The Opportunities for Australian B2B organisations

Editor's Notes

• #3: One of the key ways we’re going to work on your LinkedIn strategy tonight is to focus on who you wish to influence when you are on LinkedIn. I encourage you to write your LinkedIn Profile for people who don’t know you and to engage in activities on LinkedIn (via the content you post, like, share and comment on) to be written for 2 clear groups. Ideal clients Referrers
• #5: Linkedin is the world’s largest professional network. It launched in 2003 and has over 300 million members (LinkedIn Profiles) globally, over 4M company pages, over 1M professionals publishing on LinkedIn Pulse and over 2M Groups. In Australia, LinkedIn has more than 6 M members, with an estimated four out of five Australian professionals using the social media platform. It is the number one platform for business conversations and one of the first places people will evaluate you when deciding if they want to do business with you or not.
• #6: LinkedIn is for business, not a chat and a place where Big questions are answered Inspiration of all kinds travels fast and far You can start a conversation Introverts can network very effectively behind the scenes via messages Extroverts can actively network in groups B2B conversion is at it’s highest relative to all other platforms   BIG PAUSE   Please ask yourself this question . . .   How much time does my business dedicate to LinkedIn and am I really sure about what to do when I am there?   12 months ago I talked about why being on LinkedIn via a LinkedIn Profile is so important to being found and evaluated by potential clients. This is still true.   What has changed and evolved since then is the even greater content marketing capabilities via the LinkedIn publishing platform, LinkedIn Pulse, and the ability to be notified of company page activities and get greater insight into company page followers via analytics.   There are now even greater opportunities for businesses to leverage LinkedIn for their content marketing goals as a tool to attract, acquire and engage clients. Tonight we are going to take a deep dive into 3 key areas of LinkedIn where I recommend you focus on your energies: Company Page Publishing on Pulse Groups
• #7: What is a LinkedIn Company Page? A Company Page helps LinkedIn members learn about your business, brand, and job opportunities. Company pages are also a great way to establish industry expertise. Organisations like Hootsuite, have grown their LinkedIn Company Page by 489% between Jan. 2014 – Jan. 2015. The growth from 17,785 – 104,733 followers was largely in part due to the valuable and timely content they publish on their company page, as well as our CEO’s thought leadership articles.   What is the benefit of a LinkedIn Company Page? LinkedIn Company Pages have traditionally been used by some larger organisations as the HR landing page, and is becoming the perfect place to drive business results, raise brand awareness, promote career opportunities and educate potential customers on your products and services. If you view your website as your King, then LinkedIn is your Queen – she is just as powerful but in different ways. Think of your company page as a regular way to add value to your business community. It gives a business a great opportunity to share important, interesting, and useful updates. It is s a supplement to your website, it helps you drive traffic to your site and provides you with an outlet to promote your products and services, and content. Your LinkedIn Company Page enhances the credibility of your company to your audience. By improving your presence on LinkedIn Company Pages with rich content and compelling status updates you can also establish your brand as a leader in your industry.   If you have a company name and company email address you can create a LinkedIn Company Page within minutes. The best part is that it’s free and relatively easy.   (Quick research)   Who currently has a LinkedIn Company Page? Who currently posts from their company page? Weekly or less? Every day?
• #8: These companies are ranked as the Top 10 most influential brands among LinkedIn members in Australia (in June 2015). They were assessed using LinkedIn’s content marketing score, a score measuring a brand’s unique engagement and dividing it by its audience. If you want to learn from the leaders in Australia, follow the following companies on LinkedIn to see how to leverage LinkedIn Company Pages. Australian Institute of Business, Telstra, Commonwealth Bank, ANZ, National Australia Bank, Deloitte Australia, CPA Australia, Qantas, Optus, and Westpac QUESTION Who currently follows these companies on LinkedIn? I recommend you do.
• #9: Social media management can become consuming. LinkedIn can be the same. Once you’ve worked through the tools I’m showing you tonight, you may also like to consider how to better manage LinkedIn and social media platforms better for your social strategy to attract, acquire and engage your business community. I recommend you leverage social media scheduling tools such as hootsuite, buffer or social oomph or employ a 3rd party (like me) to manage this for you.   My Approach - What to talk about? Top three content topics that resonate with audiences Current affairs and financial news, Professional development, leadership and productivity, and Company and industry trends.   LinkedIn’s director, marketing solutions Matt Tindale says that analysing the industry in question and creating an engaging content calendar is key to creating material that will be effective in catching the attention of audiences.   “Today’s professionals are consuming diverse forms of content. The brands achieving cut-through are developing high-quality content that is personalised to their audience’s interest areas and are humanising it by getting their employees to amplify it through their networks,” Tindale says.   “Brands that get content, context and relevance right at scale are winning.”
• #10: In terms of a company page, this is how I recommend you approach it. Write a compelling summary. The home page on a LinkedIn Company Page includes a cover photo, company updates and showcase pages (which I recommend if you have different departments or focus areas with different clients within your business). A brief description of the company is included near the bottom of the page.   Represent your brand and organization well on LinkedIn The cover photo appears at the top of the home page of your LinkedIn Company Page. Choose a cover photo that is consistent with your website images and the background images on your employees professional profile son LinkedIn.   Ask your employees to connect with your page. Ask your employees who have LinkedIn Profiles to identify within those profiles that they work for your company. Once they take this step, they’ll appear as employees on your Company Page where visitors can learn more about them and connect with them.   Your employees are the best place to start adding followers – after all, they’re your biggest advocates. Encourage employees to add your company to their personal profiles. By doing so, they automatically become followers and can like, comment on, and share your company updates to help expand your viral reach.   Attract followers Followers are your brand advocates. They are key to driving word of mouth, recommendations, and referrals. Develop a robust follower community – the more followers you have, the easier it becomes to get viral reach and engagement. Add easy links Promote your Company Page by linking it to your other marketing channels – such as your emails, newsletters, and blogs. Add a “Follow” button to your website to make it simple and visible for visitors to click and follow your Company Page.   Develop a publishing plan for your company updates to add value to your community. Start creating useful, meaningful, interesting, or entertaining content that your target audience wants to read and see. A Page without content is one that no one will follow. QUESTION Why would you do this? Your company page can play the role of a company newsletter and is like a FB business page, with a B2B focus.
• #11: LinkedIn expanded the publishing platform in June 2014 by allowing members, in addition to Influencers, to publish long-form posts about their expertise and interests.   While publishing a long-form post on LinkedIn doesn't mean you're a LinkedIn Influencer, publishing allows you to further establish your professional identity by expressing your opinions and sharing your experiences.   {Show of hands}   Who posts? How often?   When you publish a long-form post on LinkedIn: Your original content becomes part of your professional profile. It is displayed on the Posts section of your LinkedIn profile. It's shared with your connections and followers. Members not in your network can now follow you from your long-form post to receive updates when you publish next. Your long-form post is searchable both on and off of LinkedIn.   Access to publishing is not determined or affected by your LinkedIn account type - both free accounts and premium accounts have publishing access. If you would like guidelines on how to write a post, please take a look at the format I use. Tell a story, have a call to action and remember to include a bio about yourself.  
• #12: 1) Explore the platform first. Before you dive into a post, it's important to note that LinkedIn's publishing platform is a little different than your company blog. The audience, the tone, and the overall "lay of the land" are unique to those of LinkedIn.   To get a feel for how people are already using the publishing platform, start by reading through a handful of successful posts.   Here's how to locate the best LinkedIn posts on a day-to-day basis: Select "Pulse" from the Interests tab in the main navigation. Select "Top Posts" to surface the top-performing posts that day. Explore   Once you start feeling comfortable about how people are using the platform, it's time to learn about the best practices for actually writing pieces to publish.   Here are a few, according to LinkedIn: Write about specific areas in which you have experience and/or expertise. Keep your writing focused. Avoid covering too many topics in the same long-form post. Keep your voice authentic. Don't shy away from expressing your opinion. However, keep your long-form posts appropriate for the LinkedIn audience. Don't post anything obscene, shocking, hateful, intimidating, or otherwise unprofessional. Publish whenever you have something valuable to share with LinkedIn members. In general, the more long-form posts you publish, the more credibility you will build, and the stronger your professional profile will become. There are no limits on word count, but the long-form posts that are best received are more than three paragraphs. Upload pictures, videos, presentations, and documents to add to your content. It helps bring your insights to life and is a good way to showcase concrete examples of your experience. Use the share box on your homepage to share short-form thoughts, questions, and other media such as articles and images. (Learn more about sharing on LinkedIn here.) Have colleagues, friends, or family members review and edit your long-form posts. Hone in on a specific topic. A LinkedIn post shouldn't take readers here, there, and everywhere. And in terms of cutting through content saturation, your best bet is to cover one topic -- and cover it better than anyone else.    While it's clear that specificity contributes to the attractiveness of a headline, getting comfortable with this concept of "zooming in" on ultra-specific topics can take some getting used to.   2) Choose your title wisely. Aside from specificity, the structure of your title has a lot to due with the success of your post.  The beauty of LinkedIn publishing is that every time you publish a post, your connections receive a notification in real-time. This notification contains the title of your post, and the title of your post only. In other words, if the title you employ doesn't dazzle them, the notification will go unnoticed.    Titles that Work Best on LinkedIn How-To Posts How-to posts perform best for post views, Likes, comments, and shares than any other post type. On average, these posts had 22,368 LinkedIn views. Example: "How to Establish Your Brand Message" Listicles List posts perform well, getting slightly more post views, Likes, comments, and shares than non-list posts. On average, these posts had 16,364 LinkedIn views. Example: "8 Ways Social Media Marketing Can Benefit Your Brand"   Titles That Don't Work As Well on LinkedIn Question Posts Posts where the headline poses a question (like "Why Publish on LinkedIn?") perform poorly across the board in terms of LinkedIn publishing metrics. On average, these posts had 13,832 LinkedIn views.   3) Add visuals. Insert 4 visuals from my blog posts Just because LinkedIn is a professional network doesn't mean everything has to be buttoned up and black-and-white. People like pictures and visual examples. Including them your posts will not only help you to reinforce your points, but it'll also help to break up long blocks of text. But before you go sprinkling visuals through out your posts, it's important to be mindful of how you're using them.  According to Kagan, you should aim to have at least one image in your post -- but if you can include eight images in your post, even better. Kagan found that including eight images in one blog post is associated with a greater number of LinkedIn shares, Likes, comments, and views.   4) Pay attention to when you publish. Being aware that LinkedIn is geared towards business professionals, you want to be sure that your schedule aligns with business professionals' LinkedIn usage patterns. Take a moment to put yourself in the shoes of these business professionals -- your potential readers. You probably wouldn't want to publish a post on Monday morning, as many of them are just making there way back into the office to catch up on emails and work from the weekend. You also probably wouldn't want to publish a post on Friday afternoon, as people are busy winding down on projects and prepping for the weekend.    While you'll want to experiment with different send times and days to gauge the way your audience responds, this data should serve as a baseline to get you started.    
• #13: LinkedIn Groups   How many people are part of a linkedin group? What is a LinkedIn Group? LinkedIn Groups provide a place for professionals in the same industry or with similar interests to share content, find answers, post and view jobs, make business contacts, and establish themselves as industry experts. In order to find a group with similar interests, either use the search feature at the top of your homepage or viewing suggestions of Groups you may like. Alternatively, you can also create a new group based on whatever topic or industry you’d like.  For example, here are examples of a few Group categories that are currently on LinkedIn: Corporate, College alumni, Nonprofit, Trade organizations, Conferences, and Industry-specific.   What is the benefit of a LinkedIn Group? There are numerous benefits to joining LinkedIn Groups, no matter what industry you’re in. Being an active participant in a Group can help you network with other professionals in your field, especially those outside of your immediate circle of current and present colleagues, classmates and employers. LinkedIn Groups can help you build your online reputation by sharing valuable information relevant to your industry. Participating in a Group discussion will also attract views to your profile or LinkedIn Page. If you are a content marketer, Groups can help you get more eyes on your content, and get constructive feedback from other professionals in your field. While it’s important to consider the competitive nature of many industries (and not be overly generous with sharing unreleased content or ideas), it can also be incredibly helpful to brainstorm ideas with professionals inside your industry but outside of your organization. Alternatively, when it comes to Groups unrelated to your job title, Groups can help you gain insight into your target audience. You can join Groups with audience demographics you think may be interested—for example, a different language—in your brand’s product or service, and see what kind of information is deemed valuable and worthy of sharing by the participants. With over 2 million existing Groups out there, finding the right ones for you can first seem like an impossible task. To make the task easier to tackle, we’ve come up with these tips to help you navigate LinkedIn Groups. To get started with LinkedIn Groups, use these 3 tips: Join relevant groups to your interest and profession: If you have taken the time to fill out your LinkedIn profile completely, LinkedIn will send you Group recommendations based on the skills and experience you’ve chosen to include. To take matters into your own hands, you can use keywords and search Groups in the directory. For example, if I want to find a group that focuses on content marketing in the Asia-Pacific region, I can type in “content marketing” and “APAC” into the search bar, and see the Content Marketing Asia LinkedIn Group. However, take note of the last posting in the group—you want to spend your valuable time on active Groups only. Share your company’s content in Groups to increase traffic to your site. Contributing to a discussion will make both your profile or Page more visible, but also can help establish you or your company as a thought leader among other participants. However, be sure to provide value and context to your post when sharing—don’t just copy-and-paste the URL. If you know of a blog post or a news article from an external source that fits a discussion, share it with others. Even if the content doesn’t originate from your team, it will contribute to your status among other group members. Engage in the groups by providing your insight and commenting on other people’s posts. If all you do in a Group is promote your own content, others will quickly catch on, and may dismiss the value of your content or your brand in general. To avoid this, be courteous to others—after all, there may be a lot of opportunities to learn the skills of the trade from more experienced professionals. Take note of inquiries, and don’t hesitate to share your own experience.   For an in-depth dive into LinkedIn Groups, please refer to LinkedIn’s resource page.  
• #14: I hope tonight has been of value to you and your business. I encourage you to . . .