5 Reasons Content Marketers Shouldn't Ignore LinkedIn

With so many social channels, it is difficult to keep up with them all. So, you’ve done your due diligence where necessary: scheduling tweets a few times a day, posting something witty on Facebook and completing your profile on LinkedIn. But if you are simply using LinkedIn for your personal professional gain, your brand is missing out on a major opportunity to extend its reach and attract new customers.

LinkedIn is striving to become the new hotspot for exchanging, absorbing and promoting content in the B2B realm. As marketing messages become increasingly more targeted, reaching preferred, segmented audiences is becoming more of a challenge. LinkedIn is attempting to help ease that hurdle.

5 Reasons Content Marketers and Brands Should Not Ignore LinkedIn

1. LinkedIn Today: A site that tailors top news stories for each user makes a content marketer’s job a bit easier by putting relevant information in front of readers. LinkedIn today curates headlines and other items people are talking about from more than 200 million professionals and puts them in front of people in relevant industries. Imagine, your brand publishes content, which is shared by not only your employees, but by LinkedIn itself. The ripple effect of sharing your content on LinkedIn can be endless.

2.  LinkedIn Influencers: A hand-picked group of thought leaders, LinkedIn Influencers allows professionals to get updates from industry celebrities right on their LinkedIn homepage. So what does this mean for content marketers? Imagine you work for a medical manufacturing company, and you post your new ebook on LinkedIn. Delos Cosgrove, CEO and president at Cleveland Clinic, reads it and likes what he sees, so he shares it. His followers (more than 85,000 of them) are likely to see that piece of content, and, thanks to LinkedIn’s algorithm, many are likely to be members of the target audience for your medical manufacturing company. 

3. LinkedIn Groups: You should already be familiar with LinkedIn Groups, but it may be time to look at them from a different perspective. There are several groups for just about every topic, especially in the B2B world, so don’t be afraid to dig in and get involved. Groups are great places to post your brand’s content, but be advised: Groups are not meant to be promotional. If you post content, ensure it is relevant, useful and educational. This type of content will get the most shares across social media channels, increasing your chances for new sales prospects.

4.  LinkedIn’s integration of SlideShare: SlideShare makes sharing presentations, documents and even videos simple, a real win for content marketers. With its integration with LinkedIn, brands can now easily share content with people in the same or relevant industries across the world—which makes LinkedIn a real destination for B2B content.

5. LinkedIn’s Sponsored Content: While there isn’t a lot of information available yet, we know that LinkedIn will be launching Sponsored Content, not unlike Facebook’s Sponsored Stories. The new ads will allow brands to promote their content, including eBooks, infographs and other branded content to specific segments of their followers.

With these strides toward a better platform for distributing, obtaining and advertising content, it seems as though LinkedIn is preparing to become a premier center for content that will help professionals do their jobs better. 

“You see with the momentum we’re generating now with Influencers, LinkedIn Groups, SlideShare, people are increasingly turning to LinkedIn to publish professionally relevant content,” said Jeff Weiner, LinkedIn CEO, on a March call with investors. “We think that’s going to create a very strong platform and very valuable content for large enterprises…who want to target [and] engage with professionals.”