"Doubling Down" on LinkedIn

(reprinted from my "Sales & Marketing Minute" column for the TIVA newsletter)

As a one-person marketing team for a small business, I am very jealous of my time. I must narrow my attention to the activities that return tangible results. 

My social media activity is one area where I have recently done such refocusing. I have cut back my involvement on several platforms and expanded my activities on LinkedIn.

I viewed a webinar about LinkedIn recently, just to make sure I was staying current in understanding its capabilities. For example, I have found the logic behind the "endorsements" feature puzzling. The value of "recommendations" I understand, but the "endorsements" seem too Facebook-like for the more professional arena of LinkedIn. In the webinar I was glad to learn that others shared my skepticism. But "endorsements" aside, the webinar affirmed my long-held belief that LinkedIn can be a most powerful resource for marketers.

In the 2014 Digital Media Workflow eSurvey that Chesapeake Systems conducted, we included a question about social media. We asked participants to answer the following: "In my professional role, I regularly 'maintain a presence' on the following social media platforms:"  70% of the respondents checked LinkedIn. The next closest was Facebook at 42% and then Twitter at 31%. I found it interesting that Google+ drew only a 16% response, since that is where I have been putting some focus of late due to Google's dominant role in SEO. I may have to rethink that strategy a bit.

Here are some aspects of LinkedIn that I continue to find appealing:

LinkedIn remains a great way to effectively and efficiently prepare for a meeting with a new contact. I can not only get the basic facts, but usually it also allows me to find something in common with the person to talk about that is outside the immediate scope of our meeting. That's textbook Dale Carnegie (author of the classic, "How to Win Friends and Influence People").

I also like LinkedIn Groups. In fact, I have expanded the number of groups I follow. Monitoring them for genuine leads has proven to be fruitful. Now granted, most of the groups have rules about being too promotional in the discussions, but what I look for are opportunities to connect with a person who posts a question that illustrates a "pain point" they are having within a realm my company can address. Instead of responding to such a question publicly on the forum, I usually find a way to connect with the person directly, then point them to some relevant online content of ours, like one of our podcast episodes. I'm not saying this opportunity occurs frequently, but when it does, I have had a good success rate in getting a subsequent conversation going between the new contact and one of our sales team members.

I continue to utilize LinkedIn's "walled garden" email platform in my marketing activities. Typically, I periodically send out an email to my LinkedIn connections that is basically a brief note featuring links to an upcoming event or popular blog article on our website. Granted, the number of my LinkedIn connections is much smaller than the number of people on our eNewsletter list, but my LinkedIn connections tend to be more responsive and engaged when it comes to reading my correspondence. While the average open rate of Constant Contact eNewsletters within the Communications industry is 17% (that's just opens, not to mention the far fewer "click-throughs"), I have been able to determine that sometimes as many as 50% of my LinkedIn connections actually click-through to the links in my LinkedIn emails. I like those results.

So if you feel you need to narrow your social media focus as I have, then perhaps you should consider "doubling down" on LinkedIn.

David Ryan is the Marketing Director at Chesapeake Systems www.chesa.com, an IT-centric media systems integrator based out of Baltimore. David can be reached at dryan@chesa.com.