Getting the most out of LinkedIn

LinkedIn is an unde­ni­able force when it comes to B2B social net­works. Henry Clifford-Jones showed us some fas­ci­nat­ing sta­tis­tics – over 80 mil­lion pro­fes­sion­als view­ing 1.5billion pages per month across 600,000 pro­fes­sional groups.

When you want to build a group on LinkedIn, it’s only going to be a suc­cess if you build it around a com­mon inter­est and pur­pose. An empty LinkedIn group can be a very lonely place…

So, the more focused and well-defined the group is, the higher the level of par­tic­i­pa­tion and engage­ment. Also, don’t get too dis­ap­pointed if most peo­ple aren’t con­tribut­ing. LinkedIn reckon that for every per­son that con­tributes on the site, nine will com­ment and inter­act, whilst 90 will just sit back and con­sume the content.

The new inPages Platform

 

We were also lucky to take a sneak peak at the brand new inPages Plat­form. Our Hud­dle saw it just ahead of its global launch in New York. So, a bit of a scoop for our company.

So, what does inPages enable mar­keters to do?

Well, it does seem that LinkedIn has picked up on a well known fact – rec­om­men­da­tions from per­sonal acquain­tances are the most trusted form of com­mu­ni­ca­tion – and intro­duced a new tab on the com­pany pro­file page called Prod­ucts & Ser­vices. This areas of the site enables com­pa­nies to fea­ture infor­ma­tion about their prod­ucts, with onward links to their cor­po­rate sites.

LinkedIn Com­pany Prod­ucts and Ser­vices Page

But the clever bit here is that the new plat­form enables mem­bers to fea­ture in their pro­files the prod­ucts and ser­vices they use and to rec­om­mend them. This gives rec­om­men­da­tions a new level of cred­i­bil­ity – because they’re directly linked to a person’s pro­file. Thereby over­com­ing the con­cerns that many com­pa­nies actively “mas­sage” prod­uct rat­ings and rec­om­men­da­tions on other third party sites. I sus­pect that many tech mar­keters are already in a mad rush to get their prod­ucts and ser­vices listed.

How­ever, on reflec­tion, this new plat­form does raise a num­ber of inter­est­ing questions:

• Will com­pa­nies need to update their social guide­lines to encom­pass their employ­ees rec­om­mend­ing their own prod­ucts or those from other companies?
• If your pro­file fea­tures a large num­ber of prod­ucts and ser­vices, does this just open you up as a tar­get for sales guys? You’re clearly a per­son who influ­ences the pur­chase and based on the num­ber of prod­ucts, you’ve clearly got the budget…
• Look­ing at the demo of the plat­form, there doesn’t seem to be the func­tion­al­ity to pro­vide neg­a­tive feed­back. Surely these are often more impor­tant than pos­i­tive recommendations?

I’d be inter­ested to hear your thoughts on this topic.