The internet is riddled with blogs posts and articles detailing best practices and trendy happenings in the realm of social media marketing. Countless numbers of words are expended to help guide you in creating ad content that will grow your brand following on Facebook and Twitter. This makes perfect sense: with Facebook boasting an impressive ~1.9 billion users and Twitter bringing another 319 million potential customers, why not spend your advertising dollars where your audience spends its time?
However, in an era where social media users are constantly bombarded by ads from all angles and maximum ROI must be wrung out of every cent, we must consider the age-old compromise of “quality over quantity.” Do you want to engage users more substantially or more often? A precarious bargain to be sure. Perhaps, though, we could be asking a different question, a better question: how can we consistently engage audiences in a meaningful way?
Assuming that you’ve been building a strong professional network on your journey to launching your brand on various social media platforms, odds are you have a LinkedIn account with years of connections and content already in place. While LinkedIn may not bring Facebook numbers in terms of potential audience, it does have a large audience of about 450 million users to tap in to.
Making that number far more significant, LinkedIn reports that 7 out of 10 users consider LinkedIn to be a trustworthy source of professional information. This statistic speaks volumes about the value of LinkedIn as potential audience for your ads, especially given the current state of heightened skepticism regarding other social media platforms, (*ahem**Facebook*). Not only does LinkedIn have a huge user base, but these users, for the most part, believe the content they see to be legitimate and therefore are more likely genuinely engage with this content.
What this is all getting at is that LinkedIn is an often overlooked platform when it comes to placing ads. Running Sponsored Content ads for your personal brand is the ideal way to leverage the years of content that has already been created — the same content that helped grow your network to where it is now — to further increase your brands reach. The numbers tell a similar story. Given that Sponsored Content ads appears in a similar way to Facebook newsfeed ads, that is, as native content, users are 25% more likely to look at native advertisements and 53% more likely to actually engage them when compared with more traditional types of ads offered by LinkedIn, such as sidebar or text based ads.
So, as we have seen, LinkedIn attracts a similar size audience as other major social media platforms and its user base generally considers the content they see to be more trustworthy than these other platforms. Being able to engage your audiences consistently and meaningfully are the top priorities in social media marketing and it would seem that LinkedIn delivers on both.
