Maximize Your Social: A One-Stop Guide to Building a Social Media Strategy for Marketing and Business Success

Chapter 9

Maximizing Your LinkedIn Presence

Looking at the general spectrum of social media sites, with Facebook being on the far end as a large, personal site, LinkedIn is far on the opposite end of the spectrum as a professionally geared site with only a quarter of the number of users that Facebook has. However, LinkedIn is more about the quality of users than the quantity. Although this chapter will cover why LinkedIn is an important platform for business-to-business (B2B) companies, it’s just as important for business-to-consumer (B2C) companies because every B2C company has both B2B components, such as partners, distributors, and strategic alliances, as well as a huge numbers of employees or former employees who can become brand ambassadors as well. Those who are your brand ambassadors on LinkedIn are a relatively influential demographic, and companies who want to be taken seriously should capitalize on and leverage LinkedIn as part of a social media strategy.

B2B

LinkedIn from a demographic perspective is very different from other social media channels in that it has a very influential, affluent, and educated audience. According to reported data, more business decision makers, people with household incomes exceeding $100,000, and college and postgraduates are LinkedIn users than the physical distribution audience of the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times.1 This scale of influence that LinkedIn users have when compared with these leading business sites should not be ...