LinkedIn creates guide for social media managers and professionals

Sahail Ashraf posted on 23 September 2020

LinkedIn has always helped users with guides and advice. Now it’s brought out a brand new guide for social media managers. Is it worth a read?

LinkedIn is a huge professional network, and it continues to grow and exceed expectations. The social media platform has also been pushing recently to make sure it is more accessible to its users. This has involved making it’s feeds less stuffy and more like those of Facebook and other social giants. Things are changing, in other words.

Now, LinkedIn has decided to pull together a special guide for social media managers and professionals. And it’s a full guide that offers a ton of advice. We thought we would get into it and see what advice and insights we can glean.

The guide kind of starts out with the basics, a real attempt to explain why social media marketing is important for a business. Readers of this blog will need no convincing of this, but it seems LinkedIn is jumping on the cause that has motivated so many social media channels recently. It’s effectively reminding us of what is important with social media marketing, quite possibly in an attempt to get even more people on board.

However, section 2 cuts right to the chase. It’s called ‘Why social media managers should spend time on LinkedIn’. Right there, it shows exactly what LinkedIn is trying to achieve with the guide, and it actually delivers a good pitch.

The whole crux of LinkedIn’s argument here is that, yes, prospects do spend time on other social media platforms, but with LinkedIn they are simply in a different state of mind than they are on Facebook,or Twitter. LinkedIn argues that contacts on LinkedIn are in the right place and the right mindset to purchase. It’s a bold claim, but it does kind of make sense. LinkedIn has very carefully cultivated a professional feel and approach, one that fits the B2B model easily. You don’t go on there to share funny cat videos or to rant about the latest TV plot twist. You go on there to find useful information about business topics, and to connect with people in your industry or professional area of interest. So it makes sense to say that people on LinkedIn are simply in a different place than they are on other platforms.

Then the report hits you with the numbers. It talks about having well over 600 million members. That stat alone is one to raise eyebrows if you aren’t already on LinkedIn for your brand. But it gets even more interesting, because it starts dishing out percentages that seem truly compelling. 

One key percentage is that 92% of B2B marketers use LinkedIn to share content. This is important, and a social media manager isn’t going to ignore a stat like that one. However, the truly compelling stat comes when the report states that 90% of B2B marketers leverage LinkedIn over other platforms. 

How to tell your story

The next key section is about storytelling. And no matter what people may think about LinkedIn, this one is absolutely on the money.

This section really dives deep into how to properly manage your LinkedIn page to drive traffic and growth. One thing that really sets LinkedIn apart from other channels (until recently at least) is its willingness to help people get the most out of the platform. It’s full of support and advice. The best thing about this support and advice is that it is actionable and actually very effective. Whenever LinkedIn decides to help users, it always goes all out.

That is very much the case here, with clear advice on setting up pages, the customer journey and other aspects of building a presence on LinkedIn. It’s just helpful, plain and simple.

The guide then goes on to talk about setting up content calendars and using the famous 4.1.1 rule for content.

Is it useful?

Like most great pieces of advice, this guide is only useful if people act upon it. However, there is one key aspect here that makes it potentially one of the most useful guides you can have. 

The marketing team at LinkedIn (the team that created the guide) literally shows you the step by step process it took to get to a million followers on LinkedIn. Now, if we are looking at the exact same process used to get 1 million followers, and the guys who work at the place where all this happens are telling us what to do, we would be kind of foolish not to follow their lead, right?

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