No Seriously. What the Hell Do I Do with LinkedIn?
LinkedIn is an anomaly in the social media world – it’s decidedly a social network, but I would argue that it’s either the Least Social Network or the Most Social Network, depending on how you view it. It’s the least social because, let’s face it, it appears to lack the real-time sharing nature of Facebook and Twitter…which could be a good thing, if you don’t want to know what your boss had for lunch. On the other hand, LinkedIn enforces authenticity and places a premium on authentic interactions, albeit from a business perspective, something that is increasingly difficult (for a variety of reasons) on Facebook and Twitter.
Sure, you could undertake an archvillain-esque campaign of lying and misinformation to convince your contacts that you’re literally Bruce Wayne, but that defeats the entire purpose of the site. And that purpose would be, at it’s most simple: business networking. Yet despite this easy-to-grasp premise, LinkedIn success, or the perception thereof, remains elusive for most businesses.
So what, pray tell, constitutes success on LinkedIn? And how does one achieve it?
For the former…that’s an individual (or corporate) decision, just like with every other social networking platform. There are no hard and fast metrics for any social media, and that includes LinkedIn. But given the site’s professional make-up, business leads are a reasonable metric to use, assuming that they are tracked appropriately with LinkedIn specific whitepapers, webinars, etc.
How to achieve this success follows a bit more of a pattern. The first step is engagement, but internally rather than externally, in that you need to get as many of your employees onto LinkedIn as possible. Encourage them to connect with old colleagues or friends – start a wide-ranging network. Next, create a company page (LinkedIn provides step-by-step instructions) which functions much like a Facebook page, only with a guaranteed audience and the added benefit of all of your employees’ backing it.
Finally, add content – everything from whitepapers to authored articles to press releases to brochures is fair game. Get it up on LinkedIn (better yet, tailor it to LinkedIn) and use the handy analytics component to track what’s going on.
Honestly, that’s the basic premise – efforts can be refined across verticals (you can make different versions of your page, for example), but the principles remain the same.
So what the hell do you do with LinkedIn? Now you know.
--John Terrill