If you are a B2B marketer you will be actively managing your presence on LinkedIn. It drives more traffic to corporate websites than other social media platforms and it is the platform of choice of most B2B marketers. However, managing your presence on LinkedIn, engaging across various groups and tracking engagement can be a complex and time consuming task. Thus I was keen to test out Oktopost which is a social media management platform developed for B2B marketers with a specific focus on LinkedIn.
I have been very impressed so far, particularly with the way it supports B2B marketing on LinkedIn. Oktopost supports social media marketing on all of the main platforms but has been built specifically to support B2B marketers and focuses on their favourite platform, namely LinkedIn.
In this review I focus on five Oktopost features that can improve your LinkedIn marketing. Oktopost also has sophisticated lead capture, tracking and analytics tools. In order to test these I have set up a campaign within Oktopost encouraging people to download the new Google+ Playbook for B2B Marketers from Anders Pink. I will run this campaign for a week or so and then report here on the outcome and on my experience of Oktopost's lead capture, tracking and analytics capabilities.
The five Oktopost features that I would highlight for LinkedIn B2B marketers are as follows:
1. LinkedIn Group Search
Oktopost has a LinkedIn Group Search function where you can search on keywords and then filter results to find relevant LinkedIn Groups to engage with. This can all be done within Oktopost. If any of your team are already members of a Group Oktopost will show you and provide you with a link to join the Group. This is a very useful way of finding Groups to engage with.
2. Tailored Posting For LinkedIn
Oktopost allows tailored posting to the different social media platforms. In the example below I used the Chrome Oktopost plugin (currently in beta) to post content to my social media platforms. I personally like a plugin option that sits in my browser bar so I can easily share content that may be valuable to users. Using the Oktopost plugin I can post to Twitter, in much the same way as I can if I use the Buffer or Hootsuite browser plugins. In the example below, I can create my tweet and choose the account to post from, I can also schedule the post.
One of my frustrations with other posting management tools is the difficulty of creating tailored posts for the different networks. With Oktopost, as you can see above, there are left hand tabs for the different social networks. If I click on the LinkedIn tab to the left I get a different view of the posting screen as you can see below.
Thus for LinkedIn I can separately create my headline and my post, and then choose which LinkedIn account I want to post from and which LinkedIn Group I want to post into. In this way I can create tailored LinkedIn posts easily either from the Chrome plugin or directly in the application.
3. Multiple Employee Posting to LinkedIn Groups
As indicated above, you can publish posts from multiple employee LinkedIn profiles and not just to their profile but to each of their LinkedIn groups. This makes life much easier if you want to post from multiple LinkedIn accounts in your business. If these people would rather post themselves Oktopost has a nice message library feature which makes this easy for them to post in line with your overall campaign.
4. Message Library and Autoposting
In Oktopost for any campaign you can create a library of pre-approved messages with various headlines and links. These messages are kept in an asset library. Your colleagues can then choose from these pre-approved messages to post to their networks. Another really useful option is create an auto post schedule from your library of messages. This creates a schedule of posts across your chosen networks for a specified campaign time period using the message library.
5. Social Inbox Management
One of the biggest challenges of social media management is keeping track of your interactions and responding to them. Posting is easy, engaging and interacting is where the hard work begins. Oktopost makes this much easier for you. If people engage with your posts such as commenting or retweeting, they will appear in the Social Inbox. You can access this Social Inbox from the top tab where you can read and respond directly from inside Oktopost. Below is an example of a Social Inbox.
This is a great time saver and I love how it keeps a record of each conversation, especially in LinkedIn Groups. Thus I can click on the LinkedIn line in the Social Inbox above and view the interactions as shown below.
I can then decide if I want to comment and engage with the discussion. I can comment and reply directly from within Oktopost.
Lead Generation and Analytics
So far I have really liked what I see from Oktopost. Over the next week as I mentioned above I will be running a campaign to test Oktopost's ability to capture leads, track users and its analytics. I will report on the results here on Social Media Today. I have set up a campaign in Oktopost to encourage people to download the new Anders Pink Google+ Playbook for B2B Marketing. (Feel free to check it out!)
Try It For Yourself
You can sign up for the two week free trial at Oktopost if you would like to test out the features for yourself. At the time of writing the paid monthly subscription starts at $29 a month.
Disclaimer - I have no connection with Oktopost. I review all tools independently and share my personal experience as I have done previously with tools such as Topsy and BuzzSumo.