Marketing on facebook and twitter has been a matter of great discussion and speculation. Some believe that potential of marketing on social media is still untapped while others dismiss it as just hype...lot of smoke with only a little fire at heart. Instead, LinkedIn can be a better option to target professionals more accurately. Lately, LinkedIn has opened doors for various companies to take on followers for their profile page and upgrade them (of course for a fee). Now LinkedIn is the new social media that presents unforeseen opportunities for marketers and media buyers to exploit.
While LinkedIn creates a profile for your company, it is open for anyone working with your company to edit it. As company profiles are user content driven anyone with valid company e-mail address can make changes. Only way to check it is to upgrade it by paying an annual fee. The added benefit is that you will be able to add job listings and enjoy other features in near future.
By adding follow button to your site, you allow people to follow the latest developments that are posted on your company's LinkedIn profile. What's more...you are part of LinkedIn's company search whether you have a free profile or a paid profile. Over 70 million members give LinkedIn the ability to reach out to the most targeted audience niche. It enables you to use the "home" page of selected audiences for a certain period of time.
The most popular feature among B2B consumers is LinkedIn Answers. Here professionals post questions on different topics such as careers, products, and services to be answered by other LinkedIn members. LinkedIn Answers can be used for Category sponsorship by bundling together various answer categories. In fact the most interesting thing about this set up is that you can actually reach out to people who are there to ask question about the very products or services you are advertising for. You can really saturate relevant topic areas and communities with your brands and offers.
Another interesting marketing option that LinkedIn provides is the use of InMail messaging for delivering messages to the inbox of members of certain categories on LinkedIn. The message is not only delivered on the top of individual's inbox but also remains there until he sees it. Irrespective of the number of messages come after it and the number of days after which that individual opens his inbox, the message won't get pushed down.
LinkedIn Polls let you create a poll and aim the questions towards specific audiences. Now we all know that taking the poll is a very high value brand interaction which enables your target audience to ponder over specific issues which you wanted them to through your questions. As the responses are published on the results page it acts as an incentive for people to participate. The best thing about polls is actually its by-product. You get an extremely targeted study with a significant sample size that can easily be utilized for white papers, reports, and press releases.