What is the LinkedIn Insight Tag?

If you’re familiar with Facebook marketing, it’s the Facebook Pixel but for Business to Business marketers. If you’re not: it’s a small snippet of code that you add to your website, which sends a message to LinkedIn whenever one of LinkedIn’s members visits your website. The code looks something like this:

Why do I need a LinkedIn Insight Tag?

Look pretty dull, huh? Well, it’s marketing dynamite. You need that little piece of code because when that LinkedIn member (let’s call her Helen) visits your site, and the Insight Tag lets LinkedIn know about it, Helen is added to a special list. That list is only available to your business, and it will allow you to target adverts directly at Helen, and anyone else who’s visited your site.

This has a ton of advantages, but the biggest ones are 1) you can personalise that ad copy to reference the fact that Helen has visited your site, and even personalise it according to which part of your site she viewed; and 2) you are targeting your ads at a very warm audience (ie, people who are sufficiently interested to have previously visited your site), which means you can afford to spend a little more on them.

And it gets better…

If you’re familiar with the Facebook Pixel, you’ll know that it has been allowing marketers to do that exact same thing for quite a while now. So why is the Insight Tag better? Here’s why.

Imagine that pool of Helens, the people who have visited your website, or maybe just one page about a particular product or service, in the last few months.

Now within that pool, there will be lots of people who aren’t going to be great prospects for you. That could be for lots of reasons, but just a few examples: You have a service that has to be delivered in person, such as consultancy. If your company is in the UK and the website visitor is in, say, Australia – there’s little point in marketing to them. Or, you have a big ticket product that needs buy in from all of the senior team within an organisation, but the person who just visited your site is still a student or a job hunter. They might have been interested in your product for all kinds of reasons, but those reasons wouldn’t include “because they might buy it”.

NOW, this is where the LinkedIn Insight Tag gets more brilliant.  You can filter your pool of Helens so that your adverts are only shown to those within the pool who are in the right geographic location for you, or are sufficiently senior, or are working in a particular sector.

The only tiny “gotcha” around this is that you must have a potential target audience of at least 300 LinkedIn members before your campaign will run, so you have to bear that in mind when setting up your criteria. Having said that, if you set everything up and actually launch the campaign, LinkedIn will start running it when that 300 person threshold is reached – because remember, your initial pool of website visitor is being added to every day. Which brings us to:

Why you need to set up the Insight Tag ASAP

Even if you aren’t planning to do any LinkedIn advertising in the very near future, setting up the Insight Tag sooner rather than later means that that pool of potential advertising targets is starting to fill up, and will be available to you when you do want to. If you wait until the day before you want to run a campaign and then install your Tag, you may (depending on the level of traffic your website gets) be waiting a fair while before the advert starts to get shown.

And one last thing…a cure for the LinkedIn Lurgy

The LinkedIn Lurgy is what we call the nasty surprise that’s waiting for B2B marketers in some sectors, when they try to use  LinkedIn to reach their target audience.  There’s a dirty little secret hidden in LinkedIn’s user figures: a very large proportion of its registered users log in very, very infrequently.  Take a look at the second graph in our UK Social Media Stats for 2016 article.  Whilst around 80% of Facebook’s users log in every single day, that same figure for LinkedIn may be closer to 10%.  Which makes sense, when you think about it; LinkedIn just isn’t such a fun place to be, and for many people, it will sit dormant unless they are actively job hunting.

There are certain sectors and job roles where users are very active – particularly those that involve selling a product or service to other businesses, strangely enough – and professionals in those categories may well use LinkedIn very regularly. So if you are marketing to them, no problem.

If not, how do you use LinkedIn to market to someone who isn’t there? Until now, you didn’t.

But.

A further option within the LinkedIn ad creation progress is to enable something called the LinkedIn Audience Network.  Essentially, that is a set of apps and website where LinkedIn owns, or is leasing, advertising space. Which means that you can use your Insight Tag, plus criteria filtering, to target your perfect prospect – and then market to him or her even if they never actually visit LinkedIn.

LinkedIn says that all the apps and sites in its Audience Network are “Brand Safe” – that is, not adult or otherwise inappropriate for professional content – but as you can see, you can also exclude certain categories if you want to have closer control over where your content appears.

So, there you have it. If you’re a B2B business, you need to get down and cosy with the LinkedIn Insight Tag pronto, and start filling up that lovely pool of warm prospects.

UK Social Media Statistics for 2017

The tree is down and the tinsel is wilting, so it must be time for our annual review of social media use in the UK at the start of 2017.  We do this for two reasons: one, because statistics that focus purely on UK based users can be hard to come by, and two, because it also helps us clarify our own “hunches” about how things are going for each of the major sites, and use that information when we’re working with our business and third sector clients in the UK.

There’s also some good news: UK specific statistics have become a little easier to find this year. Props must go to agency We Are Flint for carrying out their own primary research during 2016, complete with actual transparency about how the research was carried out (link below to the entire report) and Statista.com is also offering a decent amount of open source information. We’re grateful to both organisations for those contributions, as well as the other source sites linked within this post.

UK social media in 2017: general thoughts

We talked in our last annual update about the fact that the mainstream social media market is now mature. Nothing has changed there; there haven’t been any significant upsets this year, and it’s been a while since a genuinely “new” entrant offered anything different. The “Big 3″ in the UK (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn) have more or less stayed static in user terms for several years. Apart from a potentially interesting Twitter vs Instagram clash, the only action is around the smaller players and ancilliary apps like Snapchat which we see more as utilities than social networks.

We’re going to kick off this year with two charts that we think contain the most crucial information for social media strategy planning if you’re a UK business: Total UK Users by Site (based on the current “best estimate” as described below, where the site has not provided figures), and the percentage of those users who log in daily.

Remember, a registered user who never goes onto the site isn’t going to be a viable target for your marketing!

UK Facebook Users 2017

So let’s kick off our indepth review with the Big Daddy, Facebook. Once again the overall number hasn’t budged all that much; we’re looking at around 32 million user accounts in the UK. That’s been pretty steady for around three years now. We Are Flint’s report puts the proportion of over 18s in the UK who use Facebook at 78% – so still, after all these years, probably the single most consolidated channel available to marketers for accessing most of the population in one place (after snail mail, which surely only those printing their own money can afford these days!).

We also have, courtesy of Statista.com. a nice breakdown of the demographics within that figure, which does offer some interesting observations. No, Facebook probably isn’t “cool” any more. My ageing Samsung Galaxy, if it was ever cool, certainly isn’t now either, but that doesn’t stop me using it constantly.

Looking at these stats, the same is true of Facebook: the largest demographic is the 20-29 year olds, clearly showing that it’s not just everyone’s Mum using Facebook these days.

With organic post reach now sitting at around a measly 10%, the major area of interest for businesses using Facebook now is the development of new types of advertising, and the fluctuation in cost. This year we’ve seen enhancements or new introductions in ever more sophisticated ad targeting – Lookalike Audiences, Dynamic Ads and a whole suite of options around remarketing to website visitors. For large ecommerce sites this is a godsend. For smaller businesses, anecdotally it seems as though the cost of reaching the standard 1,000 eyeballs, or achieving a good volume of link clicks, is on the increase. This may be partly due to the more targeted types of advertising being more costly, which is not unreasonable if the results match up to their promise.

There are numerous studies showing that social media advertising is by far the cheapest medium.  Ad Espresso tell us that overall CPM on Facebook actually declined during 2016, but there are so many factors influencing what any individual business will spend that it’s almost inevitable that your mileage will vary. As an aside, if you’re interested in what factors affect your ad spend, and how they affect it, Ad Espresso have a superb report here covering every aspect, from ad placement to the demographic being targeted, and the day and even hour that the advert runs in.

UK LinkedIn users 2017

Like all the mature sites, LinkedIn’s growth is also slowing, but there is still some growth. Last year we had a figure of around 19 million UK users; this year the figure is 21 million. You can see LinkedIn’s own global figures here.

When planning your strategy, though, it’s important to remember that the average user uses LinkedIn very different to the way Facebook’s average user uses Facebook. And that’s why you won’t see too much emphasis on metrics such as “monthly active users” or time spent on the site in an average month. Unless they are actively job hunting, or actively using LinkedIn as part of their job role (think Enterprise software sales execs), we believe that most people who are registered with LinkedIn, don’t necessarily touch that account for weeks at a time.

Again we’re going on anecdotal evidence with a pinch of common sense – by its very nature, LinkedIn’s content offering doesn’t begin to compare with how compelling Facebook’s is, where users are on the site multiple times each day exchanging banter with their social networks or just surfing for something to cheer themselves up.

UK Instagram Users 2017

Instagram themselves haven’t released any new data since that which we used in last year’s report, giving us 14 million Monthly Active Users in the UK, from a global MAU figure of 300 million. The global figure was updated in December 2016 to an impressive 600 million, but it would basically be a total guess as to whether the UK’s growth has kept pace with the global growth.

It’s hard to tell at this point whether Instagram is continuing to cannibalise Twitter’s market, particularly among the younger demographic – that seemed to be the case in previous years, but the research that we’re referencing here doesn’t really support it.  Which is good from a marketing point of view, because the lack of native “retweet” function and inability to include links in a post, means that driving anything other than general brand awareness is harder work on Instagram!

The We Are Flint survey suggested that 29% of UK adults use Instagram, which would give us a figure around the 19 million mark.  The same report also gives a proportion of 64% of users as being under 30 – but gives the same figure for Twitter, which has generally been considered to be an older demographic thus far. Even more interestingly, Instagram has something of a peak in the higher income brackets (though not as much as Twitter does); 46% of users reported a household income of over £48k per annum.

From a general strategy point of view, Instagram has joined Facebook and Twitter this year in filtering which of your followed accounts’ posts you actually see. That seems a clear pointer that in the not too distant future, you can expect to be paying Instagram for any kind of guaranteed reach at all, in the same way we now have to pay for reach on Facebook.

UK Pinterest Users 2017

We’ve not had anything directly from Pinterest this year on the subject of UK user numbers, so the stats below come from third party research.

All the indications though are that Pinterest’s early period of stellar growth has definitely stalled.  Although Pinterest did tell us that their global MAU figure was up to 150 million in October of 2016, just 5% of the UK population log in to Pinterest on a daily basis.

Interestingly, at some point the Pinterest user demographic has got a LOT younger. In the US, and in the early days of UK use, older (as well as more affluent) users were in the majority. In 2017 however, research from both Statista and We Are Flint suggests that 50%+ of Pinterest users are in the 18-29 age bracket.

The female gender bias has persisted however, with 38% of women who are online reporting that they use Pinterest, whereas only 20% of men say the same thing.

In terms of how people are actually using the site (which should give you some clues as to whether your business will be commercially successful there), here’s a useful summary from Pinterest’s CEO, Ben Silbermann :

Pinterest is more of a personal tool than a social one. People don’t come to see what their friends are doing. (There are lots of other great places out there for that!) Instead, they come to Pinterest to find ideas to try, figure out which ones they love, and learn a little bit about themselves in the process.

UK Twitter Users 2017

Twitter did provide a very minimal status update around the middle of last year, which gave a global MAU figure of 313 million, and 79% of those accounts being outside the US. That would be sufficient to keep them ahead of Instagram in the global rankings, just.

Other independent research gives us figures of 45% of UK Online Adults using Twitter, with 37% of those account holders logging in daily.  Using the ONS figure of 45.9 million for the UK’s online population, that would give us a user base of around 20 million.  That seems plausible, if maybe a little generous, compared to the last “official” UK figure of 13 million which was provided in 2013.

The same research reports a surprisingly young demographic, too: 64% of users are 18-29, 57% 30-49, and 33% 50-61.  The more affluent citizens are also over-represented on Twitter, with 62% in the 48K+ household income bracket – bearing in mind that the median UK household income this year was just over £26k.

If you’re interested in how people are actually using Twitter, there’s a really good, and up to date, report here from the BBC.  From that we learn that a relatively small number of highly active users dominate in terms of posting content – 1% of accounts are responsible for 20% of all tweets, and 85% of all tweets are accounted for by just 15% of total accounts.

The number of actual tweets sent each day has remained almost constant since 2013, despite increases in monthly active users. So, if you’re planning a campaign on Twitter, be aware that there are a *lot* of users out there who read but never post!

So there we have it: the social media landscape for the UK in 2017. As ever, we hope it’ll help you plan your strategy – and if you need some help figuring out what you should be using and how, get in touch!

Credits

https://weareflint.co.uk/uk-social-media-demographics-2016

www.statista.com

www.social-media-co.uk

** Maybe “hates” is too strong a word, but definitely “finds it yawnsome” / “irritating” / “a chore”…..

There’s a statistic that we’ve long since lost the source for (Socialnomics?! possibly..) saying that for a third of women in the 18-34 age group, the first thing they do in the morning is check Facebook. They wake up, and immediately reach for the smartphone, thinking  “I must catch up with what my friends have been up to in the eight long hours i’ve been asleep”.

Whatever your views about whether this is a good thing, there’s no denying that it’s a good thing for Facebook. At least for a section of the world, Facebook have got the formula so right that it’s the first thing they think about each day.

Now contrast that with LinkedIn. In a highly unrepresentative poll of people who happened to be nearby when this post was being written, here are the top 3 reasons why people most recently visited LinkedIn:

1. Trying to find something almost legitimately work related to do in order to put off doing something even duller

2. To switch off those darn endless email notifications

3. To update their profile because they’re about to finish a contract / get fired.

Not exactly the stuff of dreams, is it? LinkedIn is in danger of becoming synonymous with irritation: irritation at “having” to maintain a presence there (rather than wanting to because it’s valuable), irritation at declining the 20th auto-worded connection invite from a stranger that month, irritation at the lack of decent discussion in Groups and / or flooding with irrelevant blog links from the “look at MEEE!” types. And that’s before we get on to the endless invitations to experience the thrill of LinkedIn Premium for FREE!

We got a bit excited a while back when LinkedIn showed signs of becoming more than a CV-repository on steroids, but we have to say, the social side is still leaving us cold – and that seems to be the case for most people we speak to.  Very few people admit to finding LinkedIn an enjoyable, effortless way to maintain professional relationships and solve real problems. It should be so much better than it is.

So, below are our suggestions for some simple, and not so simple, ways that this could be changed. What do you think? Would they work for you?

One: Fix the utterly dull and useless LinkedIn Home Page feed.

The Home Page feed is, frankly, deeply unengaging. It’s the stuff that the Facebook News Feed team would call “bottom of the barrel updates” – “someone you’ve never heard of joined a group you’re not interested in“.

One simple thing that would make the Feed instantly useful: Active and popular threads in the groups you belong to should be the #1 item prioritised into the Home Page feed, alongside genuine updates from your contacts. Surely this is the most no brainer suggestion in the history of the world? LinkedIn is struggling for social “stickiness”, but still chooses to ignore the obvious area where it could be helpful.

For the life of me, i can’t understand why this isn’t already the case. Even setting the Home feed filter to “Groups” just brings you a bunch of irrelevant rubbish about how people you’ve never heard of have joined one of your groups, or people you have heard of have joined a group you don’t care about. Just bizarre. At least if you could see, at a glance, where the action is (and isn’t) in the groups you’re a member of, that would be useful.

The “Pulse” news section also needs a lot of work – it’s rarely relevant, and very US biased. Some kind of quality control on the sponsored posts would be great, too – i’ve lost count of the number of times i’ve had posts which are not just dull, but also badly written to the point of unintelligibility. With apologies to the firm in question, this is today’s offering – I didn’t have to look hard for it, just logged on and hey presto! a post apparently written by a random word generator.

Two: Encourage people to be themselves…just a little bit more.

Status updates on Facebook are easy. Sometimes too easy, for the natural oversharers amongst us. LinkedIn updates, less so.

Seen a great article on The Economist or Harvard Business Review? Tick, everyone feels confident about sharing that. Update about challenges you’re facing in your professional life? Er, no.  The thing is though, most of the people who care about the HBR article will already have seen it, and hey, HBR is so much better at being HBR than you are. It’s a “safe” update, but the value to your contacts is low.

But imagine if the culture on LinkedIn changed, so that instead of presenting the fake, shiny, go getting versions of our professional selves, people were a little more candid and authentic. Being brave enough to give people an insight into the not-so-perfect stuff you face at work, admit to challenges and look for support, could turn LinkedIn into a fantastic resource. Yes, some do that on Facebook – but while your Auntie Maud might be great at telling you how talented you are, aren’t the people in your professional network better placed to help you actually solve problems?

Three: Kill off the mindless contact collectors

Certain functions in LinkedIn tend to promote quantity over quality when you’re making connections. For example, you’re theoretically more visible in the internal search engine if you have more connections, and have a higher chance of seeing others’ full profiles (though there’s a loophole for that). This is all wrong.

Imagine how low the chances of your Facebook or Twitter feed being fascinating would be if you just friended or followed a couple of hundred random people who you’d never had a discussion with in your life? Personalisation and relevance is the lifeblood of social media, and connecting indiscriminately kills it.

A random set of impersonal contacts also further reduces the chances of you being candid (and therefore interesting) and getting value back from your network. So LinkedIn are entirely shooting themselves in the foot here. They’d be much better encouraging everyone to choose their most influential / supportive / knowledgeable contacts, however that is done – hell, just limit everyone to 50 and be done with it. Or make search visibility dependent on the proportion of your connections you’ve interacted with in the last 6 months. Whatever – but something needs to change.

Four: Dump the endorsements

It’s obvious why LinkedIn introduced these – some nice bait for people to log in, and a catchy “hot or not” style interface that just keeps you clicking away, spraying endorsements over your connections like champagne on a Formula One podium. But really they just add to the superficial, spammy feel of the site – you know you’ve just endorsed someone you barely know for Brain Surgery despite having no idea whether they’re any good or not. So why would you trust the endorsements on anyone else’s profile? If you really rated someone, you’d take the time to write a proper Recommendation, wouldn’t you.

A little disclaimer…

I should point out here that we’re not suggesting LinkedIn has no value; it does, if only as a public (and therefore more credible and verifiable) source for checking out companies and professionals, and (hopefully) maintaining good connections. There are even some genuinely well run and useful Groups out there, although they are few and far between and LinkedIn does them no favours in surfacing their content to users.

But what we are suggesting is that, for the most part, it’s not lovable. It’s missing that seamless ability to draw you in that the other big social media sites have.

What do you feel about LinkedIn? Could you imagine ever loving it? What improvements would help? Personally, I’m off to do some serious pruning on my Connections as a starting point – I might look like Billy No-Mates by comparison with the Contact Collectors, but at least I won’t keep getting LinkedIn Mails about life insurance from strangers.

Of all the social media platforms, it was LinkedIn that dominated the discussions, but in our informal chats afterwards it became clear that many of the attending professionals weren’t sure what exactly LinkedIn is, or is for.

They’re not alone

According to Google’s keyword search tool, there were 1.8 million searches in the UK, last month alone, for “what is linkedin”. So, here’s our absolute basics guide to LinkedIn – we’ll follow it up with a second part in the next few weeks, looking at strategies for the more advanced user.

What is linkedin?

So, to start with that question! LinkedIn is a platform to help you connect with people you know in a professional capacity – old or current work colleagues, suppliers, or networking contacts.

If you’re familiar with using Facebook, the easiest analogy is that it’s a “business” version of Facebook.

Beyond the basic functions of keeping in touch with, seeking help or assisting those in your wider professional network, you are also able to see your contacts’ contacts (LinkedIn calls those your “2nd level network”) or even their contacts (your “3rd level network”). If you’re comfortable doing so, you may ask your immediate contacts to introduce you to particular people who are relevant to your business.

In addition, the site hosts tens of thousands of special interest, sector and geographic forums (“groups”) worldwide, has a Q&A function if you’re looking for answers to a specific question, and even allows you to create highly targeted advertising campaigns.

Should we be there?

In May 2011, LinkedIn recieved just under 3.6 million unique visitors from the UK. So yes – LinkedIn is fast becoming a “hygiene factor” for professionals and businesses; potential contacts or customers are highly likely to look you up on the site.

If your business isn’t there, the details are poor, or the key messages are contradictory to the impression you give offline, that can be detrimental to your business.

Getting started

We advise all our business customers that they should have a complete, professional looking Company page on LinkedIN, supported by good personal profiles for at least their senior managers. LinkedIn is another shop window for your business, and one which goes beyond the standard corporatespeak that many fall into on their websites. That way, even if you don’t (yet) plan to use LinkedIn for specific business objectives, it will be working positively for you.

A quality company profile

The Company page should be properly linked to the employee profiles, and copy provided for the appropriate sections on each of your key products and services – if someone has made it as far as your company page, why waste the opportunity to show them what you can offer?

Fine tuning personal profiles

Employee profiles should include a clear, professional head shot, and be reasonably fully completed – not necessarily including every detail of their past working life, but giving a full picture of their skills and experience.

Most importantly, their background information – skills and past employment history – should ideally be phrased in a way which shows the value they add to your existing customers. A personal profile isn’t just the same as a CV!

For both personal and company pages, there are applications within LinkedIn which allow you to significantly enrich the profile, using everything from slide packs to blog posts.

Join the dots

Next, you should try to connect with as many relevant people as possible. One way to do this is to export your personal email database and load it into LinkedIn, which will then show you who you already know on the site. You’ll start to receive invitations to connect, so you might want to give some thought to your personal policy around this, too.

Once you’ve got a credible presence on LinkedIn, you’ve taken the basic opportunity to give yourself and your business a positive representation on the web, away from your corporate website. The next stage is to start using the site strategically – take a look at How to be a star on LinkedIn.

Need to look great fast?

We offer inhouse, private LinkedIn training courses – a few hours up to a full day, depending on what you need!

Most importantly, compared to the other big social media sites, the opportunities for “natural” exposure to a wider audience were really limited.

Getting seen without shouting

By natural exposure, I mean the ability to come to the attention of your contacts’ wider network without sending the equivalent of a cold calling email. That works for some, but many people are uncomfortable with being on either end of it, and it’s artificial compared to, say, your content being shared on Facebook.

LinkedIn should be a goldmine

That said, LinkedIn is the single biggest gathering of professionals on the planet. Over 187 million members, of which in the UK, almost 60% are management level or above. They just needed to learn some lessons from the other social networks to really liberate the potential of that gathering – and I think that’s what we’re now starting to see.

A LinkedIn revolution

Over the last few months, LinkedIn have introduced a handful of new features which are nothing short of a revolution in how effective the site will be. The opportunities for exposure, and the value provided by LinkedIn, is now really exciting. If you’ve not checked it out lately, here’s a rundown of the features which have made the difference.

1) Re-vamped Company pages

LinkedIn’s Company pages used to be minimal, to say the least. Now, they’ve got a new look, the opportunity to include richer content especially around your products and services, and improved analytics. It’s been possible to send out status updates from a Company for a while, but they’re being used more and more, supporting a Company-specific audience of followers.

For our Wish List, it would be great if there was some way to integrate Company and personal audiences. For example, if everyone in an individual’s network could opt in or out of receiving their employers’ updates as well as their own. That would remove the challenge of building a separate Company audience, and would be great for smaller businesses. But for now, and certainly for larger organisations, the additional functionality is a great start.

New Personal profiles are coming soon, too, with a lot less emphasis on the CV and a lot more emphasis on social connection. You can see a preview, and register for the new format here.

2) Interactive Home pages

Your personal Home page now has a Facebook-style activity ticker, highlighting what other people in your network have been doing on LinkedIn – including when they’ve commented on articles posted by others. You can also add your own comments to those discussions directly from the home page, for the first time  allowing you to converse easily with your network.

Quick tip – We all have people in our networks who overshare, and can’t let a moment go by without posting yet another link, or whose area of expertise you’re just not that interested in. You can tailor what you see on your Homepage simply by hovering over one of the offending articles and clicking “hide”, and Shazam! you’ll not see any other posts by that person.

3) LinkedIn Today

Another huge change is the launch of LinkedIn Today. This is a combination of two areas: a more traditional publishing model with content  from “Thought Leaders” – experts in their field who’ve been selected by LinkedIn’s publishing team – and community generated content. It’s still evolving as more people get active, but has clear potential to become a real go-to source for any given industry. You can fine-tune the topics which are presented to you, as well as keeping up with the business “big guns” like Harvard Business Review and the Economist.

From a marketing and visibility perspective, both of these are big news. A handful of our professional services clients are eminent enough in their field to have applied for Thought Leader status. As well as the enhanced profile, this allows individuals to build up a Twitter-like “Follower” audience, but without connecting at the network level.

For everyone else, the community-driven content is a massive opportunity. It’s selected according to a number of factors, but mainly by the level of activity surrounding posted content. So if you post up a link to free materials, a blog post, a webinar invite or anything else on LinkedIn and it’s widely shared over a short period of time, it’s very likely to be featured on LinkedIn Today. That means huge exposure to everyone interested in your industry sector.

There’s also a section for articles trending in your network, so you can easily see what’s interesting and engaging to your contacts.

And this adds up to…

The way that both the home page activity feed, and the LinkedIn Today sections in particular are working, is much greater than the sum of their parts. It’s starting to liberate the real power of individual’s Networks. It also enables  industry-based conversations of a much higher quality than are found in many LinkedIn Groups – because content is filtered by activity level, all those spammy “look at me!” posts which nobody’s interested in, automatically drop out of sight.

As a result, we’ve seen a huge increase in relevant activity for both our own profile and our clients': a big increase in opportunities to interact, leading to greatly increased profile views and responses to posted contant. These recent changes amount to a massive shift in the utility of LinkedIn for B2B marketing.

So if you’ve not reviewed your LinkedIn presence for a while, or aren’t using the new features to benefit your business, we’d recommend that you spend some quality time with it. We also offer private, tailored LinkedIn training courses – so if you need a hand, give us a call!

It’s been niggling me for a while that I seem to get inconsistent results within LinkedIn when viewing others’ personal profiles. Sometimes, everything seems to be available; but other times I’ll be in the middle of a process and suddenly be denied access.

I’ve only just gotten around to checking this out and now have proof – LinkedIn appears to be opportunistically demanding that you pay for something which is actually freely available, if you know how.

Profile viewing restrictions on LinkedIn

I’m pretty sure that it used to be the case, that not all profiles were available in full to every LinkedIn user. If you wanted to check out someone who was more than one step removed from your network (third level connection or no connection at all) then most of the profile was hidden.

Initially I think this was to encourage people to connect widely – the theory being that the more connections you have, the higher the chance of any particular individual being in your second level network. That certainly seems to have worked, and is one of the main reasons given by the LION (“LinkedIn Open Networker”) brigade for connecting with all comers.

Latterly, the restriction was linked to the Premium account option; if you were paying for a monthly LinkedIn subscription, you got a higher level of access.

…or no profile viewing restrictions

Recently though, I’ve noticed that on some occasions I’m able to view full profiles even for people who aren’t connected to me in any way, and yet sometimes I still get the annoying “upgrade to premium” prompt.

So I decided to test it out with someone who’s (unfortunately for me) definitely not a close contact: David Cameron.

And sure enough, under two different circumstances I get completely different results.

Here’s me being denied access, on the grounds that the PM is only a third level contact and therefore I absolutely must pay LinkedIn money to view his profile:

and here’s me, logged into exactly the same account, being able to view the whole thing:

Note it still confirms that he’s a 3rd level contact, so nothing’s changed there.

What makes the difference?

In this case, the page I was on BEFORE I clicked onto Mr Cameron’s profile. In the first screenshot, I’d done a simple Google search for “David Cameron LinkedIn”. In the second, I’d searched from within LinkedIn itself, using the People Search function.

Strange, and not obvious why this is happening – the conspiracy theorists might like to assume that LinkedIn thinks those coming in from Google are more susceptible to being tapped for an upgrade, but it could be a genuine mistake by LinkedIn or some other technical glitch. However, I can confirm that it works consistently – searching from within LinkedIn allowed me to see full profiles of a number of other people which had been hidden when coming in via Google.

As a quick extra tip, LinkedIn’s internal search seems to be much better at producing a colossal list of like-named people who you *aren’t* interested in, so searching via Google and then using the information you can see on the top part of the profile, really helps. For example, the exact spelling and format of their employer’s name, which you can then enter into the appropriate additional criteria boxes on the left side of the search results page.

Mystery solved – and one more reason to connect indescriminately on LinkedIn shot down, too!

The session was excellent and went into considerable detail about the way global brands like Phillips go about building LinkedIn groups of 50+ thousand members.

Along the way a couple of incredibly powerful features were mentioned which we hadn’t been aware existed, and a quick straw poll of our fellow social media professionals showed most of them hadn’t either!

Search the whole LinkedIn datastream

So, did you know that it’s possible to search the whole of LinkedIn – all the public Group and Update content – for conversations around keywords which are relevant to your business? And not only that, you can also refine the search results by geography, industry, job seniority and more?

This is SO powerful for finding influencers, relevant groups and hot topics for your business…and yet it’s hardly known about by most.

The “Signal” function

Here’s how to do it.

Log in to your LinkedIn account, and under the “News” heading in the main menu bar, you need to choose the option “Signal” from the drop down, so:

That will give you a feed of everything that’s being published, content wise, from people in your personal network – quite useful in itself, as it effectively allows you to apply search filters and keywords to your home feed.

The real power is in the filters on the left hand side, though. There’s a set of filters under the heading “Network”, which by default are set to restrict results to your own updates and those of your immediate contacts.

By unchecking those options, you are able to search through everything happening on LinkedIn.

Now…choose your target

And there’s more!

If you scroll down a little further, in the same left hand section you’ll  find a complete set of filters which allows you to select the contributors of the content by a vast range of attributes.

Some of these are the same selection functions available when setting up a targeted LinkedIn ad, so can be used to pick out very precise combinations of location and industry, but there are more, too.

Which groups are talking about my key topics?

You can filter by how recently the content was published, and even more interesting, LinkedIn suggests a number of groups and “hot topic” hashtags you may want to search within – which basically means, it’s showing you which groups contain conversations about your keywords.

This is great because, although you can search through groups by keyword, in popular areas you may get tens or even hundreds of groups which aren’t very active.

Using the Signal search is a much faster way of locating groups which are active and actually discussing the topic you’re interested in participating in.

Let LinkedIn do the hard work for you

A quick example of how valuable this can be. Let’s imagine we’re developing a campaign on behalf of a cleantech startup. They want to raise their profile with relevant industry leaders, and become known as a knowledgeable resource for their peers. Putting “cleantech” into the search box, and clearing all the other filters, gives the results shown on the right in the “Group” section.

Note, many of these groups wouldn’t have shown up under a basic search for “cleantech” – some smart thinking out of the box would be needed, and a lot of hit and miss searching, to find them.

Having identified those groups, we can take a look at the specific content within each, see who the active influencers are in each, and include that data in our campaign planning.

Building your campaign

Here are a couple of stand-out statistics from the session. LinkedIn reached 150 million members last week, of an estimated 640 million professionals worldwide.

Of the most senior folk, 15% log in to LinkedIn at least daily.  So for B2B companies who want to connect with influencers, positively influence industry perceptions of their products and services, and increase their influence during the research phase of those long and complex sales processes, a well executed LinkedIn campaign offers fantastic possibilities.

If you’d like some help developing yours, give us a call!

How LinkedIn is meant to be

Personally, I’ve been using LinkedIn less and less over the last year or two, but it was working with a client in the education sector last week that really brought the reasons why into focus for me.

For her, LinkedIn is still a great resource. Most of her contacts have kept their networks small and “real” (ie, people they’ve at least corresponded directly with a few times). The groups that we found which are relevant to her product, are genuine discussion forums full of useful information.

That’s how it’s supposed to be. But, my personal experience when I log in to LinkedIn couldn’t be more different. Especially in the marketing / small business sector, so many people seem to be making it their mission to behave like a one person spam campaign. By which I mean, trying to connect with everyone who’ll let them (with no obvious advantage beyond contact collecting), and treating Groups as a contest for who can post the most pointless rubbish.

“…sound and fury, signifying nothing..”

As soon as I log in, my inbox is twitching with invites from people i’ve never heard of, claiming to be a “friend” or “have done business with me”.  When I check out most of my Groups, the discussion threads are full of interaction-killing self promoting posts, containing nothing but a link to someone’s (irrelevant) blog article or company news.  To put it bluntly, if I want to read your latest blog post, I’ll subscribe to your blog. At the very least, add some invitation to discussion or commentary as to why it’s relevant before you spam your links all over the site. Ditto posting links to news articles; there are a few which are so relevant that they need little explanation, but quite often the links being posted are so irrelevant to the group topic, that it’s obvious the poster just wants to get their profile “up there” on the Influencers list.

The majority of the groups I see are so dominated by the members’ marketing agendas that there’s no space for actual discussion. It’s a shame because collaboration and business support are two of the best aspects of social media; on Twitter, for example, we often see people going well above and beyond to help out a stranger. And there are certainly exceptions within LinkedIn; for example, The Inspired Group often has detailed and supportive discussion threads on all kinds of unexpected topics, from a great group of businesses based around Cambridge.

But, it IS an exception, and increasingly the “me me me” approach seems to be spreading. It seems that more and more people have read those articles suggesting that marketing gold will result from them connecting and posting indescriminately (it won’t. Any more than having 100,000 spammy twitter accounts follow yours will benefit your business).Personally, I think that much more rigorous moderation is needed from the majority of Group owners, and ideally some kind of function within LinkedIn that allows you to discover the really valuable groups in any particular sector much more easily – a voting mechanism of some sort perhap.

Otherwise, will the less vocal majority just get turned off by the relentless noise and leave it to the spam merchants?

What do you think? Do you get more or less value from LinkedIn than you used to?

Onwards and upwards

So, you’ve seen how LinkedIn can support and accelerate your professional networking efforts. Your business has a credible and effective company page, and your personal profile is complete and ready to go.

Here are our top tips for using LinkedIn effectively and strategically.

1. Rock your recommendations

The Recommendations feature is a great way of substantiating your own statements about your abilities, but only if you use it well. Be scrupulous in only requesting recommendations from people who can truly comment on your work, as it puts people in an awkward position if you ask for a recommendation and they barely know you, or have worked with you very briefly.
On the flip side, be discriminating about who you recommend, and particularly try to avoid an “I’ll do yours if you do mine” approach – readers can easily see whether all of your recommendations are reciprocal, and this may undermine the credibility of both the recommendation and your personal integrity.

2. Connect consistently.

Do you want your network to consist of colleagues and regular contacts, or are you happy to connect with people you’ve met briefly at a networking event – or perhaps someone you have never spoken to, but share a common interest group with?  There’s no right or wrong answer to this; in some industries, a small, “close contacts only” network might work best, but remember that the larger your connection list, the more likely it is that someone you want to approach on a professional level will be within your wider network.
You may see people using the acronym “LION” in their profile heading – this stands for “LinkedIn Open Networker” and indicates that they are happy to connect with all comers.
You might want to include a short statement about your connection policy within your own profile, especially if you’re restricting to a small group for some reason.

3. Perfect your profile.

On the top menu, click “More..” and then “Get more applications”. This will show you a number of apps which can be added to your profile, ranging from being able to upload presentation to connecting up your blog so that new posts show on your profile. Certain professions, such as the Legal sector, have a number of sector-specific applications. Have a look around and add anything that will give additional depth to your profile and help to show off your strengths.

4. Be clever with your Groups.

Join a manageable number of relevant groups, but think out of the box a little – rather than hanging out where all of your sector colleagues are, give some thought to the kinds of groups your prospective customers might join, and get involved in those too.

5. Be a brilliant contributor.

Respond to discussion threads in your groups – but make sure you stick to your areas of knowledge and experience if you’re going to give advice or make bold statements, because you can be sure someone out there will call you on it if you don’t!
Avoid posting “naked” links – those with no commentary about what the link is to and why it might interest your fellow Group members – especially if those links are at all self promotional, ie to your company website / press releases. That section of the group is called “discussions” for a reason! Posting a lot of links to what is basically advertorial just looks low rent, and doesn’t do anything to enrich the value that your fellow members get from the group.

If you’ve got a point to make about something you know well though, absolutely do start a discussion thread. If you hit on something interesting and / or controversial, these threads can take on a real life of their own! Here’s a thread we started about the commercial value of Twitter followers which drew over  141 comments, and drove a significant amount of traffic to our website over almost a month. “Follow my Facebook page / Twitter account” threads – are we all kidding ourselves?

So, those are our tips for starting to become a LinkedIn superstar. What have we missed, that’s worked really well for you?