While developing the Social Media Strategy for our Internet Marketing group client and reading various social media articles, I’ve been thinking how great LinkedIn is as a promotional tool.
Imagine the company A. Let’s assume the company A is a chocolate company (the example is purely inspired by my personal sympathy for this product). The chocolate company A has a corporate website, a Facebook Fan page, Twitter, LinkedIn…and everything which is a modern Must.
Facebook Fan page is full of light fun messages and all types of efforts to encourage the communication between fans and increase number of “likes” and “talks”.
Twitter is full of short messages, I can hardly understand their meaning. That’s probably me; maybe it takes time and you need to follow for a while to have a full picture of what’s going on.
LinkedIn is a boring page with a few formal sentences that replicates the corporate website section “About Us”. In addition it has information about the number of employees plus information on number of employees that are on linked it. This is pretty much it.
With LinkedIn buzz growing and even roaring , (you quickly realize it as soon as you google it), Chocolate company A has all the chances to find a much better application of its linked in account and benefit the business.
LinkedIn has the power to promote company among target customers, vendors, potential employees and overall professional community!
Possible Steps:
1. .Company starts to like articles on LinkedIn account, that would be sort of easy to read “chocolate educational and scientific articles” (preparation facts, history about the chocolate, nutritional and dietary, discoveries by scientists, etc) to appeal to the curiosity and learning side of the “serious” linkedIn users. This can be written by the company or external articles “liked” by the company (which is great as the company starts promoting someone else and that can be mutually beneficial).
2. Company Employees on Linkedin start to like these articles and then, as in arithmetic progression, the articles spread little by little to the world via the chain of “likes”. Company account simply piggybacks on the “likes”.
3. At the same time the company creates a group of professional interest that would attract the suppliers searching new business and confectionary industry professionals searching for jobs or promoting themselves. The goal of the company is to initiate a live community by starting several talks on challeges and opportunities in the industry. And then this will grow as a snowball: company A will feed a group with the articles and professionals will create a content to fulfill their goals. I believe this effort has all chances to become mutually beneficial too.
4. And also in parallel the company makes sure it enters already existing groups of interest in LinkedIn and regularly participates in the discussions.
When I read about the penetration of LinkedIn and see a lot of corporate accounts being quiet inactive (uncles it’s consulting and HR), I clearly see the possible great outcome for a particular business. At least it is definitely worth trying.
* Image is taken from http://www.4tegroup.com/blog/2011/09/it-staffing/is-linkedin-the-best-tool-for-recruiting-2/