Why I love LinkedIn
I love LinkedIn - as much as one can love a social media platform. But I do prefer it to most others, and, along with YouTube, it is the only platform I use daily.
For B2B marketing or even B2B2C marketing, I find myself gravitating to LinkedIn the most. There are many reasons, one I wasn’t expecting is that it’s allowing me to be far more creative than other social media where algorithms dictate strongly the type of content you need to produce to increase chances for growth or success.
Here are some numbers, but I also want to go over why these numbers matter.
There are more than 900 million members in 200 countries and regions worldwide.
Facebook has gotten us used to considering audiences in the billions, and Instagram is projected to reach 1.35 billion this year. That is not that far off LinkedIn.
For most businesses, the potential audience pool difference between 900 million and 1.35 billion isn't going to make that much of an impact. So talking numbers may not be that relevant, and when talking B2B, it seems even less relevant.
Relevant or not, a pool of 900 million people is no joke, especially 900 million people that use the platform in a specific context.
In terms of demographics, 25-34-year-olds make up nearly 60% of LinkedIn users. This goes against the notion we may harbour that most people on LinkedIn are corporates and over 40.
According to LinkedIn, the three things that set them apart from other social media channels are:
A business environment
A professional audience
Meaningful engagement
And even though the first use for LinkedIn that comes to mind is recruitment or job searches, some stats show us that people are using LinkedIn in quite a different way.
There are 36K newsletters on LinkedIn with 29 million unique subscribers, so as a potential funnel to your email list, it is a highly effective platform to use.
40% of LinkedIn visitors organically engage with a page every week. And talking about weeks, LinkedIn statistics are still considered in terms of posting weekly. This is fantastic news because we can focus on quality over quantity and still see results.
Here are some more numbers: 96% of B2B marketers use LinkedIn for organic social marketing.
I think this is due not only to the fact that the context is business-related content but also the fact that LinkedIn is such a versatile social media platform in terms of the type of content with high organic engagement.
Instagram wasn’t designed to be used as a business media platform, so it can become convoluted to get people to click on your links or to speak about your business. It can be great for certain types of businesses, but overall, it still operates as a social media platform.
On LinkedIn, business content is the organic content of the platform, so naturally, it performs well.
However, there is also a personal element to it. You have your personal profile and your business profile. You can post slightly different content for each profile that plays off and interacts with each other without losing integrity. It has a nice balance that is very appealing.
And this is likely why it has such nice engagement.
I also like that it has quite an international presence and international interaction between its users. If you look at the comments and if you join any LinkedIn Group, this quickly becomes apparent. It adds an exciting and interesting dimension to the platform.
So what does all this mean?
Even though LinkedIn is experimenting an increase in publishing frequency with more of that same principle of rehashing the same content in certain niches (the explosion of ChatGPT posts has been annoying at best) - relevant, spaced-out content does well on LinkedIn.
Combined with the variety of types of posts you can produce it results in quality, creative, valuable content that can pull your ideal audience in and keep them engaged.
When I say a variety of types of content, the platform supports anything from live streaming (turn it into a podcast on Q&A or webinars) to a video, articles, short Twitter-style engagement posts, carousels, infographics and everything in between that you can think of, and all types can ultimately be very successful.
The options are endless, and the opportunity to create branded content, connect with your audience and communicate your value is immense.
It also means that B2B marketing has no excuse to be boring, dry and predictable.