LinkedIn Breaks Through the Chinese Wall
By Kristina Klaffenboeck on 05/22/2014
With a social media landscape that changes nearly everyday, older networks need new and innovative ways to keep not only users, but advertisers engaged. LinkedIn, the world’s largest professional social media platform has found ways to do that by evolving and expanding its current network. Here’s what’s new at LinkedIn:
Welcome to China
In early May, LinkedIn launched its simplified Chinese language portal in China. While it already has over 4 million members in China, the majority of those members are Western-educated and/or expats living in China who use LinkedIn’s English-language pages. This marks LinkedIn’s first attempt at targeting the 140 million Chinese business professionals instead of their usual target: multinational Asian professionals who travel extensively outside of China.
Western social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube haven’t had it easy in China. The government blocks all three, leading to heavily government-censored imitations, of which there are also several for LinkedIn, all fighting for market share. But as a site where people upload their credentials and read articles from business leaders, CEO Jeff Weiner admits that he isn’t too worried about government censorship of LinkedIn.
Hopefully, where LinkedIn will be able to succeed is in harnessing its already existing world scale in order to bring relevant China-specific content to its new members.
How Is Your Content Performing?
LinkedIn has been slowly transitioning itself into a content-driven site for business and career advice content. To aid B2B advertisers in evaluating how their content is performing among its users, LinkedIn has started assigning each brand a score on the effectiveness of their content posts to company pages, their branded groups, and posts.
LinkedIn also allows brands to see trending content among specific audiences -- such as IT decision-makers no matter what brand has posted it. This is fantastic, safe, and currently free way for B2B marketers to see what content resonates best with their target audience, and to subsequently test any of their own content within the relevant audience network.
Next up: API
In April, LinkedIn announced five partners that can now sell Sponsored Updates (the in-feed ad format) using programmatic buying and a brand new dashboard. Partners include AdStage, Brand Networks, Shift, Salesforce ExactTarget Marketing Cloud, and Unified Social. The ad format itself, first concepted by Facebook, has only been active on LinkedIn for about a year, but the new API feature will allow for more sophisticated targeting of audiences at scale within LinkedIn’s platform. For example, rather than just C-Suite, advertisers can now narrow in on CIO, or IT decision-maker, whether or not that person has identified themselves and C-suite or not.
In the first few months of 2014 LinkedIn has made great strides in making it easier and more efficient for B2B marketers to target exactly the audiences they want to reach. For more reading on LinkedIn, check out the links below:
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