Is LinkedIn Effective For Marketing?

Are you using LinkedIn to grow your business, and do you think it is effective for marketing?

If your answer is ‘no,’ you should definitely consider looking into the amazing tools that the platform provides to attract and convert ideal clients for your business.

As a LinkedIn lead generation agency, we use the platform every day to generate hundreds of inbound and outbound leads, which is why I’m confident you can make it work for your business as well.

Is LinkedIn good for marketing?

The platform has been around for more than 15 years now, and while most people have a profile on the platform, very few actually use it for business development.

So what makes it a good marketing tool?

Well, before we go into the details, let’s take a look at a recent post that was published by Gary Vaynerchuk on his profile:

In this post Gary writes: 

Why is Gary so passionate about this opportunity? Well, let’s look at some numbers:

• There are 90 billion weekly impressions of the newsfeed.
• But only 3 million platform users post content every week.

In other words, the demand for content on the platform is much higher than the supply. And this obviously presents a huge opportunity, if you know how to take advantage of it.

Take advantage of amazing organic reach

Now you might be saying at this point, “It’s easy for Gary Vee to get amazing organic reach on the platform because he’s a celebrity, but it’s a very different story for me.”

But that’s definitely not the case.

We recently did a survey of 67 of clients who regularly post content on the platform, and on average, they reported getting 939 views per post (they provide these numbers for every post you publish).

Now, many of these people have a well developed network, and they know how to create high quality content that performs well on social media. But they definitely aren’t celebrities with millions of followers. And if they can achieve these kinds of results, then so can anyone who puts their mind to it.

The LinkedIn algorithm favors viral content

Let’s look at two additional reasons why the organic reach is currently so amazing on the platform:

• Their algorithm was adjusted in 2018 to favor content posted by regular users.
• Their algorithm readily allows content to go viral.

Let me just explain that last point. 

My team and I recently noticed that some of my posts get more views than I have people in my first degree network. So, obviously, some of those views must be coming from outside my network.

Because of that observation, we then decided to check who was liking and commenting on my content, and we got these results:

1st degree connections: 27% of the engagement on my posts

2nd degree connections: 47% of the engagement on my posts

3rd degree connections: 26% of the engagement on my posts

That means their algorithm is showing my content to a lot of people outside my first degree network. In fact, almost 75% of the engagement seems to come from my 2nd & 3rd degree connections. 

While LinkedIn doesn’t reveal specifics about how their algorithm works, probably something along these lines is happening: when someone from my 1st degree network engages with my content, the algorith then shows that content to some of the people in their 1st degree network (which is my 2nd degree network), and so on.

Conclusion

So let’s revisit our original question: is LinkedIn effective for marketing?

Well, it obviously provides a great opportunity to get your content in front of many people. And since it is a business network, this is a wonderful way to get your content seen by many business professionals, which can result in a steady stream of high quality inbound leads for your business.

And while this article is primarily about the opportunity for inbound marketing, I also wanted to mention in closing that it is still one of the best tools for outbound lead generation available (due to the highly specific search filters it provides to identify & connect with your ideal target audience).

So, in summary, LinkedIn is currently an amazing tool for both inbound and outbound marketing, which means that now is literally the best time ever to take advantage of it to grow your business.

How are you taking advantage of this opportunity for your business?

If you’re interested to learn more about how you can make this work for your business, take a look at our LinkedIn marketing course.

Additional resources:

• LinkedIn mistakes you should avoid
• LinkedIn profile tips
• LinkedIn boolean search explained