Direct marketing and employees as brand ambassadors using LinkedIn

The direct marketing power of LinkedIn is partially driven by its customised databases, the influence 3rd party credibility provides, the extra oomph an organisation can gain by using its employees’ profiles and its excellence as a thought leadership platform.  

Company pages on LinkedIn provide an additional means for organisations to leverage their presence on the platform. They enable the business personas of individuals to boost a company’s profile.

LinkedIn is a B2B social marketing platform without peer:

• Research has identified LinkedIn has a four times better conversion rate of visitors-to-leads than Twitter or Facebook
• Marketing Profs refers to research saying: “61% of registered LinkedIn users say LinkedIn is the social site they use most for professional networking, and 35% check the site daily.”

But do you agree? Please share your thoughts in the comments section of this post.

Using employees as brand ambassadors on LinkedIn

How may organisations, I wonder, really use their employees effectively as advocates on LinkedIn? Very few, I suspect.

Of course, you need to have a thought leadership platform to promote, such as a blog featuring helpful insights and advice, to make this an exercise likely to be able to be sustained, but still…

According to LinkedIn itself, employees are 70% more likely to engage with their company’s status updates, thus helping spread the message across LinkedIn, with mornings being the best time to post these updates. That makes for powerful marketing. And it’s not hard to do:

• Set up a company blog; post insights and advice
• The company places a summary of the post on its company page with a link to it
• An email is sent company-wide to let employees know of the post and encouraging them to read it and share to their contacts via LinkedIn etc.

Doing this will ultimately make a significant difference – directly and indirectly, via SEO for instance – to how easily this company blog content is found and read on the internet. There is NO company which will not benefit from undertaking this approach and it is so simple it is ridiculous.

Let’s not forget that after word of mouth recommendations from people we trust, the next most influential form of communication is how highly a service or product ranks on Google searches. This is supported by the power of social proof that comes from visiting a blog page and seeing it has been shared hundreds if not thousands of times.

Why aren’t we all doing this?? Well, actually maybe many of us are, as recent research has pointed out LinkedIn is the most popular social media channel for sharing content organisations produce.

Where have you seen companies using LinkedIn effectively as a communication tool, in particular using thought leadership as an inbound marketing approach?