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Earlier this month we introduced our October Book Club title, Maximizing LinkedIn for Sales and Social Media Marketing by Neal Schaffer. Thanks to Neal, we were able to send copies to several of our chapter leaders and Professional members to review on our behalf.

Our reviewers Erno Hannink, Mark Krupinski and others, shared some great tips on how you can better leverage LinkedIn for business. Neal joined us for a members-only webinar last week to share a deeper dive on his book and answer participant questions. 

If you missed the webinar, please see a few of Neal’s slides below. We did record the webinar but due to technical issues, the audio was unusable.  Better than the webinar audio, Neal sent us answers to many participant questions we couldn’t answer during the webinar. Congrats to webinar participant Ken Murphy, who won a free copy of Maximizing Linked for Sales and Social Media Marketing.

I don’t know where Sean got those statistics, but it’s entirely possible. That is, if LinkedIn currently has an approximate user base of, say, 130 million members, that only 104,000 users visits LinkedIn each day.  On the other hand, there are other statistics that would appear to prove that LinkedIn gets a lot more traffic.  We can look at other statistics, such as the latest figures from Compete.com that show that in September of 2011, when LinkedIn probably had around 110 million members, there were 24 million unique United States visitors to LinkedIn.  Since US membership in LinkedIn is approximately 1/2 of its user base, those numbers suggest that there was almost one unique visit to LinkedIn per two LinkedIn users.  That’s a much greater number than .08%!

Assuming that the real number is in between those two, yes, there is a benefit to being on LinkedIn.  As far as how often you are active on LinkedIn, that really comes down to your objective as to what you are on LinkedIn for and how strategic LinkedIn is as part of your comprehensive social media strategy. My feel about LinkedIn in 2011 is that it is more under-utilized than over-utilized, so I think more people should be giving LinkedIn a chance to prove its value before discounting it.

I personally only spend a few minutes a day to moderate my LinkedIn Group.  I have yet to hire a Community Manager for my brand, and I would like to move in that direction as I would like to spend more time being an active moderator and creating a stronger and more valuable community to all members.  For businesses, how long you spend moderating your LinkedIn Group should be similar to how active you are monitoring your Facebook Page and/or Twitter account.  Compared to those two platforms, most businesses will find, at least at the beginning, that there is less traffic on LinkedIn Groups compared to the other two platforms, and LinkedIn does have robust tools to make it easier to manage your Group in an efficient manner.

Facebook has been on the attack of late, mimicking LinkedIn’s professional profile in their revised user interface, helping to launch BeKnown, and now the Social Jobs page. But the numbers pale in comparison to the 100+ million members that LinkedIn has: BeKnown has 330 thousand users and the Social Jobs page has less than 15,000 likes. The problem is that many professionals still use Facebook for their private life and/or still have fears about privacy issues vis a vis Facebook. In addition, from a professional networking perspective, Facebook can’t compete with LinkedIn degrees of connection as well as the robust database and advanced search filters that are part of its core.  LinkedIn is also loved by recruiters because they can find their candidate quickly.

One of the case studies I wrote in Maximizing LinkedIn for Sales and Social Media Marketing is about the use of LinkedIn Ads.  As I mentioned on the webinar, the compelling point about LinkedIn Ads, similar to Facebook Ads, is the ability to micro-target an audience.  In the case of LinkedIn, for example, you can target people who work at certain companies, have certain titles, or are members of certain groups.

LinkedIn Ads are about quality, and not quantity, and because you are able to market to a wealthy demographic, the pricing will be more expensive.  In this respect, just like any other ad campaign, you will want to make sure you do A/B testing across every aspect of your ad, including image used, ad copy, as well as the micro-targeting options to see what performs the best.

The next thing to remember is that, unlike Google Ads that appear with search results, LinkedIn users might not be searching for anything, or expect the results to appear within the LinkedIn user interface, not outside of it in the ads.  This can explain why click rates are probably going to be lower on LinkedIn than on Google.  I wouldn’t be surprised it LinkedIn click rates are even lower than Facebook, because at least on Facebook you often have faces of friends that beckon you to “Like” their page.

The best advice I can give about LinkedIn Ads, other than doing comprehensive A/B testing
and keeping the above in mind, is to remember that those that are most active on LinkedIn will probably be the ones that are most comfortable clicking on ads.  For that reason, I would concentrate on displaying ads to Groups members.  A case study that will be in the next edition of my book is how the proofreader of my book, a content marketer, yielded new business with very little spend through experimenting in this way.