How LinkedIn Networking Changed Digital Marketing in 2010
LinkedIn closed 2010 near 90 million members and, with Company Pages launching in November, gave B2B marketers a real reason to treat it as more than a resume.
LinkedIn launched back in 2003 as a place to keep an online resume and stay loosely connected to former colleagues, and for most of its existence that’s exactly how businesses treated it: useful for recruiting, irrelevant to marketing. This year changed that. The network is approaching 90 million members worldwide, and this month it finally launched Company Pages, giving businesses an actual presence to market from rather than relying on employees’ personal profiles.
Company Pages gave B2B marketers a real foothold
Until this month, a business’s only presence on LinkedIn was whatever its employees put in their own profiles, which meant no consistent branding and no way to publish anything as the company itself. Company Pages change that: a business can now post updates, showcase its products and let visitors follow it directly, roughly the same shift Facebook Pages brought to that network three years ago. For B2B businesses in particular, whose customers were already using LinkedIn professionally, this is the first time the network has offered a real marketing surface rather than just a recruiting one.
Groups turned into genuine discussion hubs
LinkedIn Groups, built around industries and professional interests, have grown into places where real discussion happens rather than just another feed to scroll past. A business contributing useful answers in a relevant Group, rather than obvious self-promotion, has built more credibility with a targeted professional audience this year than most display advertising could buy. It’s slower than an ad campaign, but the audience is unusually well-qualified.
Self-serve advertising found its niche
LinkedIn’s ad platform lets advertisers target by job title, industry and company size, criteria that don’t exist on consumer networks and that make it useful for reaching a narrow professional audience even at a higher cost per click than Facebook. It’s not a mass-market advertising tool and nobody should treat it as one, but for a business selling specifically to, say, marketing directors at mid-sized companies, that precision is hard to replicate anywhere else this year.
The shift from resume to reputation
The bigger change underneath all of this is how professionals themselves are using the network. A LinkedIn profile used to be something updated only when job hunting; now it functions as an ongoing professional reputation, kept current, shared in email signatures and treated as a first impression for new business contacts. That shift matters for marketing because it means a business’s people, not just its Company Page, are now part of how the business gets found and judged.
What’s still missing
LinkedIn marketing in 2010 is still mostly manual: there’s no equivalent yet to the automated lead-nurturing tools businesses have built up around email, and Company Pages launched with a fairly basic feature set compared to what Facebook Pages now offer. What’s clear is that the audience has become too large and too professionally relevant to keep ignoring, even while the tools built specifically for marketing on it are still catching up to the size of that audience.
Seven years after starting as a place to store a resume, LinkedIn enters next year as something closer to the professional layer of the web, with a marketing toolset that, as of this month, finally matches that role. Businesses that build a real Company Page presence and contribute to relevant Groups now are positioning themselves ahead of a network that’s still figuring out how big its marketing ambitions are.
