Why LinkedIn?

Transcript of Episode

Hello, and welcome to the Lillian link podcast. I'm Lillian Cotter. Today we're talking about "Why LinkedIn?" It's one of the most common questions I get asked: What is the point of being on LinkedIn? Why should I be spending more time on LinkedIn? Why are we doing this? It is a question that I often think about because I think there's an inherent obviousness to many people in the business world who are in marketing communications, particularly in B2B, as to why you should be on LinkedIn. But it's not something we often have a definite answer for, so I thought I would go through some reasons why LinkedIn is the priority for me and my business. When it comes to B2B social media marketing and social media marketing, any business today needs to also be on LinkedIn, so start with some basic facts about LinkedIn. LinkedIn has 875 million users. This would be as of the beginning of 2023. We can look at a lot of other social media platforms and see that they may have more users, but this is by far the number one business social media network if you think about a platform like Facebook, Instagram, Tik Tok, Twitter, all of those social media platforms do something different LinkedIn has a different tone it has a different intention, and it has different voice and Persona. When you're on LinkedIn, you're not posting the same things on other channels. From a hiring perspective, it is one of the main tools that is used for hiring. It's one of the main tools used for job searches today. Every every minute, eight people are hired on LinkedIn. So that is one of the main reasons companies are on LinkedIn from an HR perspective. It's one of the most common things that people think about when they think about LinkedIn is job search. There are currently 58 million companies on LinkedIn. From a marketing communication standpoint, particularly from my almost ten years of experience doing social media marketing, I think LinkedIn has this very specific sort of space for content marketing. For example, the number of users that I was talking about in the last two years that I've been specifically focusing my efforts on LinkedIn started at 740 million users and now it's up to 875, making that an 18 growth in just the last two years LinkedIn. For content specifically, you think about all those users you think about the fact that people are going on there more and more to get their business news. It is a significantly more trusted platform than Facebook and Instagram. LinkedIn is one of the most trusted platforms when it comes to particularly social media, and one the things, that we see with that is there are about 9 billion impressions a month on LinkedIn. Relatively high for a social media platform percentage of active users, meaning they're logging in once a month. However when you look at how how many of those users are creating content (and content in this case does not necessarily mean writing a full article writing a Blog authoring thought leadership but instead just think about posting something just a picture with a couple of sentences) on other platforms like Twitter and Facebook and Instagram it's around 60% of users that are posting content. So you think about that that's pictures of your dogs pictures of your kids on their first day of school, whatever it is that you are sharing on social media. That is, you contributing to the content that exists on that platform, so when other people go scroll through, that's the reason you go to Facebook. That's the reason you go to Instagram is for the content that's on that platform. On LinkedIn, only around 1% of users are posting content. What that means is there's an active user base that is looking for information on LinkedIn. They're trying to understand more about LinkedIn. However, there are not as many people creating that content. And what that is doing is it's creating an opportunity. LinkedIn is a platform that is growing really quickly. People are choosing to spend more and more of their time on that platform. However, it is not keeping pace that growth is not keeping pace, with the demand for content with the actual content that is being produced. So, by creating content for LinkedIn, you are going to be able to take advantage of an existing opportunity. How exactly should you take advantage of that opportunity what are the ways to create content? How do you make sure you're not those examples of people that you see who you feel are maybe not doing it right? Why should you be the why you should be doing it should be clear here now. But all of those hows, all of those whats, will be things that we will cover in future episodes. We're gonna keep these episodes really bite-sized so that we can focus on just a couple of things. Maybe over your coffee or however you choose to listen, but that is really the why of LinkedIn that's the first sort of step in understanding taking advantage of your LinkedIn platform is to understand why it is that it's so important so that we will be covering all of those other questions in future episodes thank you so much for listening to you can find me all across the web, particularly on LinkedIn you can follow me at Lillian Cotter, or you can find Lillian link and all of that great stuff got lots of blogs and articles asking some answering some of those other questions if those are things that you're looking for more urgently, but for now I will wish you a very great day a very great week, and we will talk to you again next week.