See below as an example, whether your post or someone else’s.
Here’s what I found surprising about LinkedIn.
We know our typical engagement rate on Facebook is 2-3%, so getting 1% on LinkedIn either means people don’t expect to engage as much in this context (you’d not talk loudly at a funeral versus at a party).
And LinkedIn’s algo isn’t as sophisticated yet in determining reach– chicken and egg problem, since there it’s easy to reach pretty much everyone on LinkedIn, as there aren’t many posts competing.
When you have a “hot” post or a “dead” post, the 100X rule of thumb breaks at either extreme. My latest 2 million impression post had 8,000 likes, which would imply 800,000 impressions.
But the impression to likes ratio on hot posts is higher, since there are more people to progressively get notified when people comment (especially) versus like.
Were it not for LinkedIn showing notification on each person engaging (much like Instagram does), your impressions wouldn’t be as high.
That said, I believe (but can’t verify) that frequency is way higher on viral posts. Meaning that the reach to engagement ratio on posts is likely flat, but that the same group of people are seeing the same posts over and over.
Thus, this isn’t an algorithmic issue for LinkedIn, but one of the early days of just not enough people posting relative to available inventory and LinkedIn notifications being “noisy”.
If you agree with this logic, you’ll jump on this bandwagon and do the “hero story” posts to grow your personal brand and your company’s exposure.
Follow Logan Young on LinkedIn to see how he’s been able to hit some home runs with purely organic LinkedIn posts (no boosting possible yet), despite having only 500 connections as of a couple months ago.
And see if your connection requests also increase at 1 to 20. In other words, for every 20 likes on your posts, you’ll get one connection request. I get 140 new connection requests a day, since I generate about 700 likes per day on my posts.
I’ve changed my mind. I’ve decided that I’m an INFLUENCER after all.
By working on ad campaigns, I INFLUENCE the client’s leads and sales.
By being on top of business communication– 900 emails a day– I INFLUENCE our projects getting done and INFLUENCE stuff not falling through the cracks.
In fact, the harder I work, the more I INFLUENCE the outcomes that I want to see happen. I still do speaking, podcasts, blog posts, Instagram selfies, and all that.
But that’s for building RELATIONSHIPS. Today in Las Vegas, there are plenty of scantily clad women and dudes on the strip handing out cards trying to INFLUENCE me.
The right-hand side ads fared poorly here, but delivered the most clicks and the highest share of new visitors. Of course, new visitors convert at a lower rate than retargeting traffic. So make sure you’re apples-to-apples.
LinkedIn converts 70% better than Facebook, but the traffic costs 4 times as much. Once they’re a lead, the conversion rates are similar, largely because we use ad copy that qualifies leads.
So the question is not “Is Facebook better than LinkedIn?”
Rather, keep the highest performing segments from both networks. If you can spare the effort to run campaigns on both networks, it’s well worth your time.
Your own results will vary, so test it on your own data and let us know!
Looks like the min CPC and CPM bids are determined dynamically by account and even down to the ad level, so the $4 min CPC mentioned previously isn’t accurate.
$10 min daily budget, which is not an issue for enterprise.
Notice that you can bid by CPM, too.
If you are confident in your content, then choose this option. Facebook will charge you about $12 for a thousand impressions in the newsfeed in the US. So you’re paying only double on LinkedIn, while getting a higher CTR, apples-to-apples.
Facebook has more traffic, is cheaper, is more “top-of-funnel”, and provides advanced lead-gen/conversion features. Read our side-by-side comparison here.
In B2B, few would dispute that LinkedIn has the highest quality traffic. Expensive, yes, but we can target by workplace, seniority, skill, interest, industry, geography, and so forth.
Here’s what you need to know:
Keep your audiences really small— only a few thousand– since the cost is higher.
We still recommend you create multiple ads to separate out the performance by target.
Unlike Facebook, you don’t have to post daily, since you can select multiple updates to sponsor in a particular campaign.
Test to see what works— but start with Facebook. In search, you start with Google and then move to Yahoo! and Bing. In social, you start with Facebook and move into LinkedIn and YouTube.
Here’s another one, this time from our company’s own page.
We got a respectable 2.5% click-through rate.
It cost us $80 for 16 clicks, which is a $5 CPC:
As we said before, the minimum CPC bid is $4, but we’ve been able to get $3 clicks by bidding CPM and having a killer CTR.
But here is what is surprising:
Notice that while the paid ads got 16 clicks, we got 45 clicks organically, nearly 3 times as many.
So if these paid clicks cost us $80, then it would have cost us nearly $240 to buy that same level of organic engagement.
If you believe that, then the moral of the story is that it’s much more effective to produce amazing content than it is to buy your way into the LinkedIn newsfeed.
Do you find it funny that we’re spending money on LinkedIn ads to discuss how LinkedIn ads are performing?
Or that we’re primarily using Facebook to market the research that we’re doing on LinkedIn?
But when your targeting is off, especially in the sacred newsfeed of friends and companies that users want to follow, you’re branded as a spammer.
Isn’t it interesting to see that spam is not about Viagra or weight loss supplements, but often the unintentional by-product of great brands who indiscriminately target?
It’s up to all of us to help companies of all sizes be more effective marketers.
Let us know how your LinkedIn campaigns fare on your business page!
