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5 Reasons Why LinkedIn Sponsored Updates ROCK!

Note – If you find Paul’s post below helpful, please feel free to ‘tip’ him with a share on your preferred social network. Thanks!

Ahhh I see what you’ve done there LinkedIn. Bravo! Well played!

This morning while doing my daily iPhone news crawl, I received an email from LinkedIn just letting me know that they have now rolled out sponsored updates.

Woah… Wait what?!?!

This. Changes. EVERYTHING!

Well, not really, but it certainly is an exciting new feature for businesses and advertisers.

Just to give you the low down, sponsored updates are similar to Facebook’s sponsored stories and Twitter’s promoted tweets in that they allow businesses to pay to have their content disseminated to any LinkedIn audiences they wish to target.

Now, anyone who is a regular LinkedIn user will have noticed the huge, sweeping (and well overdue) interface changes that have taken place on the platform over the past 12 months or so. One of the big improvements has been the revamp of the news feed (and I for one am a huge fan).

Considering the increased prevalence of this news feed combined with the introduction of sponsored updates, below are FIVE reasons as to why you should be starting to get very excited about this new content dissemination opportunity:

1. Get your content in front of the right professional audiences while they are actively consuming content!

Since I downloaded the updated LinkedIn iPhone app, I’ve been using the social media site as a vital source of relevant industry news more than ever. Seriously, it’s now even on par with my coveted Google+ industry thought leaders circle with regards to providing juicy content for my Saturday morning digital marketing fix!

Now, with the introduction of sponsored updates, businesses have the ability to get their relevant content pieces in front of the right audiences while those audiences are in the mood to consume great content. Brilliant!

As mentioned earlier, sponsored updates are a definite learning from the immense success Facebook has achieved through their ‘sponsored stories’ advertising initiative. The primary difference – this content promotion method can be targeted at influential business leaders while they are in an active content consumption mindset.

2. The stats don’t lie: LinkedIn is becoming a social media powerhouse in Australia

All of LinkedIn’s new interface enhancements and smartphone app updates are really starting to gain some traction for the platform; especially in Australia. The most recent Sensis Social Media Report highlights the fact that 20% of Australian social media users use LinkedIn (up from 9% in 2011). That’s more penetration than Twitter, Instagram, Google+ and Pinterest! Furthermore, Australian social media users are ‘Linking In’ about 8 times a week for about 10 minutes at a time.

I think you’d agree, this is a REALLY big opportunity for the right businesses.

Q: But how can a business ensure that their content will be seen and consumed by their intended target audience during these 8 x 10 minute weekly windows?

A: LinkedIn Sponsored Updates! Heyo!

3. Content is still king in the world of SEO

Since Google started teaching their search algorithm to place a huge emphasis on quality website content, the world of search engine optimisation has been scrambling to integrate content marketing and content development into their strategies and tactics. Once SEOs got their heads around how to develop great content, the next step was obviously dissemination.

While we’ve written about content dissemination tactics on this blog before, LinkedIn’s sponsored updates is going to become powerful new weapon in your content dissemination arsenal as it allows you to target a previously elusive audience; the B2B, C-Suite and business professional crowd.

Furthermore, as the search engines continue to place more and more weight on social signals as a relevance and ranking factor, sponsored updates will be a great way to generate targeted, influential and authoritative social sharing of your quality content pieces.

4. You only pay for the clicks you receive to your content.

That’s right, LinkedIn have followed suit with the other big players and have allowed for both a cost per click (CPC) and cost per thousand (CPM) advertising model. While CPM models are generally used for branding and awareness objectives, as we’re talking about content consumption in this article, we’d strongly recommend the CPC option. This is because CPC is great for tracking the success of performance based objectives such as click throughs, engagement, downloads, sign ups, shares, video views, sales, or any other critical onsite metric.

5. You can start today!

Yep, this feature is available to all advertisers right away! Hoorah!

Here’s a link on how you can get started. If that’s all too much, just give us a call and we can help you out.

If you want to find out a bit more about the nuts and bolts of this exciting new advertising avenue, check out a few of these great examples as provided by LinkedIn.

Reminder – If you found a couple of useful nuggets in Paul’s post above, please feel free to ‘tip’ him with a share on your preferred social network. Thanks!

If you want to hear more from Paul or get in touch with him, add +Paul Goldston to your circles on Google Plus!


Reload Team
Reload Team

Sharing the latest industry topics, company news and behind the scenes.

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