Why LinkedIn marketing is undervalued in B2B

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%).

So there appears to be a bit of a myth exposed here – if almost half of major corporate America is on LinkedIn, how can a fifth of marketers claim their customers don’t use social networks.

The truth is probably that B2B marketers don’t think of LinkedIn as a social networking tool in the same way as Twitter or even Facebook, yet it is actually the most powerful one of all.