Everyone knows a great case study or example can do wonders for your marketing strategy inspiration – which is why we have curated a trove of them to share with you.
Join LinkedIn’s content marketing expert, Deanna Lazzaroni, and LinkedIn Senior Insights Analyst, Nick Mangum as they dive in and dissect how top brands are using the platform to achieve marketing goals.
Take a look at this webinar deck to learn:
- What the 10 Most Influential Global Brands on LinkedIn are doing differently – and how to apply what’s working for them to your efforts
- How LinkedIn’s Content Marketing Score (CMS) tool can help you measure the effectiveness of your content efforts on LinkedIn
- Examples of brands effectively using LinkedIn Company Pages and LinkedIn Sponsored Updates
Webinar: The Best of LinkedIn: How Brands Are Using the Platform to Win
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The Best of LinkedIn:
How Brands Are Using
the Platform to Win
Deanna Lazzaroni
Global Content Marketing Manager
LinkedIn
Nick Mangum
Senior Insights Analyst
LinkedIn
#Succeed2015
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• The Top 10 Global Brands on LinkedIn:
Who Are They & What Are They Doing Well
• LinkedIn’s Content Marketing Score:
What Is It & How Are Brands Using It
• Takeaways to Enable Your Success
• Q&A
Topics We’ll Cover
Today
#Succeed2015
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We’re taking your Q’s...
• Share your questions in the chat box
• Tweet with #Succeed2015
And giving you a recording
• Expect an email with links to the
presentation and recording within
the next few days
Helpful things
to know
#Succeed2015
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Connect the world’s professionals
to make them more productive
and successful
LinkedIn’s mission
#Succeed2015
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Be the most effective platform
for marketers to engage
with professionals
LinkedIn Marketing Solutions’ mission
Be the most effective platform
for marketers to engage
with professionals
#Succeed2015
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You like content that
showcases brands
doing it well. Got it.
We picked up on the hint you left us…
#Succeed2015
8. The Top 10 Global Brands on LinkedIn
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Be the most effective platform
for marketers to engage
with professionals
Calculated with LinkedIn Content Marketing Score (CMS)
#Succeed2015
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What is LinkedIn Content Marketing
Score (CMS)?
A Score that quantifies and benchmarks the influence companies have on LinkedIn
CMS
Groups
Company Updates
Sponsored
Updates
Employee
Shares
Publishing
Platform
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How we calculate CMS
6,000,000 Members
2,500 Members
Target Audience
Members you would like to reach
(monthly active users)
Content Marketing Engagement
Members who engage with
your content
(for example, all C-Suite)
Like, share, comment, follow, click
Content Marketing Score
Unique Members Engaged= =x Multiplier 417Active Target Audience
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But, what are these companies doing
differently with content on LinkedIn
that’s been so successful?
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Forbes focuses on the
entrepreneur, positioning
itself as a source for
business, investing,
technology, and leadership.
They typically publish 6-10
Company Page updates per
day, promoting
on-site content and asking
their audience for further
ideas.
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You don’t need to be a for-profit business to find success on LinkedIn.
The non-profit World Economic Forum utilizes LinkedIn to recruit business
leaders, political representatives and academic instructors for global change.
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Inc. Magazine serves the
business owner and CEO,
and their content reflects the
C-level purpose. Everything
from the simple productivity
hacks to complex data
analysis is covered here.
They also provide additional
room for their audience to
share personalized
knowledge.
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At Microsoft, the conversation doesn’t stop at the Company Page.
LinkedIn members looking for answers for a particular product or
service have new communities to join via the company’s Showcase
Pages.
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The social managers at Financial Times, the renowned British business and
analysis newspaper, love to ask questions. Whether the concept is data-
driven or purely hypothetical, the content on FT’s Company Page is directly
designed to encourage engagement and audience feedback.
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The Wall Street Journal also
fares well on LinkedIn
primarily for similar reasons.
Posts with rhetorical
questions and statistics are
common here — however,
the Wall Street Journal also
uses its Company Page to
tease list posts on the
newspaper’s website.
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Hewlett-Packard’s LinkedIn Company Page serves as a great example of
the balance between internal content and curated third party content. While
much of the social messaging on the Company Page points to HP domains,
the company isn’t afraid to give credit to outside content on their channels.
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Salesforce knows how to
engage its audience with
helpful, attention-grabbing
posts. As part of their
LinkedIn marketing
strategy, Company Page
updates are generally
kept short and direct,
rarely consisting of more
than one sentence in
length.
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It’s no surprise that
several major technology
companies top this list –
and IBM is included for
its dedication to visual
content. The majority of
IBM’s Company Page
updates include some
form of visual element –
infographics, images,
illustrations, and links to
YouTube videos.
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Mashable, the self-
proclaimed online purveyor
for the “Connected
Generation”, knows their
audience – and, as a result,
they deliver content with as
few strings as possible.
This makes the content
easier to consume on
mobile devices, where
much of their audience
resides.
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23. They release new and engaging content tailored to specific audiences.
They add their voice to relevant conversations that their audiences care about.
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So, what do these leaders have in common?
Three simple practices:
They continually update users on industry news.
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A few other things we discovered about
these top global brands…
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Factor Average #
Posts Per Month 112
Number of Followers 880,000
Targeted Status Updates All
Using SMMS Tools All
Sponsoring Content All & Frequently
Engagement Rate of Content 1.5X Higher vs.
Benchmark
The Top Performing Brands on LinkedIn:
By The Numbers
• Publish on average 112 status updates
per month (about 4 per day!)
• Target content to specific
audiences within their roughly 880K
organic follower base through “Targeted
Status Updates”
• Sponsor content via Sponsored Updates
regularly to ensure that content reaches
the intended audiences at scale
• See performance 1.5X higher than
platform benchmarks based on
Engagement Rate
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Factor Average #
Unique Admins 26
Admins Who Publish 9
Non-Employee Admins 9
Countries Represented 7
Number of Showcase Pages 6.5
Number of Employees on
LinkedIn
150,924
Number of Marketers on
LinkedIn
2,607
The Top Performing Brands on LinkedIn:
By The Numbers
In terms of internal structure:
• Have on average 26 admins on their
Company Page, with 9 on average
publishing content
• Manage content predominantly through
the Marketing and Communications
departments
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The Top Performing Brands on LinkedIn:
By The Numbers
The top 10 global brands on
LinkedIn are using on average
4.2 out of 5 content marketing
sources on the platform.
This goes to show that leveraging a mix of
the right channels to engage with your
target audience is key.
CMS
Groups
Company Updates
Sponsored
Updates
Employee Shares
Publishing
Platform
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28. Drive Success for Your Brand using
LinkedIn Content Marketing Score
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Questions to Ask
Your Team:
What is our LinkedIn
content marketing strategy?
How are we incorporating
the five content marketing
sources of engagement into
our mix?
Who is in charge of leading
these efforts?
How will we determine what content to share and
maintain an always-on content calendar for our
Company Page?
What’s our strategy for determining the right
content to promote to our audience?
What 3-5 internal subject matter experts can we
work with to publish content on LinkedIn?
Company Updates
Sponsored Updates
Publishing Platform
Employees
Groups
How will we empower our employees to share our
content and broaden reach?
How are we leveraging LinkedIn Groups to drive
meaningful discussions with our audience?
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And of course…
How can we make the next Top Global
Brands on LinkedIn list?
Coming
Q2 2015
#Succeed2015
Hi everyone, thanks for joining us today for this webinar. My name is Deanna Lazzaroni and I help lead our Global Content Marketing efforts here at LinkedIn, specifically focused on creating and distributing content to help marketers like you use the LinkedIn platform to reach your goals.
As many of you have likely seen from the promotions surrounding this live-event, today’s webinar is part of our “Succeed in 2015” series, designed to help you up-level your 2015 marketing strategy and succeed in the year ahead. This is the last webinar in the series, and we’ve saved the best for last – today we’re going to be talking about the Best of the Best on LinkedIn, those brands who are doing it well and using the platform to drive real success for their brands.
I’m delighted to be joined today by Nick Mangum from our LinkedIn Insights team. Here at LinkedIn, we have dedicated professionals who are focused on extracting insights from the platform that can arm you to be better marketers – and today, Nick and I are going to talk a bit about one specific tool we use – LinkedIn’s Content Marketing Score – to quantify influence of companies on LinkedIn.
In case some of you were expecting Valter Sciarrillo’s face on this slide, I’m happy to tell you that is it not there because his wife gave birth to their new baby this past week, so he is off enjoying being a new dad and we’re thrilled for him. And I’m thrilled for you because Nick couldn’t be a better replacement, as he helped lead the reveal of our Top 10 Global Brands on LinkedIn as defined by Content Marketing Score. So, we’ve got an expert with us today folks – get your questions ready ;)
Okay, so before we dive in – let’s take a quick glance at what we’re covering today.
We are going to give you what we promised – a look at the Top 10 Global Brands on LinkedIn: who they are and what they are doing well on the platform.
These brands were revealed using LinkedIn’s Content Marketing Score, so Nick is going to tell you a bit more about what that is and how we calculate it for brands.
After we talk about these brands doing it well, we want to make sure you feel prepared to go back and start working through a strategy to get your own brand’s name on this list – so we’ll give you a few takeaways to enable your success.
And lastly, we’ll hopefully close with some time for Q&A.
If you do have a question, please go ahead and submit it in the chat box here in the WebEx throughout the session, and at the end, we’ll get through as many as we can. You can also tweet along with the hashtag #Succeed2015 and submit your questions there - Alex on my team will be making sure those get to us.
And, because I know the question is already coming – yes, we will give out a recording of this webinar following the presentation. You can expect an email with a link to the presentation and the recording in the next few days.
So, let’s get started.
As a quick foundation, I wanted to start with a reminder of LinkedIn’s mission --- which is to connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful.
From a marketing perspective – and the reason you are all here – we want to help you drive greater efficiency with your marketing to reach the professionals who truly matter to your business. You’re likely here because you already know these people you are trying to reach are on LinkedIn, so we want to make sure you can put the platform to use to drive results with your marketing.
And what better way to do that, to get some inspiration for your 2015 strategy, then to look at examples of brands doing it well.
We know you guys love examples, you love case studies – I’ll attest, I’m a sucker for content that shows me who’s leading the charge and what I can learn from them to improve.
And clearly you guys love this type of content, too, because our top blog post of 2014 is the one shown here – our reveal of the 10 Most Influential Global Brands on LinkedIn. So, we got it – you want more of this type of content.
And I’m here to give it to you. Let’s take a deeper dive into these Top 10 Global Brands on LinkedIn.
As you look at this mix, a few interesting things stand out to me ---
First is the prevalence of publisher brands: Forbes, Inc, Financial Times – these companies are publishing content continuously and amplifying it through the LinkedIn platform. We’ll talk more about what each of them are doing well in just a minute.
Second, if you notice – the other half of the list seems to be made up of Tech brands – Microsoft, HP, IBM, Salesforce. In the next few slides, we’ll talk through what these tech leaders are doing and the type of content they’re publishing to be successful.
But first, how did we arrive at this list? As I mentioned earlier, these rankings were calculated using LinkedIn’s Content Marketing Score. As the expert on this LinkedIn tool, I am now going to let Nick talk to you a bit more about it.
* Open-ended question invites audience members to comment on the post* Content addresses a key issue for many leaders looking to improve customer service within their organization
The group makes their point using numbers – statistics from global business studies are used in several Company Page updates:Numbers and statistics are powerful tools in page updates and Sponsored Updates, especially if the results draw widespread conclusions about human behavior.
The 100 days, 100 questions campaign curated content provided by the Inc. audience and generated new discussions. In this campaign, Inc. serves as the bridge between audience members – as they are now speaking to each other via the magazine’s Company Page.
Customers looking for specific information on Microsoft Office need not wade through the overall Company Page updates. They can simply join the Office Showcase Page, which shares more personalized communications for professionals interested in updates around this product. With several other Showcase Pages and LinkedIn Groups tailored to different parts of business, Microsoft does a great job of building a LinkedIn ecosystem for the company’s various audiences.
What kinds of questions work best? For FT, rhetorical questions or questions with answers validated by research gain good responses – for example, in the above update, asking about the most undervalued business skill. Questions without a definitive answer can also spark conversation among a curious audience.
These list preview posts are among the most engaging on the WSJ’s Company Page, as they serve to invite users toward a converting click and discussion. List posts are certainly effective on social – 53% of top performing blog posts on social are lists – and the WSJ uses LinkedIn to tease the list without giving the whole piece away.
The above post references an article on Lifehacker, a tech-centered blog from Gawker Media. HP isn’t directly mentioned in the article, but they still promoted the content as an educational benefit for their audience. Various resources have debated the “Sweet Spot” between content creation and curation, but it’s clear that Company Pages shouldn’t just be forums for self-promotion. HP generates goodwill among their audience by promoting industry news outside of the company’s walls
Indeed, we’ve seen on LinkedIn that top performing posts have lead-in copy around 140 characters in length. For the Salesforce team, the “short and to-the-point” strategy works for them, as the matter-of-fact status updates instantly encourage agreement or disagreement directly in the company’s feed.
Visual content is a vital marketing tactic – visuals are processed 60,000 times faster than text, so the brain is naturally drawn to graphics and videos. IBM utilizes several forms of visual content in their updates, and the results speak for themselves
When we looked over the last 6 months at the top global brands on LinkedIn, we learned that on average they are using 4.2 out of 5 of these content marketing sources on the platform. The most used are Company Updates and Sponsored Updates – with top brands creating an always-on calendar of content that they are posting organically to their Company Page and a strategy to determine what content they will sponsor.
Additionally, we’ve seen a trend rising with employees of these brands – more of them are becoming more active on the platform, sharing short-form content – such as the posts that the brand is sharing from the Company Page on a daily basis, but also publishing long-form content through our publishing platform. When we looked back over the past 6 months, nearly every single one of these brands had employees publishing on LinkedIn – and we predict this trend will only continue to rise as more companies seek to activate their employee base socially and leverage these brand ambassadors to grow their brand presence.
If you are already a LinkedIn Marketing Solutions customer spending at least $25K per quarter, you should have a sales rep assigned to you. This rep can go ahead and generate a CMS report for you that will showcase how you’re currently performing today against your competitors. This insight can help you devise a strategy for increasing your efforts – and thus your score – over the months ahead.