LinkedIn group – maturing marketing tool
Got this LinkedIn mail. Spam really but let he who is without guilt cast the first stone. It’s promoting a specific LinkedIn group.
Dear Trefor,
Do you have an interest in keeping up with current and future trends concerning the technology industry? Do you have an opinion on how technology will influence our economy and society? Do you have viewpoints on questions such as:
Is it possible for artificial intelligence to produce real art?
Could tech companies really disrupt the automotive industry?
Tesla’s new battery for homes: disruptive innovation or hype?
These are just a few of the discussions that will be taking place in the Future Realties group. We would like to invite you to join and share your opinion with contributors from The Economist Intelligence Unit, along with industry experts in areas including Technology, Sustainability, Design, Life Sciences, Industrial Operations and Finance.
Learn, have your say and get involved in the debate.
Thank you,
The Future Realities Community,
Brought to you by Dassault Systèmes
Point is a company website is becoming less and less likely to be used by a company to attract attention to themselves. In this example LinkedIn is far more likely to have access to the people that Dassault want to engage with than their own website.
A company website will be seen to be 100% oriented to that company and not be able to be objective about life.
I only have to look at this site, trefor.net. These days we get few comments on actual posts (ok I might be writing blander stuff) than we do on links to those posts on LinkedIn and Facebook. I’ve also started to change the focus of broadbandrating.com, an affiliate marketing site, by adding business ISPs. We have been getting more shares on LinkedIn than on consumer sites such as Facebook. Follow the line of lest resistance I say. Facebook is still the goto place for consumers.
The Future Realities Group on LinkedIn was founded by Dassault Systems on June 2nd 2014 and has 14,113 members. I’m not one of them. You have to be careful not to join too many groups otherwise your timeline gets filled up with too much stuff for your brain to cope with.
Dassault will have steadily built up the membership using paid for messaging aka the one I received and by building up content useful to the people who join. Looking at the members, those I have some kind of link with are all C Level types, founders, Directors etc. That may be just because my own network is filled with people like that but it might also suggest that Dassault is being successful in attracting the types of people who influence strategy and direction in business. People who presumably Dassault thinks might influence the future success of their own business.
Now the chances of people clicking through to Dassault’s website and buying a product are not likely to be large. However as a tool in the marketing kitbag it seems to me to be very useful. The biggest problem is that such a tool needs a skilled craftsman to use it. So it isn’t just a case of “deciding to have a LinkedIn Group”. Somebody has to work it and that involves money. These activities need to be costed into a marketing plan.
It’s a wonder to me that commercial print houses still exist. The whole marketing world is moving has moved online.
I might be wrong but one of the problems I see there is that the number of online places people are converging on is not that big. We are talking Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Maybe I’m getting to be a creature of habit. I rarely go elsewhere unless one of those platforms has linked me to a specific story/site.
I do visit the BBC, Guardian and Telegraph websites but there it is almost a vain (ie not so productive) flick through looking for something interesting that is different. Most news sites carry the same stories these days.
There is anecdotal evidence (ie my gut feel) that successful posts, ones with a good level of visits and social media shares, source a lot of their visits and shares from those posts shared with a LinkedIn group. I don’t do enough of it really.
So there you have it. I suspect your business needs a LinkedIn group. Just make sure you manage it well (see this post for ref).