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.

Case Study: Social Media presence of Goldman Sachs: Looking to improve presence

Despite being one of the biggest investor in Social Media companies like Facebook, Goldman Sachs presence on Social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube is quite lackluster. Goldman Sachs joined Facebook in June 2009 and till now it has only 20,000 fans, mere 16,000 likes which is far below when compared to its peers in the Financial Services industry and also has many negative comments about the bank on the Facebook page. It started its twitter account in May 2012 and since then it has 22,000 followers and the twitter account highlights the events, work, research and employees.  Goldman Sachs official twitter account is nothing compared to a parody feed called @GSElevator Gossip, which has over 320,000 followers which reports the various conversations overheard in the bank’s elevators. Goldman Sachs LinkedIn presence has 90,000 followers and is limited to job openings, recruiting interns and informing about employee update and new hires. In February 2012, Goldman Sachs launched YouTube channel and it features videos of employees discussing careers; experts interviewed on topics such as the global economy; clients talking about relationship & work and its corporate citizenship programs. Goldman Sachs is looking to hire a fulltime social community manager who will manage its social media presence and will also monitor the activity.

The reason for such a lackluster presence for Goldman Sachs and slowly improving social media presence for most of the Banks and Financial Institutions is due to the stringent financial regulations by the regulators. Broker, dealers, Relationship managers must comply with very stringent regulations regarding communications with their clients which had become a negating factor. The SEC and FINRA quickly classified social media interactions as records just like emails or physical communications which means they must be archived and managed according to the same rules and which also means tight policing and steep sanctions these institutions face in terms of violations from the SEC/other regulators will also be applied to social media records. Most of the financial institutions were not confident that they could comply with such stringent regulations while using social media so they avoided using it. But there are significant benefits in using social media like advisors/traders/relationship managers can build trust with clients, network more effectively and use social media as a marketing tool for more business and with new tools available that help in archiving and managing social media interactions effectively, Goldman Sachs and other Financial institutions & banks have been actively improving their social media presence. Social Media policy is in place and employees are being trained in terms of how to utilize and manage the social media presence, regulatory aspects and precautions to be taken during client interactions is also provided to all the client facing teams.

Banks & Financial Institutions need to understand that the new era financial customers, clients and public are social media savvy users which also has become an active part of their day to day lives and Social media is disrupting the financial industry with the emergence of social media real time money, investment and trading communities and crowd financing which is funding new players. All the above factors have forced the financial institutions to enter the open and transparent world of Social media. Goldman Sachs too is following and improving presence.