Recently, DJA attended a webinar by LinkedIn that provided excellent information on sponsored updates. Here’s a quick summary of what we learned.
Like other social media sites, LinkedIn has a section for people or businesses to post a status update where they can share information, links and photos. This is a great place to share company news and blog posts, and other interesting industry information to help position your company as a thought leader and generate traffic to your website.
Sponsored updates take these updates, and target them at specific audiences. Businesses only pay for a sponsored update when it is clicked and each update comes with “social share” buttons that are totally free to click.
LinkedIn suggests that sponsored updates follow these three rules:
- Snackable and Valuable – Get to the point quickly.
- Avoid hyper targeting. – If you’re overly targeted, you might miss out on key audience members that you hadn’t though about. Try to use a minimum sample size of 300,000 – 400,000.
- Test to understand your audience. Try A|B testing to see which types of messages work best for your audience. LinkedIn noted questions and content with images are often successful.
Even if you’re not using sponsored updates, LinkedIn recommends posting content once per day around normal working hours. And remember, updates go live immediately, so make sure your content is timely and relevant to the audience. Finally, LinkedIn suggests that the most successful posts include update text, a link and an image.