5 Tips To Rock Your Content Strategy With LinkedIn Showcase Pages This past November, LinkedIn introduced Showcase Pages, a new feature designed to help businesses better market their brand(s), products, services, verticals, and more. On its blog, LinkedIn explained that this new feature would provide businesses the opportunity to “spotlight” specific parts of their company, not just the organization as a whole. This is meant to ensure that users can access content that’s most relevant to their needs and interests. For example, the average consumer might not be interested in the various positions you’re currently recruiting. However, they may be very interested in learning more about a new product or service you’re offering, or about something related to customer support. Showcase Pages are basically specific profile pages for any aspect of your business that you’d like to show off. This new feature has been welcomed with open arms by business owners, marketers, recruiters, PR professionals and others. Many major organizations already create multiple Twitter accounts and Facebook profiles for various parts of their business, so it makes sense for LinkedIn to offer functionality that meets this need. If you’re ready to start using Showcase Pages to help with your social media and content marketing efforts, follow these five tips. 1. Remember SEO Business owners use search engine optimization tips to support their blogging strategies and rank highly in Google’s search engine results pages. However, few company leaders follow these best practices on social media, mostly because every network has its own search algorithm. You can’t afford to think like this when using Showcase Pages because SEO can go a long way towards ensuring success. If you don’t follow basic SEO best practices, your profiles will likely be ignored by most of LinkedIn’s audience. This means that your pages have to be developed like other content on your website. The easiest way to start is by strategically including keywords in the title, meta description and copy (ideally, a target phrase would be written every 100 words within the body). Next, you need to think about more abstract elements like subject-matter expertise and originality. If your page is filled with simple and repetitive content, it won’t be effective. Always create content with purpose. Never create content simply for the sake of creating content. 2. Make one Showcase Page for each offering Adobe ranked number one on Fox Business’ list of top company LinkedIn pages recently, partially because it does an amazing job with Showcase Pages. The software developer has created profiles for various products, including Adobe Marketing Cloud and Adobe Creative Cloud (#Smart!). Adobe set a clear example that you should replicate. Instead of only making a couple of Showcase Pages, you should develop one for each of your products or services. In most instances, your customers only want a few of your offerings and don’t want to know about anything else. By creating pages for everything, you can ensure that customers can find information on the specific items or services that they enjoy. This might take some time, but it will be well worth it in the long run. 3. Track the numbers Social media marketing is all about analytics. As the saying goes, “you can’t manage what you don’t measure”. You need to review metrics whenever possible to ensure that your campaigns are successful. Also, by identifying what content is successful, you can build upon that success by creating more of it. Fortunately, LinkedIn has made this easy with Showcase Pages. Companies can gain valuable learning’s when viewing the data behind engagement, trends and demographics. These analytics can show you how frequently consumers interact with your content, what they’re responding to, similarities between users and more. This deep level of insight should be capitalized on at every turn. Companies should go over their analytics on a regular basis to ensure that they’re maximizing the potential of their Showcase Pages. Review the numbers at least twice a month. See which posts got the most attention and generated the most responses among your target audience. Use this information to inform future content by tailoring your updates accordingly. Exercise some caution and be careful to differentiate data from your Showcase Pages and your main profile. If you ever confuse the two, you won’t be able to make the best business decisions for your strategy. While you can obviously recover from a mistake, it could take some time to right the ship, and time is something you don’t want to waste when marketing your business. 4. Be unique Whenever businesses get their hands on a new marketing tool, it seems only natural that many look for the easiest way to use it. This can sometimes result in falling back on something simple – like recycling content from other platforms. This strategy eliminates all of the work involved with development and publication. Its simple…easy. But you shouldn’t take the easy way out. This isn’t efficiency – it’s laziness and it can be costly. While there’s no doubt it can be difficult to suddenly add another channel to your marketing strategy, that doesn’t mean you can simply mail it in. If you’re just copying and pasting content, you’ll likely bore your followers and you’ll eventually be penalized for self-plagiarism. Think about it from a follower’s perspective. Say someone is subscribed to your Facebook, Twitter and Showcase Page on LinkedIn. This person will see everything you post, so if you’re just publishing the same stuff over and over again, he or she will become disengaged with your content. This could easily cause someone to disconnect from you on every social channel. This is what is commonly called a lose-lose strategy. 5. Stick with it Showcase Pages were only introduced a few months ago making them the new kid on the social media and content marketing block. As with many new social apps, tools and features, there’s a lot of buzz in the beginning and rush to get on board. However, eventually the hype wears off… and marketers and others fall back on their old ways. Don’t let this happen to you. LinkedIn has been making a lot of great moves lately and their popularity is soaring. This is likely to continue for the foreseeable future, especially with this weeks announcement that their publishing platform will now be open to all members (#gamechanger). A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to see Gary Vaynerchuk, and among the many things he said that stuck with me was this: “Some great things are coming for LinkedIn, build your pages and grow your following now, you won’t be disappointed that you did, in the future.” That’s advice I believe every business marketer should heed. By: Martin Jones
Posted on: Thu, 27 Feb 2014 23:59:32 +0000
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