Bottom Line: LinkedIn shows the power of harnessing social media
LINKEDIN, the social network for professionals, this week ran a fantastically successful social marketing campaign, showing how one social network can harness the power of another to get its message out.
To celebrate reaching 200m profiles, LinkedIn sent emails to many of its users congratulating them on being in the top 10 per cent, five per cent or one per cent most viewed profiles.
The ego boost that these messages gave to users receiving the emails led to many of them turning to social media to celebrate their popularity. Others took to Twitter to double check the authenticity of the email.
The impact is seen at a glance on YouGov’s social media audience measurement tool, SoMA.
On the four days the emails went out, LinkedIn achieved reach figures on Twitter (that is, the percentage of the UK Twitter population hearing about them) of up to 13 per cent.
The firm then got a secondary boost earlier this week when articles started appearing talking about the success of the campaign, which enabled LinkedIn to achieve 18 per cent reach, which came despite a big drop in the volume of tweets.
ONLINE TALK SNOWBALLS
Combining the initial hit and the follow-up story, LinkedIn has reached 40 per cent of UK Twitter users since 7 February. All of this was achieved simply by running a global event driven marketing campaign that persuaded recipients to talk about it on social media.
Pretty impressive stuff, made even more so by the audience that LinkedIn managed to reach. The most valuable audience for the professional networking giant is in the higher income brackets, and the second chart shows the reach amongst those earning £50,000 or more.
Among this group, LinkedIn reached over 15 per cent of the Twitter audience on three separate occasions, and got a total of 45 per cent reach over the period.
Stephan Shakespeare is the chief executive of YouGov