LinkedIn Marketing with Stacy of Pencil Point Marketing
LinkedIn has been one of the most interesting places for business to business growth.
Unlike Facebook, the tone, times to post and even the content you should post are different. In this episode, I had the opportunity to speak with the amazing Stacey McPhillips of Pencil Point Marketing. Stacey is a marketing generalist who focuses on strategy and planning to help businesses grow using marketing tactics – one of them being LinkedIn.
Let’s dive into a deeper understanding on LinkedIn with Stacey.
WHO SHOULD USE LINKEDIN
“At its core, LinkedIn is a professional networking site primarily used to match content with professionals,” says McPhillips. “If you are focused on B2B, you should definitely be on this platform to have easy access to reach out to other businesses. Also, if you are a professional looking for a new career, professional development, or connection with other people than LinkedIn is a good place to start.”
LINKEDIN’S AUDIENCE
The stats are in! Out of adults in the United States, 27% have used LinkedIn at some point in time and 61% of those users are between the ages of 25 and 34 with a 57% male to 43% female ratio. So what does that mean for our b2b, b2c and individual users? According to McPhillips, the age range of users for this platform are the ones who are growing their careers or trying to figure out what their next move is going to be. LinkedIn is a great place for this age group because most of the brackets being hit are reaching people who are making or striving to make $75k/year and have a college degree or further education.
Here's another super interesting thing about the user of this platform. The average LinkedIn user spends 17 minutes a month on LinkedIn. When you compare this to FaceBook, the average user spends 1,400 minutes a month or Twitter at 170 minutes a month, it shows the audience for LinkedIn isn’t as engaged as other social media platforms.
With these numbers, one might question whether or not LinkedIn missing something the other platforms aren’t despite having different target audiences and reasons for existence.
For instance, posts on FaceBook work differently than they do on LinkedIn. For instance, if a post on your LinkedIn page gets more engagement and traffic than one of their editors will slowly start to introduce the post to a larger audience to continue to grow the posts, its likes and its comments.
BUILD ADVOCACY
Outside of commenting, posting and liking content, there is a lot more you should be doing with this platform, according to McPhillips. “You want to maintain that relationship with your connections, and you want to build relationships with your connections because those are the ones who are going to help you grow your business by giving you referrals, interacting with your content, and so much more,” she says. Her recommendations for building some of these connections are similar to building friendships; let your personality show. You can do this in a number of facets. For instance, through your tone in messages and when sharing content, nice visuals like a company logo, or a header image that speaks to your company or personality.
THE DO NOT’S OF LINKEDIN
LinkedIn is just like sales 101 – you don’t jump straight into bed without having some background or at least an introduction to start building on the connection. Also, don’t use LinkedIn for opinion-based content like you would on Facebook. Why? Because at the end of the day you are either representing a business or more importantly yourself so you don’t want to cause any controversy there especially if you are trying to build your business or find a new job. Also, don’t send the same message over and over like it is a sales pitch; be personable and you will immediately see better results.
BLOGGING ON LINKEDIN
The cool thing about blogging is it is not a one and done. You can write it and share it across multiple platforms as long as google doesn’t detect that it is duplicate content. For instance, you can write an article on LinkedIn or you can post it on your website and then share that post to your LinkedIn page for cross promotion, or you can try both as an experiment to see which style of posting from you is gaining more traction with your audience to help inform how you post blogs in the future on LinkedIn. Just be sure regardless of which route you take in posting your blog that there is a clear call to action.
“Regardless of whether it is a blog or a post be sure to ask yourself if the content you are posting is relevant to your audience on this particular platform,” suggests McPhillips. One of her recommendations is to format the content to match the platform you are posting on. For sentence, Instagram is a square graphic, and it has probably 15 to 30 hashtags with a certain word allotment. That is not the case with LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a nice size graphic at 1200 by 628 with no more than three to five hashtags with no real allotment on the number of words used.
WHO IS DOING IT RIGHT?
Unsure as to whether or not your page is doing what it should? Check out some of the recommendations on LinkedIn page that McPhillips told us you should start stalking.
Adam Carp IAQ; McPhillips messaged him and told him she liked what he was doing and he asked what he was doing because he truly didn’t know despite having 160,000+ followers almost like a normal social media outlet. He uses memes gifs and other funny tactics linking them back to the hiring process either from a recruiting standpoint, a corporate hiring standpoint, or candidates looking for jobs. All of it tying directly back to his skillset to what he does in the accounting industry.
I hope you enjoyed this episode with Stacey McPhillips and learned more about LinkedIn. I know I did!
Want to learn more or connect with Stacey? You can find her at her LinkedIn page or at Pencil Point Marketing.
Comment below with your biggest takeaway from today’s episode or visit our website to sign up for a free chat!
