Why LinkedIn? Because Professionals are Consumers too

We often forget that professionals are consumers too. In fact, they often have a lot more riding on their decisions than the average consumer and therefore are often more emotional in their decision making then what we assume of them. It’s not always just about dollars and cents. Taking a typical product like coffee, while a consumer can change the coffee they drink day-to-day with little personal cost or repercussions (monetary or otherwise), a professional might have to order coffee for a chain of restaurants or enough coffee to supply their colleagues for the next 6 months. So, if they order crappy coffee, trust me, they’ll hear about it. If a professional can’t sample or take opinion polls amongst their colleagues and friends, then who do they turn to, to help them make less risky decisions? They turn to thought leaders, which is why if you’re a B2B company (or a B2C company that also sells into B2B) you need to, at the very least, be on LinkedIn, if not actively releasing articles, posts and advertisements.

So What’s the Deal about LinkedIn?

According to LinkedIn, there’s more than 500 million professionals worldwide on their site. In comparison to all the social media networks, LinkedIn has the most affluent and educated users as well as the most business related influencers. Here’s some facts from LinkedIn to ponder¹:

• 74% of B2B buyers choose a vendor that’s first to help them with useful content.²
• 71% of professionals view LinkedIn as a trusted resource (they expect that content will be vetted with facts and be of high quality).³
• 61 million senior-level influencers, 40 million decision makers, 22 million most affluent, 6 million c-level execs, 10 million opinion leaders, and 4 million decision makers.
• 4 out of 5 LinkedIn members drive business decisions and they have 2x the buying power of the average web audience.⁴
• Of the LinkedIn users, 81% do not visit Google+, 79% do not visit twitter.com, 23% do not visit facebook.com, 83% do not visit pininterest.com.⁵

Let’s look at that last fact a little more closely. Why would LinkedIn users be so unique and its users rarely use other social media sites? Because when people visit LinkedIn they are there for work related reasons. Believe it or not, many might not otherwise do social media. People now need to be on LinkedIn for work, whether your company expects it or your network does (or your job search does). No one forces you to do Twitter. In fact, according to LinkedIn, 100% business decision makers use social media for work. They also spend about 8 hours per week consuming professionally related content. With the acquirement of Lynda.com in 2015 by LinkedIn, and the even more recent purchase of LinkedIn by Microsoft we suspect that LinkedIn will more and more be developed as the go-to resource for busy professionals to not only present themselves professionally but to learn on the job (and in case you weren’t aware, one of Microsoft’s flagship products is Microsoft Dynamics 365, which is a customer relationship management solution. Stay tuned for more cross-pollination there). LinkedIn boasts that currently there are 9 billion content impressions a week and LinkedIn users are more likely to engage with content vs job postings.

Therefore, if you’re in the B2B sphere, or are a B2C company with a large B2B sales opportunity, we recommend maintaining at least a presence on LinkedIn. We may also recommend a content marketing or advertising strategy. Contact us to find out what we’d recommend for you.

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^{1. All statistics are provided by LinkedIn via their sales/webinars, where possible we’ve included additional footnotes.↩}

^{2. Source: Inside Sales ↩}

^{3. Source: LinkedIn/Millward Brown Mindset Divide Study, 2014 ↩}

^{4. LinkedIn, https://business.linkedin.com/marketing-solutions/ad-targeting? (2017)↩}

^{5. Source: ComScore cross visitation, Desktop Data, May 2016, US.↩}