The LinkedIn business network is playing an increasingly important role in social recruiting and employer branding. With clever content marketing, you can generate new leads via the platform and turn strenuous cold calling into strategic social selling. Today I'll show you how you can benefit from LinkedIn, especially in the B2B sector.

What is LinkedIn?

The US platform has been offering international networking since 2003 and is now owned by Microsoft. Globally, LinkedIn has more than 600 million members: with around 14 million in the DACH region, LinkedIn is hot on the heels of its German competitor XING. LinkedIn marketing therefore plays an important role in the communication strategy and employer branding of many companies. Despite similar functions to Facebook, LinkedIn members are increasingly focusing on specialist topics and discussing news from their industry. Colorful pictures and funny videos tend to remain the exception.

Ideally, no company should focus solely on its social media presence. Even a large platform such as LinkedIn can, in the worst-case scenario, radically change its algorithms or terms of use overnight. The individual user must accept such changes. 

It is therefore advisable to maintain a platform-independent presence. On a company blog, for example, the published content remains permanently and is accessible without any hurdles. From there, you can easily distribute it to various online platforms.

Memberships in LinkedIn

LinkedIn offers free basic personal profiles for employees and freelancers as well as company pages and groups. You can follow personal profiles and company profiles - or submit a contact request in the case of the personal profile.

Does LinkedIn cause costs?

There are four variants of paid premium memberships on the platform : 

• Career: Applicants can specifically draw the attention of recruiters to themselves in order to find a new job.
• Business: users can expand their network without restriction and write to non-contacts, for example. They also get access to business insights and online video courses.
• Sales: With the Sales Navigator, sales specialists can keep track of their growing network, generate leads for their social selling more efficiently and find contacts in the target market more easily.
• Employee search: With the LinkedIn Recruiter and Recruiter Lite products, headhunters can find top candidates faster and contact them directly 

Build a sustainable network with LinkedIn

Especially in the B2B sector, LinkedIn can be used to establish long-term relationships and expert status. Instead of randomly collecting contacts, you should show genuine interest in your network on LinkedIn. Many buyers of equipment or high-priced products in B2B use the platform as a source of information. They monitor their newsfeed or ask questions in specialist groups. They don't just gather information once, but repeatedly over a longer period of time. A major investment in B2B is not decided overnight.

The faces behind your company

In general, people today are interested in the faces and stories of companies. Establishing yourself as a specialist on LinkedIn underlines your own expertise - and that of your employer. The professional position merges with the person. Ideally, employees have a certain willingness to open up and reveal personal details.

LinkedIn marketing can involve specifically developing your own employees into brand ambassadors - and making their personal brand part of the employer brand. This requires a great deal of trust on the part of companies and loyalty on the part of employees. Companies should encourage their employees, but only if they are interested and communicate authentically as a result. 

If colleagues are interested but unsure, there are training courses, guidelines and contacts within the company. In this way, the company can specifically communicate how employees are allowed to act. It should be clear at all times that it is not the company itself that is communicating. At the same time, employees should be made aware not to divulge company secrets or violate competition law.

The company's content can be distributed more widely by its own employees. If a colleague shares the company post, the content reaches a whole new target group. In addition, the post is perceived as less promotional if the employees recommend it and not the company. Employees can publish industry-relevant content and answer specific questions. If you save them as a source of information, they may also be approached when it comes to buying a product.

LinkedIn as a source of information for B2B content

The trick is to provide individually tailored content for everyone involved in the purchasing process and to build trust. The entire range of content formats can be used to convey complex information clearly: from blog posts and infographics to white papers, videos and e-books.

A managing director is interested in the "big picture", while the engineer or IT specialist can use a large amount of specialist knowledge and details. What they all have in common is that they are looking for high-quality and helpful content. As people have different preferences when it comes to formats, a carefully selected mix of texts, infographics, images and videos is ideal. Current and relevant topics that are presented in easy-to-read and thoroughly researched articles tailored to the target group are particularly popular. 

As on many other social media platforms, you will notice that posts with images attract more interest. Even a clear and entertaining text is difficult to compete with a video or an infographic that can be understood at a glance.

LinkedIn in social recruiting

If you create a Linkedin company profile, employees are visible and approachable as ambassadors for the company. With a meaningful company profile, you can strengthen your employer brand and address latent job seekers in active sourcing, which is particularly useful for "shortage occupations". First analyze who your target group is. Very young people are less represented on LinkedIn, so your search for trainees on Instagram or Snapchat promises to be more successful.

In addition to customers, LinkedIn can also be used to attract applicants. In the company profile, the company can present itself, its products and its team - and provide a look behind the scenes. 

Two examples: In a short video, an employee shows how logistics work in the company. Or: In a review of the summer party, the company talks about how they celebrated together. This shows competence and the personal face of your company.

Content with added value

The right format and cleverly chosen hashtags are not always enough to generate lasting interest. Think carefully in advance about who you want to reach with your content. Which topic offers your target group added value and new food for thought? Is your content credible, up-to-date and relevant? Without immediately becoming a copycat, it doesn't hurt to look left and right. Which content and formats are your competitors successful with and which posts quickly disappear into oblivion? Learn from your successes and failures - and keep an eye on the competition.

If you run a company profile, you can use the LinkedIn Analytics data to view important parameters. How often was your post viewed, how high is the click-through rate and how many comments did your post receive? If you look at this data regularly and thoroughly, you will learn how to tailor your content and suitable formats even better to your target group.

When and how to post on LinkedIn?

The question always arises as to what time of day posts achieve the most success and how often they should be posted. Regular posts are ideal for LinkedIn, although a daily rhythm is not mandatory. Two to three good posts a week can be sufficient. 

You can try out whether your target group reacts more in the morning or afternoon, on Wednesday or Thursday, in the sense of "learning by doing". Nevertheless, it has been shown that posts in the morning, evening or during the lunch break meet with a slightly greater response than publications at 6:00 a.m. or at the weekend. 

Pay attention to quality rather than quantity when writing articles. You can also achieve expert status by regularly sharing and curating third-party articles, i.e. by practicing content curation. This will turn your presence into an important source of high-quality content for your industry and specialist topic. Of course, you should not redistribute third-party articles unseen, as you want to offer your network high quality and added value.

Advertising on LinkedIn

In addition to organic posts, you can also place LinkedIn ads with a wide range of targeting options. These include sponsored content such as native ads as images or video ads, text ads and sponsored InMails. As the name suggests, the first two examples are advertisements and the InMail is a direct message advertisement. 

The advertising company pays for sponsored InMails if they are successfully delivered. Sponsored content and text ads are offered in the variants cost-per-click or payment per thousand impressions of a previously defined target group.

My conclusion: You should focus on LinkedIn marketing for your company. You'll kill two birds with one stone. With suitable content, you establish yourself as an expert and contact person - and by building an employer brand, you support social recruiting.

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