LinkedIn is a very important social network for business connections. But is it used correctly? Do your connections even know who you are?
Karen Rubin of HubSpot has some great suggestions how to avoid one of her big LinkedIn pet peeves.
The ROI of Social is "Will Your Business Be Around in 5 Years?"
I first blogged the latest edition of Socionomic’s now ubiquitous video about how the media landscape has changed to digital and its social implications back in December. Now, six months later, the world has changed again and Socionomics has come out with a new video called Social Media Revolution 2 (though not the second edition of their video, which has been around for over a year – an eternity in the age of the iPad).
A few facts, from Socionomics:
- Over 50% of the world’s population is under 30-years-old
- 96% of them have joined a social network
- Facebook tops Google for weekly traffic in the U.S.
- iPhone applications hit 1 billion in 9 months.
- We don’t have a choice on whether we DO social media, the question is how well we DO it.
- If Facebook were a country it would be the world’s 3rd largest ahead of the United States and only behind China and India
- 80% of companies use social media for recruitment; % of these using LinkedIn 95%
- The fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55-65 year-old females
- 50% of the mobile Internet traffic in the UK is for Facebook…people update anywhere, anytime…imagine what that means for bad customer experiences?
- The #2 largest search engine in the world is YouTube
- There are over 200,000,000 Blogs
- Because of the speed in which social media enables communication, word of mouth now becomes world of mouth
- 25% of search results for the World’s Top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content
- 34% of bloggers post opinions about products & brands
- People care more about how their social graph ranks products and services than how Google ranks them
- 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations
- Only 14% trust advertisements
- Only 18% of traditional TV campaigns generate a positive ROI
- 90% of people that can TiVo ads do
- Kindle eBooks Outsold Paper Books on Christmas
- 24 of the 25 largest newspapers are experiencing record declines in circulation
- 60 millions status updates happen on Facebook daily
- We no longer search for the news, the news finds us.
- We will non longer search for products and services, they will find us via social media
- Social Media isn’t a fad, it’s a fundamental shift in the way we communicate
- Successful companies in social media act more like Dale Carnegie and less like Mad Men Listening first, selling second
- The ROI of social media is that your business will still exist in 5 years
How is your company reacting?
Happy 7th Birthday LinkedIn
One of the points that I try to make to clients is that, while social media has revolutionary changed communication, it is not so new. In fact, this week marks the seventh birthday of LinkedIn, the business-oriented social networking site. Launched in May 2003, LinkedIn has over 65 million registered users in over 200 countries. LinkedIn helps users with the most important professional skill: networking. Users can use this business social networking to find jobs, post jobs, or ask and answer professional inquiries.
Businesses can use LinkedIn to establish professional credibility and to recruit for open positions. They can also use it for due diligence, to see if a perspective employee has been recommended, verify their employment history, and see if they have other skills that are not included in their one-page resume.
In a future post, we will talk about 10 ways to use LinkedIn, but for now, we just want to wish this important business network a very happy seventh birthday!
Who uses what?
As I mentioned on an earlier post about the demographics of social media use, baby boomers are the fastest growing group on social networks.
But, what does that mean for marketers? Does it mean that they just need to set up a Twitter or Facebook page and they’ve done their job? Alternatively, will a LinkedIn page do?
The answer: it depends.
As in any sort of marketing, demographics and the purpose of communication matter. Twitter is not Facebook. LinkedIn is not MySpace. It’s not even ASmallWorld (and no, I don’t mean the Disney song).
As eMarketer points out, different age groups use different social media networks. Younger people – not yet in the professional world or just entering their first career – tend not to be power users of LinkedIn. The 40-year old middle manager? You bet (hopefully!) that they are doing business networking and lead generation via LinkedIn.High school students don’t need Twitter to connect with their peers. But Gen Y and X do.
There’s no one size fits all strategy in life. Certainly not in social media marketing either.