- Networking and Business: Face-to-Face and Online
- Social Media and Revenue
- The History of LinkedIn
- Why LinkedIn Is Relevant to Your Business
- Why LinkedIn Is More Than a Modern Rolodex
- How Your Advertising, Marketing, and Sales Teams Achieve Goals with LinkedIn
- LinkedIn Marketing Success Stories
- Joining LinkedIn Was Worth Nearly Half a Million Dollars
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Why LinkedIn Is Relevant to Your Business
Many marketers believe LinkedIn is a profitable channel. A 2012 poll by MarketingSherpa reported that LinkedIn’s effectiveness was supported by 65% of B2B marketers, Twitter’s by 53%, and Facebook’s by 47%.10 LinkedIn has executives from all Fortune 500 companies as members. More than 2 million companies have a LinkedIn Company Page.
Who else likes to use LinkedIn? Some interesting answers come from Quantcast, a company that directly measures more than 25 million web audiences around the world. You can use it to check the audience of any website, as shown in Figure 1.3. The following is according to their data:
- Fifty-four percent of LinkedIn members earn more than $60K per year, and 36% earn more than $100K annually.
- LinkedIn has 29% more six-figure earners than the average website.
- The 35-to-49-year-old demographic uses LinkedIn, 19% more than the average website.
- Almost one-fourth of LinkedIn visitors come back at least 30 times per month.
- More than half (51%) of LinkedIn users visit at least once per month.11
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Figure 1.3. According to Quantcast, LinkedIn users are more affluent and more educated than the average website visitor.
In June 2010, LeadFormix, a marketing automation company that offers lead generation and sales-enablement software to enterprises, published a study called “How Effective Is Social Media For B2B Lead Generation?” Their finding was that, of all the social networking sites, LinkedIn was the most effective for getting leads to B2B company websites.
In 2011, LeadFormix conducted a follow-up study focused just on LinkedIn for B2B marketing. They learned that website visitors from LinkedIn were remarkably good prospects. Many times it was these visitors’ first trip to the company website. LinkedIn was raising awareness with new customers and generating leads. Of all the marketing opportunities on LinkedIn, people who came to the site from Groups and Advertising were most likely to fill out a lead form.12
If you want for new potential customers to come to your website and become a lead for your sales force, LinkedIn is a great place to find them. What’s more, the data in this study suggests that LinkedIn Groups and Advertising are the most effective places on LinkedIn to find them, and having a company page and employee profiles gets potential customers to take your company seriously.