Social networking for business is about to get easier, thanks to LinkedIn's new advancements on their company page functions.
According to an article released yesterday by the Business Insider, LinkedIn is going to be rolling out two new specialised functions to their company pages which is going to increase user engagement for companies using social networking for business.
These two functions are "Targeted Updates" and "Follower Statistics".
Targeted updates will enable companies using social networking for business to send out specific messages or status updates to targeted people, according to the following criteria:
- Industry
- Company size
- Geographic location
- Seniority in company
- Job function
Follower statistics, on the other hand will provide companies with a statistics dashboard that reports on insights on the following:
- Followers
- Recent followers
- Engagement levels
- Demographics
Similar to the Facebook insights that already exist for business pages, these analytics provide companies the opportunity to measure the results of their social networking efforts.
Examples released from an internal LinkedIn study on LinkedIn's new targeted updates reported a 66% increase in audience engagement.
The function updates are only going to be available for limited companies in the interim, but LinkedIn plans to roll out these features to the rest of their network during the next few months.
Specific messages to targeted people, enabling companies to personalise their messages and build relationships are the result of these new social networking for business functions from LinkedIn.
These updates increase the the already viable use of LinkedIn for business social networking. Already before these updates, 62% of companies using LinkedIn have reported acquiring a customer from the network.
Key takeaway: LinkedIn is an efficient tool and successful tool for social networking for business purposes that any smart company would incorporate into their online strategy.
According to new research by Hubspot, when it comes to generating leads, using LinkedIn for business generates almost three times higher leads than both Twitter and Facebook.
Hubspot surveyed over 5000 businesses and found that traffic from LinkedIn generated the highest visitor-to-lead conversion rate at 2.74%; where Facebook and Twitter only showed .77% and .69% conversion rate respectively.
Why is visitor to lead such a big deal?
Visitor to lead is the minimal measurement criteria you should be gauging to measure your online success.
You may ask, "What about the impressive thousands of visitors that come to my website?"
The bottom line is that there's no point in visitors if they don't convert to leads. Unless of course your goal in online marketing is purely brand awareness.....
Why is the conversion rate from LinkedIn so high?
People who are networking on LinkedIn are almost certainly wearing their business hats. They're asking questions and there's a good possibility that they're asking questions about products and services that your company offers.
In other words, they're already warm. They're already in the right mind set.
The question is - can they find you?
To ensure they can, make sure you're doing lots of the following:
- Growing your network - the more connections you have in your network, the more chance you have
- Optimising your profile for search
- Sharing awesome content relevant to your audience
Marketing takeaway: For B to B lead generation, it's LinkedIn or bust
How are you using LinkedIn to generate leads?