#LeWeb 2011 LinkedIn Workshop

Building your company’s brand and presence online. A good way to do that as a company, is LinkedIn company pages. This service started a year ago. “Professional context really matters,†claimed Jennifer Weedn, business developer at LinkedIn US during a workshop about LinkedIn at #leweb 2011 (disclaimer: LinkedIn is a sponsor of the event). Driving conversations, driving engagement for you as a brand, it’s important and not only possible via Facebook and Twitter. There are now 2.000.000 companies that have started a company page (this is IBM’s for example). And, there are 130 million company follows on LinkedIn: that is substantial already after just one year. A company like IBM has 471.942 followers, Microsoft has 343.58 followers.

Following a company
Following on Linekdin is pretty different then on social networks like Twitter and Facebook. When you follow a company you get insights from the company in your inbox. Furthermore, LinkedIn is giving you as a company the possibility to target newsstories. “It’s news that’s relevant, based on your social graph,†according to Weedn.

Status updates
If you have a big amount of followers as a company: what is the next step to take? How do you engage in a conversation with your users? In Oktober 2011, LinkedIn has implemented the possibility for companies to give status updates. The updates you give as as company, end in the network update stream of your followers. Followers can either like or share a company update. “The social updates can that way go viral and reach a much larger audience,†Weedn claimed.

Who are your followers?
You really want the right followers as a company. A lot of marketers would trade hundreds of thousands general followers, to thousands specific, interested followers, Weedn claimed. To see who your followers are, you need analytics. LinkedIn delivers cloudtags for that, as just one example of a dashboard. The dashboard can also measure the follower network impact and the average connections per follower.

Cases: Dell and HBS
“The signal to noise ratio is something we want to keep really high,†Weedn claimed. “We’re starting to see an incredible high engagement for companies.†Computer giant Dell started posting company updates, and for the average IT-director it’s rather interesting content. It’s a new marketing channel, according to LinkedIn… Publishers are telling LinkedIn they get huge jumps in the referral traffic to their platforms.

Targeting, conversations and Virality.
When potential users come to your sites, you want to target them when you have differing products. Linkedin has a lot of data about their users: targeting at number of working years and working experience is easy. At LinkedIn, you can analyze sentiment about your brand, you can add Hootsuite to. You might know the LinkedIn share buttons and the LinkedIn boxes that are available.

Innovation
Weedn showed an example of the new Audi A6, a campaign that is running on the LinkedIn platform now. “It’s just one example of a brand that is using our company API. It’s the kind of innovation we are hoping for at our platform. We see ourselves as the technologist that is delivering the platform. We are excited to see what kind of things people will be making on our platform.â€