommendations you have, the better you can look to prospective customers.

Visit LinkedIn Services

Search LinkedIn

The “search” function in LinkedIn allows you to find people, regardless of if you know them or not. You then have the option of finding someone who knows them to introduce you, purchasing a paid account from LinkedIn to contact them directly yourself, or finding another way to contact them.

Visit LinkedIn Search

LinkedIn Groups

Groups on LinkedIn are actually quite simple. By joining a group, everyone in the group basically becomes a connection. Anyone else who is also a member can see the group logo in your profile. LinkedIn recently announced a new “LinkedIn For Good” charity program, and it will be interesting to see how this service develops.

Visit LinkedIn Groups

Jobs on LinkedIn

Of course, LinkedIn is known as being popular with recruiters. So it should come as no surprise that you can post a job on the system.

Visit Jobs on LinkedIn

Marketing Strategies

Increasing Your Brand’s Visibility

There are several ways you can use LinkedIn to increase the visibility of your business.

• First, you can display your expertise in “Answers”. Frequently people ask questions like “where can I find a consultant”, etc. If you fit the bill, you can use the question to open a conversation.
• Second, you can announce your services to others in Answers. Simply answer a question that relates to your service, or ask a question looking for something you need.
• Third, you can drive readers to your blog posts. If someone asks a question to which you have blogged the answer, simply point people to your blog post - driving traffic and gaining a quality, relevant link at the same time.
• Finally, you can get your service recommended in “Services”. The more recommendations you have, the better your business looks.

Generating Sales Leads

• You can reach potential clients through LinkedIn by conversing with people in “Answers”. Not only can you find new business partners and ventures, but you can also answer the questions of people who may be suitable clients.
• Second, you can respond to service requests, such as when people are looking for a consultant in your field.
• Third, you can look for the right person to contact at the organization you are seeking to do business with.

Finally, you can (again) get your service recommended.

Supporting Your SEO

LinkedIn is actually a reasonably good, quality site to get a link from. They are also (as of this writing) not using the “nofollow” tag on their outgoing links.

More and more people are recognizing the need to build a network of quality links to their websites. Not only can these links provide a way for search engines to find you, but they can also drive qualified, relevant traffic.

If your organization has, say 100 employees, and 40 of them have LinkedIn accounts, then why not send out a company-wide email requesting a link back to the company website? If only 20 staff members add a link, you’re still up 20 free, quality, possibly relevant links, simply by sending an email. And remember - each account on LinkedIn has space for 3 links with whatever anchor text you like.

In order to make the link viewable to search engines, it is important to add the “show website” feature to each profile that will link to your site. This can be done in each account by clicking on “Edit My Public Profile“, make sure “Full View” is checked, and that also “Websites” are also checked. This will make the website link (and anything else you check here) public.

Again, you can also respond to service requests and other questions in LinkedIn “Answers”, in which you can post a link to your website as a reference. Many “Answers” pages are also indexed in search engine results pages.

Example of Branding Success

Take for example, the following screenshot. As you can see, it is simply a question someone asked, looking for information on Joost (an Internet TV service). As it happens, we had recently blogged about our experiences as a Joost beta tester.

I responded to this question by pointing out our blog post and offering to help. Writing this answer took about a minute.

This question turned into a conversation, which turned into an interview, which turned into an article, which turned into NLC being quoted in a featured article with a link to our site from a Canadian online magazine.

In addition, as of this writing, the “Answers” page shown here is indexed (albeit supplimental) in search engines, the link from the LinkedIn Answer page drove traffic to the post, and the post now ranks slightly higher in some search results pages.

And all this for about one minutes work.

A Short Case Study

During the period of April 1st through June 5th, 2007, NLC ran a small test to see what kind of traffic LinkedIn could drive to our site.

While the numbers were relatively small, they are somewhat interesting. For example, as you can see in the illustrations below, we found that although the rise was somewhat modest, visitors from LinkedIn viewed slightly more pages than people who visited from either Facebook, Twitter, or overall on the website.

The really interesting metric we measured was the amount of time spent on the website. Visitors from LinkedIn spent about 3 times longer on the website than visitors overall on the site. Visitors from LinkedIn spent more time on the site than people from either Facebook, and far more than people who were referred from Twitter.

Now granted, this information is for one specific site (ours) in one specific industry, and other sites and industries may have different results. Still, the numbers we experienced were quite interesting.

Summary

It is important to remember that LinkedIn is not meant to be a mass market platform, and it is difficult to reach a wide variety of people on the site. However - LinkedIn allows for very highly targeted - I say perhaps even elegantly targeted - marketing. Instead of reaching a few million people, the vast majority of whom may not be interested in your service, LinkedIn allows you to reach the one influential person who is in need of your services. When you boil it right down - isn’t strategically reaching “the right people” a big part of what marketing is all about, after all?

If you have any other hints, tips, tricks or suggestions, please feel free to comment here to let others know.

Related Sites:

• TopLinked.com
• LinkedSEO