Social Media Marketing Strategy@ IBM LinkedIn Strategy

LinkedIn, the world’s largest professional networking site also one of the major social media platforms that companies across the world use to engage with customers, industry experts and others and also utilize LinkedIn to share brand marketing, company values, and product updates, with potential partners, investors, and customers. Initially most of the companies utilized LinkedIn for recruiting purposes like posting job opportunities, identifying talent and verifying the backgrounds. In a study carried by data analytics firm, Simply Measured, IBM has emerged as the top brand with maximum – 6,052 – number of engagements. IBM shares relevant industry articles to engage computing professionals.

IBM LinkedIn page has close to 1.5 million followers and millions of interactions every year. The company uses LinkedIn to let audience know happenings within the organization, and it also posts articles from around the Web on IBM-relevant topics. Topics like Big Data, Cloud Computing, Research, Innovation, latest product launches, etc. are all covered on the LinkedIn page. Followers comment on the updates and posts, like them and even start their own discussion threads that leads to the millions of interactions that makes IBM the most active company on LinkedIn. IBM promotes its services under the products and services tab, where various products like IBM Training and IBM Software are recommended by LinkedIn users.

For IBM LinkedIn is a crucial social media platform, both as a content channel and a discussion forum for IBM employees to actively engage with customers. “We are finding LinkedIn to be a promising content platform as opposed to just a recruiting platform,” said Ethan McCarty is the Director, Enterprise Social Strategy and Programs for IBM. “Usage of the site is trending a lot more toward professional content consumption – it’s not videos of cats. The fact is, people behave differently on different networks,” says McCarty. “On Twitter we try to structure content around an impactful headline. In [the Facebook] context, people want to talk about less technical topics and more societal impact kind of work. When it comes to LinkedIn, we tend to get deeper into the professional details. If you’re going into a community that’s all about smarter water management, we feel pretty confident about putting more technical water management content in there.”” he says in an interview with Lauren McKay, eMarketer.

LinkedIn Groups play a crucial role in pushing IBM content towards an important and informed expert audience with an advantage of pushing IBM employees to the forefront in engaging with customers and generating opportunities directly. “What’s nice and distinctive about LinkedIn is we can really emphasize interactions with IBM experts and the content they create,” says McCarty. LinkedIn is a perfect ecosystem for IBM as it includes discussion groups, recommendation ads, thousands of job postings, updates, comments, shares  and other forms of social display advertising that is generating significant return on investment for IBM and it also meets the fundamentals of IBM social media strategy of reach, engagement, amplification and conversion.