Just a few years ago, LinkedIn was primarily a playground for recruiters and job seekers. Most of us let our profiles sit and rot until it was time to look for our next job. Today, LinkedIn claims to be the world's largest business network and boasts 300 million users in 200+ countries. It has grown to be far more than a recruiting solution- offering opportunities for everyone from freelancers to Fortune 500 brands to connect, market, engage, and influence members of the community. And LinkedIn's Showcase pages enable brands to connect with audiences ion the social platform where they are already learning, networking, and engaging with peers.
LINKEDIN SHOWCASE PAGES ENABLE BRANDS TO CONNECT WITH AUDIENCES WHERE THEY ARE LEARNING, NETWORKING, AND ENGAGING
As an audience marketer and content strategist, I couldn't wait to try out the new Showcase pages when they were launched late last year. They serve as extensions of the Company pages and enable brands to segment their followers to engage them in a specific topic or area of interest, in addition to the company page of course. Each Company is allotted up to 10 showcase pages, allowing them to cultivate an audience with messaging and content specifically selected for them. Brands such as Adobe, Microsoft, Cisco, Intel, and my own employer- SAP, are diving in head-first to test the LI Showcase page waters.
Case in point, our first Showcase page launched a few months ago on the theme of The Future of Work and it already has several thousand followers and an impressive rate of engagement. And we just launched a new Showcase on The Future of Customer Engagement last week. I look forward to sharing some of the amazing thought leadership we are publishing in these innovative areas. And if I haven't yet convinced you that LinkedIn Showcase pages are the best thing since Nutella, below are the top 5 reasons why Showcase pages are truly an audience marketer's dream come true:
Content Curation
Think about the word "Showcase"- it implies that you would display only your best and most popular pieces. Some brands are creating huge volumes of content on a daily basis while other businesses with less resources may only write a blog or publish new content once per month. The beauty of the Showcase page is that you can curate the best, most relevant content for your audience and if you get it right (at least most of the time)- you will establish credibility and trust with followers.
As marketers and sales professionals, you should be curating content to your audience on a daily basis. Think of yourself as a "Content Concierge" and aim to deliver the right content at the right time to the right channel. If you've ever received service from a Concierge at a luxury hotel, you know how much goes into their recommendations of restaurants, shows, and services. They have done their homework to ensure positive customer experiences based on what they know about their guests preferences. And most importantly- a good Concierge becomes a highly valuable part of the hotel's overall customer experience.
Social Selling Enablement
Social selling is rapidly gaining in popularity as sales professionals adjust to the new realities of the buyers' journey. Gerry Moran, Head of Social Selling programs at SAP, noted in a recent blog post, 5 Content Marketing Plays to Win at Social Selling that "Your customers do not want to be sold. 70% of your customers want their problems solved, so position yourself as a problem solver with great content on LinkedIn, Twitter or blogging so they pick you!"
The LinkedIn Showcase pages build a bridge between Marketing and Sales that makes Social Selling incredibly easy and painless for all involved. It goes without saying that the sales team has been building out their individual LinkedIn Networks with prospective and existing customers who are then following their posts via their real-time feed.
Encourage every single member of your sales team to follow the Showcase page for their target audience and encourage them to visit it on a regular basis. Upon visiting the Showcase homepage, they will find content that their partners in Marketing have already curated and determined a fit for the audience. By clicking the share button on a recent post and adding a one line commentary on why that content is worth sharing and reading/viewing- the Sales professional has achieved Social Selling success!
Engagement
One of the LinkedIn Platform's top strengths overall is definitely engagement. In the B2B space, I can't think of a single other online community that engenders the quality and quantity of participation and dialogue like LinkedIn. For the marketers that will serve as moderators/curators of the Showcase pages, the analytics are simple, straightforward, and relevant. Metrics and trends can be viewed at the individual post level or for the overall Showcase page. In addition to engagement metrics and trends across key metrics, LinkedIn also provides demographic information about your followers- since they clearly have access to individual follower profiles. To summarize, the Showcase pages offer three primary types of metrics:
- Engagement-see the engagement value of individual posts.
- Trends-identify patterns across key metrics.
- Demographics-understand more about your follower demographics and sources.
Connection with Influencers
The LinkedIn Influencer Program was originally limited to established thought leaders and influencers- CXOs, high ranking government officials, and of course celebrities. Today, anyone can become an influencer on LinkedIn and publish opinions, thoughts, and news. Savvy marketers are capitalizing on this opportunity and onboarding their spokespeople and internal thought leaders onto the LinkedIn publishing platform.
What is the connection between LI Publishing and LI Showcases? The thought leaders and spokespeople associated with your brand add a human element to your marketing programs and the same holds true for your Showcase Pages. When a new Influencer post is published, promote it on the Showcase and encourage existing page followers to also follow that Influencer. If all goes well, their LinkedIn feed will be full of insights and updates from your company and thought leaders.
Connection to Groups
Did you know that there are 200 conversations per minute happening in LinkedIn Groups? There is no doubt that the deepest engagement occurs in Groups and they play a significant role at all stages of the buyer's journey, depending on the audience and topic. While comments on my Showcase page posts have been high, I would still encourage our followers to move to a Group to continue the dialogue at a deeper level. Or if there is already a hot discussion happening in an associated Group, LinkedIn makes it easy to invite Showcase followers to join in by enabling you to promote a discussion from a Group to the Showcase page.