Archive for the ‘LinkedIn’ Category

Social media sites now account for nearly 15% of referral traffic to B2B websites that have a social media presence, according to the LeadForce1 analysis of 4.4 million leads analysed over a three-month period.

LinkedIn is the top referrer, accounting for 27.1% of traffic to B2B sites, followed by Wikipedia (16.8%).

Bookmarking site Reddit (18.4%) and developer site Dzone (13.0) also feature prominently, though this is probably due to the relatively high number of tech companies included in the study.

Meanwhile, Twitter accounts for just 9.5% of referred traffic to B2B sites and Facebook 6.9%.

Visitors referred to B2B websites from LinkedIn are more interested in finding out about the people within a company rather than what the company does: The most frequently visited Web pages are “management team” pages (13.76%) and “contact us” pages (13.49%). Read the rest of this entry »

While it may have been Twitter’s year from a publicity point of view, LinkedIn, the grand old dame of business social networking – who turned seven this month, continues to dominate corporate America. New research from Netprospex shows that 43% of large company employees are members of the site.

Facebook is a distant second with 11% while Twitter languishes back in fifth spot (3%) behind Flickr and MySpace (both 4%). You quite often hear the phrase in relation to consumer social media ‘we need to fish where the fishes are’  but how often do you hear of the same thing translated to B2B, i.e., LinkedIn marketing campaigns

In our experience of LinkedIn marketing, judicious seeding of content can generate 75% of referred website traffic, far more than Twitter can manage, so why not do more of it?

The answer may lie in another recent study, marketers were asked what the main obstacles are to using social media. They said lack of analytics (35%), lack of management buy-in (25%)  and that their audience isn’t yet active on social media (21%). Read the rest of this entry »

The use of LinkedIn for B2B sales prospecting has increased by 47.8% since last year, according to US research from OneSource, reported in Emarketer.

Around 20 percent of those polled were also increasing their use of  blogs, Facebook and Twitter for prospecting purposes, though the overall majority still do not use social media for prospecting.

The most popular approach for gaining qualified leads remains outbound prospecting, which was rated 3.7 out of five for effectiveness, followed by the company website (2.9), inbound calls (2.6), email campaigns (2.6), shows & events (2.5), social networking (2.1) , direct mail (2.1)  and webinars (1.8).

In January Hubspot research showed that 45% of US companies who have used LinkedIn for marketing had acquired a customer through the site. Company blogs were considered effective for 43% of respondents, while Twitter for 38%  and Facebook for 33%.

LinkedIn has announced a new job matching service which automatically suggests qualified candidates from their 60 million strong professional database.

Called ‘Real-Time Profile Matches’ and currently in beta mode,  LinkedIn say they have developed proprietary technology “to make it faster and easier both for users to find the right jobs and for hiring companies to find the right talent.”

Hiring managers and recruiters will see qualified candidates immediately after posting a job in the form of a ‘job poster’ containing up to 24 profiles of qualified candidates, presented in business card form.

Within the job poster recruiters can view the profile of each match and contact those that are a good fit. Read the rest of this entry »

B2B marketers intend to increase spend on social media by 43% in 2010, while overall marketing budgets remain static, a survey by US research firm Outsell has reported.

However, when asked which social media sites carried the most influence for B2B marketers, surprisingly, Facebook was considered effective by the most respondents – 51%, followed by LinkedIn – 45% and Twitter – 35%.

As eMarketer points out, this is at odds with Hubspot’s survey of lead generation amongst North American B2B marketers where 45% considered LinkedIn most effective with Facebook at 33%.

The contradiction perhaps reveals a gap between understanding that social networking is important and knowing how to implement a social media strategy in the B2B market. I’m with Hubspot, LinkedIn is definitely the better route for B2B marketers at this point, combined with Twitter.

LinkedIn was the favourite social media site for professionals at work in 2009, with 86% of worldwide internet users referring to it, a jump of 24% on 2008.

The survey from internet security firm FaceTime Communications shows that most professionals use LinkedIn to network with colleagues (79%), to learn about colleagues (66%) and for general research (61%). Only 37% were using LinkedIn for marketing to customers.

While only 13% said they used Twitter in 2008 for work purposes, the number leapt to 76% in 2009, overtaking Digg, Delicious and YouTube in the professional social networking pecking order though these also experienced substantial increases.

Facebook is still regarded as mainly a personal social networking site and in another survey reported in eMarketer, by Liberty Mutual, three quarters of employees Read the rest of this entry »