Let’s take a minute to focus on LinkedIn.

We use LinkedIn all the time.  It’s great for making professional connections, but is often mistaken as a social media tool one can use for marketing.

In this post I will beg to differ.

But first, just so you’ll know how comfortable I am contradicting myself, here’s a list of all the things you can do with your company page to expand your audience:

• Represent your brand
• Join and interact with groups
• Invite friends to follow your company page
• Add a company follow button to your own page
• Post well crafted company updates

Sounds a lot like the kind of thing you could do on Facebook or Google+, right? 

LinkedIn also suggests linking to company page in your marketing – I don’t.

LinkedIn suggests buying advertising to promote company page – I don’t.

And why not?

Few things:

Let’s say you run an eCommerce platform.  Do you want to be spending large amounts of time and resource to divert traffic away from your page and on to LinkedIn?  Hells to the no.

Do represent your brand well on LinkedIn, but if interested parties want to learn more, they should be going to your website, not someone else’s.

Let’s say you’re planning a kickstarter campaign and are drumming up some buzz to get support for the campaign.  Can you preform mass outreach on LinkedIn?  Not really.  

That “follow company” button?  It’s broken about 90% of the time.  Relatively new tool, still some bugs to sort out.  

You can, as LinkedIn recommends, add a link to your company page to things like your email signature or digital newsletter campaigns.  My problem with that is if your target audience is already paying attention, you want to remain focused on your goal: kickstarter donations, not sending existing fans to LinkedIn.

Let’s say you’re looking to recruit new talent to your organization.  This is where you can use your LinkedIn company page to premium effect.  That’s because your market (new talent) is already on LinkedIn and looking for what you have.

LinkedIn pages are still relatively new, so the situation could be different a year from now.  In the meantime though,

• Don’t get distracted by glittery object syndrome.  
• Represent yourself and your company on LinkedIn, but don’t obsess over the number of folks following your company page.  
• Remain focused on the larger goals at hand, and you’ll know whether you should pay extra attention to those pages or not.

Still confused?  Schedule a free one-hour training call and I’ll help you figure out which marketing platforms you should be using.