With the ever increasing social media sites available, it’s easy to conclude you haven’t got time for them all, or they’re losing their effectiveness.  So how do you decide where to focus your time?  It’s also a challenge to keep up with changes made to the sites.  Here at Appletree we believe LinkedIn is one resource that is still effective for businesses (particularly those in the B2B sector).  Here?s a summary of how we use it and how we are seeing great results from it.

One of the most important changes recently to LinkedIn has been to the company page.  Here are some key things you can implement on yours.

• Company image – you can now add an image to represent your company which appears at the top of the page. This doesn’t have to be your company logo as this is featured as well, but should be within your company branding.
• Posting information is encouraged and the Updates box now contains some suggestions about the information you can share.  This is a great way to attract followers to your page, and another great SEO tool.
• You can share updates made on your company page, via your own LinkedIn page.  This points traffic to your company overview, and is a much better way of giving visibility to your company, not just you as an individual.
• Analytics are available.  24 hours after you’ve posted an update, you will be able to see the stats for updates.  This will give you insights into the number of people who have seen the post and any action they have taken as a result.  As we always say, you must measure your marketing activity, and this makes it really easy.

Overall, LinkedIn is becoming a far more effective tool to promote your business as a whole; you just need to make sure you follow the basic content rules – post relevant, interesting information, regularly.

That’s your company page sorted.  Here’s how at Appletree we are using LinkedIn as part of our social media strategy.  We’re seeing some fantastic results – from October to December this year we’ve seen (via Google Analytics) a 275% increase in website referrals via LinkedIn!  We’ve also secured 2 prospect meetings via contact made on LinkedIn in the past week alone.

All Appletree’s activity on LinkedIn follows our marketing mantra: keep it planned and integrated, and deliver it regularly.  We plan our weekly marketing activity 3 months in advance, using a schedule of various activities – blogs, Tweets, newsletters, videos.  We plan topics for all activities, based on our expertise, what?s topical and what are customers are talking about.

Here’s some of the activity we post every week on LinkedIn:

• Monthly newsletters (with shortened link to the newsletter on our website).
• Videos – client testimonials or films from our marketing workshops.
• Weekly blogs – we blog 3 times a week and post an update with a link to the blog on our Company Page, then share it via each of our own pages.
• Re-post interesting marketing articles and blogs.

We also contribute to group discussions on LinkedIn, but only if there are marketing-related, where we can give value from our expertise and experience.

We deliver activity via LinkedIn each working day, every week (as we do with Twitter).  We’re seeing payback from this now, and will continue to use it.  We’ll always have an eye on what else we could use; Pinterest is becoming more interesting to us as it’s now expanded its reach to marketers and B2B audiences.  We’ll write a blog about those changes soon too (then share that blog via LinkedIn!)

Are you finding success from LinkedIn?  Or is it just another social media platform you think is a waste of time and energy?  Let us know.