Facebook is closing in on a user base of one billion members, Google+ is making history as the fastest growing social network of all time and Twitter continues to mold itself into the fabric of today’s social society. In the meantime, LinkedIn is quietly becoming a force of its own, surpassing MySpace in unique visitors and expanding in even more markets.
The company, now publicly owned, shared a report of its second quarter earnings, which showed that it experienced a 120% jump in revenue over the same period last year. What’s even more interesting about the earnings report is the contribution of the company’s ad platform. LinkedIn reported that its advertising sales were up 111% in the second quarter of 2011 over the earnings from 2010.
LinkedIn’s stock in the social space is rising, and the huge increase in ad sales shows it. While several email marketers are targeting Facebook and Twitter with their social strategy, LinkedIn has just as much potential.
Plug Your Email Campaigns
Just like every other social networking site, LinkedIn gives you a platform that allows for easy and convenient communications with your audience. The platform facilitates communication in a number of ways, but the simplest is through the status update. An occasional update hyping your upcoming newsletter, complete with a link to your opt-in form and a compelling reason to join could be extremely effective at getting LinkedIn connections to sign up. Of course you don’t want to get too shameless with the plugging, but if the focus of your email marketing is value already, doing this occasionally will definitely help.
Pamper Your New Connections
When your LinkedIn contacts sign up, you have the ability to romance them in an even more intimate setting – the inbox. Once you do get those connections into the email relationship, it would be ideal to approach them as a new segment that you can give special treatment to. Maybe it’s a discount off their first purchase, maybe it’s a free report only available to your LinkedIn subscribers. Whatever you decide to offer to keep your new prospects around, make sure it is something they will appreciate.
Stay Active
Abandoning your social marketing efforts is so easy it’s almost scary. This is especially the case with LinkedIn, which, let’s face it, doesn’t have the commercial appeal of Facebook or Twitter. However, sticking with it and staying active is critical to using this tool effectively. In order to make the most of LinkedIn, you need to keep your profile up to date, engage your connections and establish yourself as an expert in whatever areas you’re an expert in. On the email marketing side, you want to make sure you are incorporating your LinkedIn presence at every opportune moment.
