August 7, 2018

5.4 : LinkedIn

5.4 : LinkedIn

Dr. Gordon Fletcher, Senior Lecturer, Salford Business School, UK

Unlike the other platforms that we’ve discussed, LinkedIn is a professional networking platform. At least that’s what you find when you first arrive there. It is encouraging you to create an online social profile and online social CV but that’is the start of things.

As a business, you’re engaging with other businesses and it’s a range of opportunities that go far beyond simply posting a CV onto LinkedIn and, in fact, a CV on LinkedIn is really going to look a poor neighbor without the additional activity.

LinkedIn is a professional social network that offers a sophisticated way of managing your CV

An organization can develop a company page enabling a group to engage in a more serious way when compared with the lighter tone of Facebook for example

LinkedIn is really for the conversation and, really, building that conversation through its own blogging platform, building it up through groups of professionals who network together and use the platform to communicate with one another, and to build interest in your brand, your product, and in yourself. It needs attention and it needs work to actually build the groups, to become a member of those groups, and to actually engage with those groups. But all of that work ultimately helps to build brand, build and attract attention, and to create an ongoing relationship that helps to drive and build the impression of your product and brand in a marketplace.

Colin Telford, Managing Partner, The Candidate Ltd, UK

We use LinkedIn for our digital marketing activities so that we can share job ads and share research and share content on LinkedIn. But we also use it to find candidates, we also use it to source these candidates for the jobs that our clients are briefed on. So we use it in a number of different ways, we actually have a premium license for LinkedIn, as it is a key channel for our recruitment agency and a key channel for digital marketing candidates to be finding new roles within digital. So that is the hot bed of candidates for us and an extremely commercially rewarding area for our business.

Linked in is used by The Candidate Ltd to share job adverts as well as to headhunt candidates

LinkedIn is a key channel for the recruitment industry and is used to source and attract candidates.

We use LinkedIn in a number of different ways. From a company point of view, we build a profile on there, we list jobs, we list information and content from our company. But we also have consultants who have their own partial accounts, which we use from a business point of view so that we can interact and build networks. One of our consultants has over 7,000 contacts on LinkedIn. So that the way that they use it is not only to create and develop their own digital brand, but also release information on jobs that are live, jobs that may be coming up, content and information that they are sharing. Our consultants and our business promote other content and other points of view that the people on our network produce so that again we are actually helping people build their profile within digital. So it’s a very, very central and informative and hot area for us, LinkedIn, as it would be for most digital marketing recruiters.

Alex Charalambidis, Digital Marketing Strategist, MONKS, Greece

We are always suggesting to our clients it’s really good to view a more interactive website for their organization and fully detailed CV for every employee, but in the paid part we are using it only for B-to-B clients.

Whilst the Monks case study recommends that individual members of a company optimize their personal profiles, LinkedIn is mainly used in a business to business context

Exercise

LinkedIn guide

LinkedIn publish their own guide based on their research and knowledge of their product You can download it here

https://business.linkedin.com/marketing-solutions/c/14/1/sophisticated-guide-for-marketing

Additonal materials

Using LinkedIn

How to use LinkedIn?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6e_EAUQqic

Google Small Business talk about LinkedIn

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hq4Kx6F7adw

References

Top Linkedin tips

http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com…

B2B Marketing on Linkedin

https://blog.kissmetrics.com/linke…

Better B2B marketing

http://www.brainrider.com/better-b…

An Introduction to LinkedIn for Business

http://offers.hubspot.com/introduc…

For chapter 5 related sections, follow:

5.0 Choosing the right digital profiles for the right audience
5.1 Facebook
5.2 YouTube
5.3 Twitter
5.5 PPC optimisation
5.6 What makes content to go Viral?
5.7 How to create content viral?