Every major social site has a niche for professional services firms, but LinkedIn is the only social network built specifically for skilled professionals. Just as importantly, LinkedIn has made a major push as a content marketing destination in recent years, with great success.
Much like Hubspot, LinkedIn has become a place where professionals of all stripes go to learn the latest innovations and tactics from their peers, keep up with industry trends, and spend time with others who speak their professional language.
Your LinkedIn company page is basically a profile page for your business. Hubspot has some solid examples of effective LinkedIn company pages, and you'll notice that all of them use images in addition to text to tell their company's story. The examples come mostly from major corporations like Coca Cola and L'Oréal, but the same concepts scale to small and mid-sized businesses, as well.
With LinkedIn's credibility as a content hub firmly established, you've already got a template for building your audience. Content is more than just an advertisement. It's a way to show your expertise, build trust with your audience, and generate the type of qualified leads that make social media marketing such an appealing tool. Even if content marketing is a new tactic for your firm, you've likely got some corporate communications materials that can be repurposed into your first wave of LinkedIn content.
In May of 2015, LinkedIn launched some new analytics tools for published content, which allow you to see who has viewed your content, including which industries and job titles your readers list on their LinkedIn pages. This is huge, and it's a great example of how the LinkedIn team always keeps professionals in mind when updating its platform. The new publishing analytics also provide geographical information, and allow you to track the online sources of traffic to your LinkedIn page.
Digging a little deeper, you can even see which LinkedIn members, specifically, liked, shared, or commented on your content. If the reader is already part of your network, you can send them a message directly from your analytics dashboard. If you haven't connected with them yet, just click their photo in your analytics dashboard and you can head straight to their profile page. While the deeper demographic data is only available for people who were logged in to LinkedIn when they viewed your content, this is still incredibly valuable information.
And that's just for publishing. LinkedIn also offers analytics to track engagement with your updates, the evolution of your audience, and the demographics of people who visit your company page. No matter what you want to learn about your audience and page performance, there's a good chance you'll find it with LinkedIn's analytics. Experiment, dive into the numbers, and find out which metrics are most important to your social media success.
LinkedIn presents a huge opportunity to establish an effective social presence for your professional services firm, so it's no surprise it's the most popular network for professional services marketing. Apply the principles outlined above consistently and you will see business results.