LinkedIn has often been treated as the black sheep of social media marketing. The platform’s focus business professionals has made it less versatile to marketers than Twitter, Facebook or Instagram. However, for those interested in B2B marketing and professional networking, LinkedIn has been an irreplaceable tool. Marketers who may have ignored LinkedIn in the past may need to give the platform another look, as recent data shows it doing better than ever.
LinkedIn recently released an ebook with a lot of useful advice on using the platform for marketing. The ebook is a valuable read on its own, but it also provided a lot of interesting information on the current state of LinkedIn. According to the platform’s analysis, LinkedIn is doing better than ever in several key metrics.
Social media networks live and die by the number of users, and LinkedIn now has 610 million registered members. This number is certainly less than the other major social media platforms, but these are good figures for LinkedIn’s demographic. By its nature, LinkedIn will have fewer younger people, as they aren’t starting careers yet. Nor will it contain many seniors, who have little need for professional networking after retirement.
Having a growing number of users is vital for the continued usefulness of LinkedIn as a marketing platform. However, it’s equally important that there be a high number of active users. There are indeed some LinkedIn users who never touch their accounts, but a sizeable portion of the audience use the platform daily. According to the data, around 40 percent of LinkedIn users visit the platform every day. With approximately 244 million daily visitors, LinkedIn certainly has an audience that marketers can’t ignore.
The growing number of users and daily visitors is good for LinkedIn, but it doesn’t matter if these people aren’t engaging with content that companies, marketers and business professionals choose to share. However, user engagement is another area where LinkedIn is reporting significant gains. Post engagements like comments, likes, and shares are up 60 percent compared to the previous year. And even when people are engaging with the content, they are spending more time viewing it. Like engagement, views in the LinkedIn feed are up 60 percent, year over year.
Mobile devices are becoming more vital to a comprehensive marketing strategy. Though many users still use a PC to access their LinkedIn accounts, that is starting to change. After a series of updates and changes to their app and mobile website, LinkedIn is getting more of its users to access the platform while on the go. According to the company, mobile LinkedIn sessions are have seen a 57 percent year-over-year growth.
Content marketers should also consider LinkedIn when looking for places to spread their content. Every week, more than 130,000 articles are created on LinkedIn. The sheer amount of people using the platform for content publishing shows that there is value in sharing content this way and that people are looking at articles when browsing LinkedIn.
All of this data confirms something that many marketers have known for a while, LinkedIn is the best place for B2B marketing, and it will only grow in importance the more people use the platform. LinkedIn has even made some recent changes to the way they sell ads and helps with lead generation, so there may be even more good news on the horizon for LinkedIn marketers.