Value/Importance: [rating=5] for B2B!
Recommended link: LinkedIn announcement
Our commentary on the new company status updates
If you use LinkedIn to market your business to other businesses you may remember that LinkedIn introduced Company Follow about 18 months ago. It allows you to setup a company page like in Facebook and others can follow it.
LinkedIn explain:
“Keep in mind your status updates can be up to 500 characters long and can support URLs with multimedia as well. Given that any LinkedIn member can comment, like or share your Company’s status update, this is a great way to build engagement with customers, potential employees and prospects alike”.
To switch on this feature - administrators should read this. I just added an update about this change to our page which you can see at the bottom of the Smart Insights LinkedIn page if you want to get an idea of how it works.
Marketing implications of new update
Like many others we setup a company LinkedIn page with some basic info about us to try it out. We have a few hundred followers, but it’s not doing so much. We send our blog posts to there, but they're only seen if someone goes to the page.
The value of this new capability is best seen on this example from Rackspace who are using the new service. I compared it to ours to spot the difference and noticed how they are making marketing announcements about webinars and blog posts/content:
They’re not syndicating all their blog posts to there and I’m not suggesting you should. But you can see it effectively gives a new channel for B2B marketing campaigns around events and product launches - that’s why I’ve given in 5 stars and the implications are to encourage more LinkedIn followers I guess.
I’m not sure how you can incentivise this so well since there’s no gated Facebook Like page. But you can use your company home page text (no visuals!) to encourage people to follow the company by showing what you will offer through your updates.
Now I've published this I'll update our status to point to this post, but I won't do it for all posts that could get annoying...
What do you reckon of this - how will you be using it - how are you using LinkedIn company pages now?
By Dave Chaffey
Digital strategist Dr Dave Chaffey is co-founder and Content Director of online marketing training platform and publisher Smart Insights. 'Dr Dave' is known for his strategic, but practical, data-driven advice. He has trained and consulted with many business of all sizes in most sectors. These include large international B2B and B2C brands including 3M, BP, Barclaycard, Dell, Confused.com, HSBC, Mercedes-Benz, Microsoft, M&G Investment, Rentokil Initial, O2, Royal Canin (Mars Group) plus many smaller businesses. Dave is editor of the templates, guides and courses in our digital marketing resource library used by our Business members to plan, manage and optimize their marketing. Free members can access our free sample templates here. Dave is also keynote speaker, trainer and consultant who is author of 5 bestselling books on digital marketing including Digital Marketing Excellence and Digital Marketing: Strategy, Implementation and Practice. In 2004 he was recognised by the Chartered Institute of Marketing as one of 50 marketing ‘gurus’ worldwide who have helped shape the future of marketing. My personal site, DaveChaffey.com, lists my latest Digital marketing and E-commerce books and support materials including a digital marketing glossary. Please connect on LinkedIn to receive updates or ask me a question.
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