Started as a simple way to make your CV available online to people you choose to network with, LinkedIn has grown into something far more useful. Members of LinkedIn create a page that is basically an enhanced CV, with education and career history, but also with recommendations and the opportunity to promote their current employer and link to further information.
Members can then invite other professionals to ‘connect’ with them, giving them access to their pages, and thus building a list of connections with whom they can communicate and share information. LinkedIn is above all used to find out about people you want to employ or people and companies you may be working with or are looking to work with.
LinkedIn Groups offers members the opportunity to set up forums for associations, industries, alumni or any centre of interest. Recent estimates suggest around 60 million current members.
Benefits of LinkedIn
- It is free and simple to set up.
- It contributes to front page ‘domination’ in search results.
- You can distribute your content.
- You can create targeted business communities.
Pitfalls of LinkedIn
- You can’t control what is said about you.
- LinkedIn Groups needs to be active and well managed.
- Information can be out of date.
- You should be aware of the implications of linking to your other personal social networking sites.
How to get started with Groups
1. Strategy: First decide on your strategy. Are you simply promoting your company, or are you looking to make your knowledge and expertise available via a group? Remember that if you are thinking of starting a group, you have to be sure that people will have a reason to join.
2. Objectives: Define what it is you want to get out of your LinkedIn strategy. Is it awareness, or are you looking to develop relationships with clients and potential clients, ultimately leading to sales opportunities. Whatever your objectives are, make sure that you identify the indicators necessary to measure success, and that tracking is in place before you start your activities.
3. Set-up and resources: Make a plan detailing what needs to be done to set up your LinkedIn campaign. It is crucial to have everything in place before you launch, and that includes the people who will manage everything. You need to decide who will be communicating on behalf of your company, how they will be communicating, and how much time they will need to dedicate.
4. Content and guidelines: Before launching, make a detailed plan of what you want to talk about. Whilst group members will provide most of the content in the long run, you will launch initial discussions. Remember to keep conversation going over the first few months. In addition, provide the team who will manage the group with guidelines. As well as participating in discussions, they will play the role of moderators, and will need to understand how the group is managed.
5. Start talking and recruiting: Once everything is ready, all that is left is to get things going. With a group, there is always a ‘chicken and egg’ situation at the beginning where there are few members and little content, so it is important to concentrate on both areas equally until a certain rhythm is established. Also, don’t be surprised if your content plan is swiftly ripped up as you discover that your members are in fact interested in totally different subjects. As long as they’re talking, however, this doesn’t matter.
6. Measure: How is the group performing based on the objectives you have defined? These will probably be quite broad – number of members, number of discussions, number of comments, as well as some that are qualitative rather than quantitative, such as mood of comments, but it is important to measure everything. A successfully managed LinkedIn group involves constant measurement and adapting to the conversations taking place.
New Group features
LinkedIn Groups has recently updated some of its features to improve on the way that members can interact with each other. New functions included a ‘Like’ button to highlight group participants who generate the most discussion activity as ‘Top Influencers’. There are also improved functions that allow users to browse and contribute to discussions more easily.
Is LinkedIn for everyone?
As a comprehensive business network, LinkedIn can play a crucial role in a B2B marketing strategy, but not for everyone. If your target market is using LinkedIn, you may well have a good reason to engage with them there.
There are limitations however. At the core of a LinkedIn strategy will generally be a group, which requires a central point of interest, recruitment and management of members with ongoing moderation. Not all B2B companies can tick all of these boxes, and it is worth spending the time to research the opportunities before starting what is a process that requires time and extensive input in order for it to succeed.
