No doubt that social networking plays an important role in business activities today. But among ordinary social websites that still can be useful for your business, LinkedIn takes a prominent position. Started in 2003, the network’s popularity has been fantastically increasing over the past years and still proceeds to grow rapidly. For only the first two years, the platform had gained more than 1.5 million subscribers.
Being a professional platform designed for business, the website remains the most powerful engine for building relations, establishing connections, and leveraging existing communication. The service is a great way not only to attract talents to your business but also to promote yourself by driving traffic to the sources, engaging target clients and business partners.
Thus, if you are on the way to start marketing and thinking about what online strategy to apply, LinkedIn could be the greatest option to choose from. If to consider widely-used social websites, such as Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube, using them for business purposes can be effective, however there you will spend more time to filter and search for target users among an enormous number of people with various intents. As to LinkedIn, the majority of platform members have almost the same goal – business. A probability to meet core clients becomes much higher. Businesses get direct communication with clients, thus they can easily offer their products, services, and information about updates.
To understand the power of the network, its today’s impact on business, and to work out your own marketing strategy, it can be useful to turn to the up-to-date stats and current general users’ tendencies. These data are to assist you in understanding the network itself and its members, their goals, needs, expectations. Thus, you will maximize the network’s potential to enhance business and reach your goals.
No matter whether you are going to use the website for a selling process, for e-commerce purposes, or advertising, before performing yourself on the network, you should be aware of its demographics, users, possibilities, advertising statistics, etc.
LinkedIn users
Since 2011 the quantity of platform members has almost tripled, and nowadays the website shows off more than 600 million subscribers in more than 200 countries globally with two new users signing up every second. The stats also report various participation habits based on users’ gender. As women are much choosier in job hunting than men, the quantity of female users is lower than male ones, that is, 43 percent of all website subscribers are women and 57 percent are men.
Most platform members are 25-34-year-old people, summing to 38 percent. The second biggest group consists of users aged from 35 to 54, summing to 30 percent. And the third biggest group includes 18-24-year-old participants, summing to 28 percent.
Approximately 50 percent of website members are educated people, college graduates. Considering this number can be very useful for planning an ad campaign and identifying targeted clients.
LinkedIn usage
With the increase in using smartphones, mobile internet data traffic has accordingly grown. That’s why today most platform’s traffic is from mobiles. Considering this fact can be a strong incentive for applying mobile commerce strategies.
One platform’s session lasts more than 5 minutes, over this period users manage to visit about six pages. As platform subscribers use the service for special purposes, such as job search, they don’t spend more than thirty minutes a day on the website.
Advertising and running business with LinkedIn
The website offers not only an effective recruiting service including employers’ and employees’ activities but also a great business environment with more than 30 million companies. This allows you to build connections, create strategic partnerships, generate leads, raise brand awareness, and plan a beneficial digital marketing strategy. You can effortlessly find a highly targeted audience because, according to the latest stats, the network has at minimum one high-level representative from every company registered on it. Moreover, every two out of three platform members are people who influence business decision-making, including managers and companies’ leaders.
The network is considered to take second place on the list of the most widely used services by B2B marketers, right after Facebook. Although the website is not as preferred as Facebook, marketers’ activity on it is on the increase today, which can be grounds for elaborating your strategy on the platform. When it comes to B2B, the website can be the most suitable service for quality lead capture, it is due to the network’s audience, including business professionals in search of connections.
While LinkedIn advertising is more expensive than Facebook or Twitter advertising, it’s worth this money. With its 600 million subscribers, it becomes a gold deposit for advertisers, attempting to reach the professionals via ads all over the world. Furthermore, the platform offers nine options of ads that differ in content, purpose, positioning, and shape. The possibilities vary from just posting a small article to shaping a presentation from SlideShare into an ad. In terms of advertising, it is also useful to know that a majority of customers report the website to be the most authoritative channel in the research process. Customers who rely on social networks for their buying decisions tend to get suggestions and to connect with vendors.
So, if you are not on the network so far, you may join a group of leading businesses right away, as you already have all the necessary data to take advantage and succeed.