Does higher brand visibility on LinkedIn equate to higher business conversion rates? Here’s why it pays to build authority on LinkedIn business.
LinkedIn is the world’s largest business networking platform for a good reason. In 2022, the social media network will have a global membership of over 810 million registered users, spanning over 57 million companies. As far as any lead generation tool goes, no other has a user base as expansive and intricately targeted around business professionals.
Your social teams might say, “oh, it’s only for corporate communications and B2B selling,” however that’s overlooking with a single-narrowed view that LinkedIn users are not potential key drivers for your business.
While LinkedIn may seem like the elder brother to its younger and undoubtedly trendier counterparts like TikTok and Instagram, there’s more to it than meets the eye. Yes, your target audience comprises the younger generation – but they too, like everything else on Earth, are bound to grow older. With Millennials and Gen Zs making up close to 80% of LinkedIn’s user base in 2021, that means sooner or later, an increasing number of your desired audience will find themselves using LinkedIn if they have not already done so.
LinkedIn is the first door for many looking to navigate the wider industry and build connections with individuals they’ll never possibly meet in real life when it comes to market reach. The ability to instantly connect with other professionals using advanced search filters makes LinkedIn so much more resourceful than your standard social media platform.
For brands and enterprises, maintaining your brand authority is one of the most crucial ways to stay ahead of your competition and become top of mind with your audience. LinkedIn provides businesses with the ideal model to transform perspectives and humanize your brand.
Like any other social profile, your business reputation is foremost defined by having its own business page. Audience trust and authenticity are instantly impressed. The more your audience sees that they are connecting with a “human,” the better it smoothes their decision-making process down the line.
Social listening is AI-powered software that allows users to efficiently aggregate first-hand data from online conversations on social media and web sources. Brands acquire social listening services to automatically survey and identify critical information on mentions related to their reputation, competitors, and industry.
However, it is also important to note that not all social listening providers have the social media coverage required for your social monitoring needs. Here’s how to choose the right social listening partner to give your team more agency to produce consumer-resonant strategies.
Here are four definitive ways to benefit businesses like yours from having data-driven strategies to improve their brand authority on LinkedIn.
1. Brand Reputation
With over 800 million users on LinkedIn made up of professionals, thought leaders, and decision-makers, the social platform represents a population integral for businesses to inspire consumer trust and loyalty, command positive brand reputation, and overall authority in their respective industries.
Active users on LinkedIn are usually there for a specific purpose, whether the use is for business or personal. Having favorable KPIs on your business page, particularly on publicly visible information, such as audience growth and post engagement, can be a good indicator of your level of brand awareness.
Having a social listening tool to monitor LinkedIn reputation can quickly provide you with the necessary data to inform strategies to boost your online authority. Effectively track conversations and sentiment around your brand or key stakeholders, giving you the extra bandwidth to detect growth opportunities or anticipate threats to your brand image.
Access to Pinpoint Monitoring
With Digimind Social, you can observe and track the volume of mentions your brand receives at a glance intuitively through multiple easy-to-view charts. The flexibility of looking at data from a timeline enables you to rapidly conduct an in-depth analysis of data points and understand conversations from a micro perspective.
Digimind Social’s robust classification features can readily break down social mentions by key topics.
Oversee General Sentiment
Having oversight of your brand is pointless without the right metrics like audience sentiment to go with it. There is more value in data for your stakeholders to obtain a complete picture of the conversations in the background.
One of the prominent features in social listening is sentiment analysis, where machine learning software can use natural language processing (NLP) to categorize text emotion from the positives and the negatives.
Say you decided to investigate a key topic like “airlines.” Given the nature of how popular travel is right now amid the pandemic, you will be certain to discover interesting conversations on LinkedIn, explicitly concerning your brand that is tagged.
Digimind Social can show you an evolution of sentiment over a period, giving you a longitudinal perspective for brand reputation analysis on LinkedIn.
From there, you will be able to have a detailed view of the overall sentiment, observe the volume of positive and negative mentions surfacing and, if need be, go further into investigating how implicated your brand is around a key topic on LinkedIn.
Track Stakeholders for Corporate Governance
Often, you would want to have oversight on every discussion that surrounds your brand reputation, which includes monitoring notable stakeholders, like employees, board members, or key opinion leaders, to name a few.
Using a monitoring tool enables a swift collection of mentions around persons of interest. Your analytics and social teams can be easily alerted when passing a certain threshold for negative sentiment, quelling potential crises before they erupt, and that your company’s reputation is upheld by those who represent your brand image.
Here, in this example, is a list of board members of Air France:
Social monitoring tools like Digimind Social have capabilities to track key profiles on social media.
Identify key company employees who can effectively influence your target audience and leverage to increase your brand engagement. Similar to what was mentioned earlier, track sentiment around these stakeholders so you can sieve out and inform about detractors that your brand needs to be wary of urgently.
In addition, the level of stakeholder monitoring can be extended to a granular scope, where you could track various determinants, such as:
- What specific products or services are mentioned
- Where these conversations are happening most on any channel
- Why these conversations are of importance to your brand
- How often do these stakeholders communicate sensitive information
In whatever case, you can be sure that LinkedIn Monitoring is your best bet at tracking and managing how your business authority is perceived in the social media platform, allowing you to respond rapidly to activities in real time.
2. Competitive Intelligence
LinkedIn goes beyond the view as a social networking platform for professionals; it also has to be viewed strategically for businesses to convey trust, establish currency, and augment their visibility among rival companies.
In the B2B sector, LinkedIn is all the more critical to survey your business environment and understand what your competitors are doing or sharing with the broader community. Having an impressionable company page should be the first goal brands start building, where core values are publicly displayed and employees, partners, and prospective leads conjunct in one source.
Developing competitive intelligence can be straightforward if you invest in the right tools that automatically bring topline data about your competitors. LinkedIn Monitoring with Digimind Social can help you discover potential threats and opportunities by collecting valuable insights on your competitors’ moves through their social activities.
For example, corporate communication about new mergers and acquisitions is standard practice on LinkedIn. With social listening, you primarily want to have up-to-date, real-time information about your competitors’ developments on investments, innovations, and offerings to funnel strategy making – providing your decision-makers a glimpse into the potential pitfalls and advantages of being a first-mover.
Benchmark Competitors in Comparison
Digimind Social can classify key topics and themes against other competitors at a glance to help benchmark your positionings.
Having a dashboard that instantly reflects critical information on competitors with similar offerings can be helpful when making sense of the buzz going around. A powerful social media listening tool that can synthesize Share of Voice (SoV) will be a must-have feature, as it will bring context and significance to why a particular brand could be performing well.
Just from identifying and benchmarking your competitor's activities, you can start to paint a holistic understanding of how it matters to your brand’s strategy and what you need to prioritize next to maintain your leadership on LinkedIn. Analysts can also utilize LinkedIn Monitoring to identify emerging players and start-ups in a particular sector or market that you want to develop your business.
In addition, you can learn the sentiment behind public perception in terms of what people like and dislike about your competitors through micro and macro analysis. While you may already have a good idea about your rival’s unique differentiators, social media monitoring data can go a long way to complementing technical specifications. Generating audience feedback and reviews on different areas – for instance, product, customer service, or overall business culture – which may otherwise go unnoticed or be difficult to perceive.
3. Market Insights
Quickly putting insights into strategies cannot be understated in a fast-moving market, where your competitors might have the luxury of more significant resources to execute and deliver strategies quicker than you.
Brands must leverage social media trends to stay informed of leading strategies and best practices. What matters to your team is having the latest market developments at their fingertips efficiently, rather than spending person-hours to do the same of sourcing, collecting, and analyzing.
Like any other social media platform, LinkedIn is an outlet for users to share relevant news-worthy content, personal opinion, and notably experiences. However, unlike other social platforms, the nature of LinkedIn’s feed is business-centric. You continually cement your authority status as a market leader by increasing how your brand’s relevance.
To center your brand on relevance, acquiring a LinkedIn Monitoring tool will allow you to stay on top of your industry’s new technologies, innovations, and most of all, consumer behaviors and expectations. Having a dedicated platform to improve your understanding of the business environment – which includes novel technologies, competitors’ unique differentiating points, and potential threats – will help your brand to remain at the forefront of innovation.
Trendsighting Opportunites
Digimind Social helps you stay on top of trends and align new opportunities for building market analyses.
Firstly, when using a social listening tool, you want to build a list of key topics directly related to your brand. Once data have been collected, begin navigating to track trending topics regarding those topics. For example, by choosing to follow conversations around the airline industry, you may find slews of discussions around “Digital Identity,” “Urbain Air Mobility,” “Sustainability,” or even “metaverses.”
With LinkedIn Monitoring, you can easily track all public conversations around your defined topics on a chosen period. If not, you can also filter down to Top Hashtags to have a more granular view of online discussions.
By breaking down LinkedIn conversations in a segmented and classified perspective, you can pinpoint which content to replicate that could foreseeably drive the most engagement towards your business authority.
4. Brand Engagement and Campaign Analysis
Finally, you want to evaluate your brand performance at the end of the day. It is not enough to make the necessary improvements but ultimately lack the requisite tools to validate how your brand has performed, especially against competitors.
Here is where LinkedIn Analytics comes in handy.
Digimind Social comes equipped with analytics modules to provide you key data about how much growth there is from period to period, whether you are concerned about community followers, engagement, or the volume of publications made.
Your business authority hinges on how well your owned media is perceived across your social community. Tracking your follower growth over time will be useful to attribute the impact of your campaign and recognize which content pieces create the most traction.
Getting topline data on your audience will be fundamental to how you benchmark your brand against key players in your market. Not only can you observe your business profile, but you can also do similarly to track the profile of other competitors. In this example, we paired two leading brands, Air France and Qatar Airways, to highlight which brand fared better when it comes to community engagement.
Using LinkedIn as a Touchpoint to Boost Business Growth
Digital marketers today should prioritize incorporating LinkedIn as a focal point for improving marketing, sales, and customer experience efforts. LinkedIn is all about knowing where, when, what, and how to position your brand into social conversations, which strengthens your business authority by providing relevant value to prospects.
From there, building business authority will eventually show returns for driving conversions as online behavior indicates that 80% of social media leads visiting B2B company websites is through LinkedIn.
With social media monitoring tools like Digimind, your teams can automatically receive vital information or monitor different touchpoints on LinkedIn to empower strategies and support your insights.
For instance, consider partnering with key influencers to talk about your brand. 45% of sales have at least some touchpoint with renowned thought leaders during the purchasing process on LinkedIn. How do you find who is deeply rooted in their community? Or identify their potential reach and engagement?
The simplest way to ask yourself if you are equipped with the right monitoring and analytics stack is this: how do you locate conversations and trends that matter to your brand?
Discover LinkedIn Monitoring and Analytics with Digimind Social and experience what it is like to listen intelligently.
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