Fig.

01

The
Essential
LinkedIn
Guide
for Marketers.
LinkedIn: For years now, LinkedIn has been the number one
network for B2B marketers and, from 2018 to 2019,

The Social it has increased in popularity among all marketers.

Brands have long utilized LinkedIn’s tools for recruitment,

Network for brand awareness, and lead generation. Now, as the

platform grows and its audience diversifies, LinkedIn has

Professionals also become a top channel for lifestyle and luxury B2C
products. It is also rapidly growing in the video space,

and Brands. with millions of users creating and sharing videos and
having meaningful conversations based on the content.

In this guide, you’ll learn how to:

1. Showcase your brand on LinkedIn.

2. Find and start a dialogue with new customers.

3. Promote career opportunities.

4. Generate new business in both the B2B

Fig. 02 and consumer spaces.
 Chapter 1:
About LinkedIn

Chapter 2:
Who Uses LinkedIn (and Why?)

Table of Chapter 3:

Contents.
LinkedIn for Every Marketer

Chapter 4:
What to Share on LinkedIn

Chapter 5:
Measuring Engagement On LinkedIn

Chapter 6:
Top 10 Takeaways
Chapter 1

About LinkedIn.
LinkedIn is a social network that functions much like LinkedIn provides a platform for
Facebook or Instagram — minus the baby photos and
both B2B and B2C marketers to:
weird memes. A strong set of norms permeates LinkedIn
and keeps profiles and posts professionally oriented. From
a marketing perspective, LinkedIn allows companies to ○○ Advertise with highly specific targeting
reach candidates, prospects and customers through their
business-oriented targeting capabilities. It’s also a rich ○○ Create and share content,
content-sharing community with video growing quickly including video
among marketers, sales people, and other users.
○○ Generate new business

○○ Attract talent and showcase

LinkedIn’s mission is company culture
to connect the world’s
○○ Find mentorship or mentees
professionals and provide
within their industry or vertical
job opportunities to
people around the globe. ○○ Engage with current customers
and offer support
Chapter 2
Who Uses LinkedIn (and Why?)
Since its founding in 2003, LinkedIn has become the
go-to social network for professionals and B2B marketers.
LinkedIn has over 645 million users worldwide, with 70%
of LinkedIn users coming from outside the US.
Education and earning
Most LinkedIn users are highly educated — as of 2019,
51% of all Americans with a college degree use LinkedIn.
This correlates with high earners: almost half (49%) of
LinkedIn users earn more than $75,000 per year. With this
information, it’s no surprise that 61 million LinkedIn users
are at senior levels and have decision making power.
51% of all Americans
with a college
degree use LinkedIn.
Demographics of LinkedIn Users.
LinkedIn skews male, with women making up 43% of total on LinkedIn, and B2B marketers consider LinkedIn the top
users. In terms of age, the largest and fastest growing content distribution platform.
portion of global LinkedIn users are between 25 and 34
However, despite the high density of users, LinkedIn
years old with 87 million millennials using the network.
has a large gap between content creators and content
Millennials make up the largest percentage of the
consumers. In fact, only three million (of the total 645
workforce and have proven to be more tech savvy and job-
million) LinkedIn users share content each week, which
oriented than previous generations.
means there’s a huge opportunity for your content to be
Among top brands, maintaining an active presence on seen and shared.
LinkedIn is de rigueur. 98% of Fortune 500 companies are

Age of U.S. LinkedIn users: LinkedIn users by the numbers:

18-29

30-49

50-64

65+
645M 200 63M 30M
LinkedIn countries unique monthly companies
users nationwide mobile users represented
Fig. 03 // Source: Pew Research Center Fig. 04
Why People Are
Using LinkedIn.
As a niche network, users of LinkedIn come for a specific
set of reasons. The most common use case is for job-
hunters and recruiters: LinkedIn has become one of
the most trafficked job listing sites in the world. While
recruitment is important and showcasing your brand
and incredible company culture can serve as a marketing
tool, let’s dive into how people are using LinkedIn in the
marketing space.
The second most common reason folks are using LinkedIn
is lead generation. Business professionals use LinkedIn
to target, profile, reach and convert new prospects.
LinkedIn offers a slew of tools to assist marketers and
growth hackers to reach their goals, from career-oriented
segmentation tools to native lead-gen ad formats.
Where Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram combine
both personal and business interests, LinkedIn is strictly for
professional development, which makes it a highly
In fact, LinkedIn is responsible
for 80% of all B2B leads that
come from social media.
successful marketing strategy. LinkedIn is 277% more
effective at generating leads than either Facebook
or Twitter.
Companies use LinkedIn as a tool for spreading brand
awareness, promoting new products and services, and
especially for employer branding. LinkedIn also offers tools
for consumer-oriented marketers to run campaigns.
It’s important to remember, however, that the average
LinkedIn user comes to the platform not to be marketed or
sold to. They derive value from staying in touch with their
professional networks, sharing their own accomplishments
or challenges, finding mentorship and community in their
industry and gaining knowledge. In some cases, that does
include seeking recommendations for new products or
services, which is really a marketer’s sweet spot.
Chapter 3
LinkedIn for Every Marketer.
Since LinkedIn is professional and helps
people find new roles, it is inherently data-
rich. This means that your content and
sponsored posts can get to exactly who
you want to be working with. While many
marketers have been using the platform for
a long time, over half of marketers are still
planning to increase their organic LinkedIn
presence as of 2019.
LINK E DI N TI P:
For those using LinkedIn
Career Pages, explore your
Talent Brand analytics to
learn more about your page
visitors, talent pipeline
and applicant behavior.
Employer branding
Employer branding is the process through which a company shares its
identity as a desirable workplace. Brands can share stories from current
employees of all levels to communicate their values, goals and day-to-day
experiences. They can answer questions from candidates and give a face
and personality to recruiters and talent acquisition teams.
Your brand is your product. Take care of your outward-facing persona and
develop a strong sense of identity, starting with the largest professional
network—LinkedIn.
As the industry go-to for employer branding, it’s also where talented
professionals go for new opportunities. By creating a strong and inclusive
employee brand, you’ll stand out on LinkedIn to impressive job seekers as
well as potential clients.
Having a good employer brand can also impact your bottom line — after
all, customers are naturally more interested in doing business with a
company that has a reputation for being a good place to work.
Top Tips 3. Add your company logo and an on-brand
cover image

You can use the cover image to promote a new product,

service, or event, or to convey general brand statements.
for Employer Branding
on LinkedIn. 4. Create a Careers Page with all of
your open job opportunities

1. Make sure your Company Page is set up Pro tip: If recruitment is a top priority, encourage job
and up to date seekers to sign up for Job Alerts with your company so
they’ll be notified every time you post a new position.
Enter your website, physical location(s),
company size and what industry you’re in.
5. Sponsor content about company culture

2. Write a concise and inspiring Whenever you post content related to employer branding
description of your company’s purpose (life around the office, employee accomplishments, new
and/or mission job opportunities, etc). make sure to give it a boost by
sponsoring it.
Throw in some keywords or hashtags
for extra credit.
6. Create Recruitment Ads for open positions

Use personalized, dynamic content to attract job seekers.

B2B Marketing Industry Job Title

on LinkedIn.
LinkedIn is known as the undisputed
champ of business marketing, making
it the B2B marketer’s playground. If
you sell a business-oriented product Keyword Skills
or service, LinkedIn has some of the
best targeting capabilities. If you’re
looking for a specific type of role or for
Language Education
companies within a niche industry, you
have almost 700 million professionals’
worth of data and targeting to find
exactly the title you need.

With LinkedIn, you can segment

audiences by industry, job title, seniority,
Seniority Location
skills, interests, groups, education, and
keyword, as well as standard filters like
Fig. 05
geographical location and language.
Find your target audience using an intersection of LinkedIn’s
member data like education, job title, and location.
Top Tips
for B2B marketing
on LinkedIn:

InMail ads
Advertise directly within LinkedIn’s
messaging tool. Write thoughtful, personal
messages and include a link in the CTA
and inline for a higher click through rate
(CTR). These campaigns don’t run exactly
like emails and work well as a way to boost
conversion for events, drive registrations
and convert prospects.

Fig. 06 // Source: LinkedIn

Audience Expansion vs
Lookalike Audience
Audience Expansion allows you to expand on a given set of
demographic data points to reach a wider net. LinkedIn’s
new feature, Lookalike Audience, is a more advanced
tool that helps you to match an already high-performing
audience to those with similar demographic information
in order to increase your network of quality prospects.
With Lookalike Audiences, you’ll have more control and
transparency about who you’re targeting.
Account Based
Marketing
Run ABM campaigns by targeting on the account level.
With LinkedIn’s targeting, you can match your accounts to
their database of over 30 million companies and narrow
your search to decision-makers at your top accounts.

Trends
Explore top performing content and find hot industry
topics. As a page administrator on LinkedIn, you can
choose a specific audience, view the pages they follow,
then explore trending topics. You can also view your post
performance to find high performing content based on
impressions, clicks, reactions, and engagement rate.

Fig. 07 // Source: LinkedIn

Retargeting
Re-engage visitors to your website with retargeting on
LinkedIn. Choose specific pages, like your pricing page, and
follow up with visitors on LinkedIn. Try pixel-based targeting
or list-based targeting to capture those who didn’t convert
the first time with related content, industry reports or demos.

Matched Audiences
Use your own data paired with LinkedIn’s data to create
custom, targeted audiences. Matched audiences help expand
your brand reach and find new customers.

Lead Gen forms

Have members register for events, download content, Fig. 08 // Source: LinkedIn

or join newsletters and track the ROI of your campaigns.

Sponsored content
Create native ads to promote content, tools, events, or job
postings in the LinkedIn newsfeed on mobile and desktop.
Use analytics to optimize and target specific audiences.
B2C Marketing
on LinkedIn.
LinkedIn is just as much a vital part of a B2C
marketer’s strategy as it is to a B2B marketer. With
unique and specific targeting capabilities, users
with decision-making power, and the draw of the
top online career network, consumer marketers
have an eager audience ready to interact. As a
B2C marketer on LinkedIn, focus on starting and
facilitating conversations and serving as a helpful
resource within your industry.

B2C marketers like the team at Kate Spade have

launched creative marketing campaigns leveraging
LinkedIn’s features. They targeted the very specific
audience of successful, busy, professional women
with their newest smart watch. The campaign
doubled their benchmark rate for engagement and
Fig. 10 // Source: Falcon.io
click-through and saw a 5x lift in engagement for
the overall campaign.
LinkedIn’s primary feature that supports a B2C
marketing strategy is data. Today’s consumers are
well-informed and want to read content, reviews
and industry comparisons before purchasing
new products. LinkedIn provides a place for B2C
Analyze your audience and
discover new demographics
Know who your audience is. LinkedIn’s admin dashboard
includes demographics, visitors, and a breakdown

marketers to directly target and gain valuable
information from their desired audience.
by job function, seniority, and other specific data
points. Centralize your social data using a social media
management platform to look for patterns and trends
among your database.

Curate and share trending

content with your target
LinkedIn audience
Drive users to your website and use highly visual content
to promote products. Join the conversations that matter
and provide helpful content like reports, product demos or
great reviews.

Keep the conversation going even when you’re on the

go with the LinkedIn mobile app. Show your audience
that you are a real person and that you care about them,
whether or not they are a current customer. Fig. 11 // Source: LinkedIn
Make your brand an
industry leader
Associate your company page with trending hashtags and
current campaigns. Be an active participant in relevant
conversation and provide resources for those in your
brand’s industry. Work with influencers and LinkedIn
personalities who are respected in your community.
Time-triggered targeting and
unconventional targeting
LinkedIn allows you to get really creative and specific with
targeting, including identifying and advertising to those
with changes to their profile. For example, someone with
a recent promotion may be more open to buying luxury
items, like a new car or watch.

Use creative and

custom ads
When creating custom Sponsored Posts, drive specific
actions with a customizable call-to-action button. Use
LinkedIn’s gallery and image-based posts to showcase
products, tell stories and complement special offers.

Fig. 12 // Source: LinkedIn

Chapter 4

What to Share on LinkedIn.

Content has proven to be an important factor in how
much people come back to LinkedIn. Creating and sharing
relevant content is an easy and free way to grow
brand awareness.
When publishing on LinkedIn, you’ll need to understand
both the audience and the medium through which your
audience receives your content. Every hour, the millions
of posts published to LinkedIn receive tens of thousands of
comments, meaning conversations are always happening.

Understanding
LinkedIn’s algorithm
LinkedIn’s algorithm, like Facebook or Instagram, shows
the audience what they think will be most relevant to
Fig. 13
them, rather than what was posted most recently.

They even published exactly how the

Companies who post at least every week see twice the
engagement with their content. algorithm works, explained visually:
 Basically, what this shows is that LinkedIn
wants to promote high-quality content that
has a high level of engagement. Beware:
content that is marked as spam or hidden
by your audience will get pushed down
in favor of content with likes, shares,
and comments. It’s all about what you’re
posting as it relates to your audience; if it’s
irrelevant or you’re posting too frequently,
you’ll have a tough time breaking through
to your desired news feeds.

Fig. 14 // Image via LinkedIn

 The LinkedIn Algorithm Favors:
○○ Engagement soon after posting as well as ○○ High quality content tailored to users’
posts receiving consistent attention and interests and behavior as well as quality
engagement content within the larger LinkedIn
community
○○ Likes, shares, comments, views, particularly
○○ Diversity in post-type: try videos, images,
from influential members – LinkedIn
links to articles, plain-text posts and
analyzes users’ influence by measuring their
shared posts from your team members
data and editorial history, who engages
with them, how fast they are growing their ○○ Professional growth advice
followers and overall how much they are
○○ Native content including videos, articles
contributing to conversations as an expert.
and images

○○ Content optimized for mobile ○○ Posting at least daily and keeping

cadence irregular
Organic Content Types.
Links
Use these posts for company updates, reports or tools.
When posting content on LinkedIn, try replacing the link
preview with a custom image and posting the link as the
first comment to encourage users to engage in
the conversation.
Images and text
These posts allow you to post either an image or text
(or both) with or without a link. These can be great as
conversation starters, questions, or regularly scheduled
“chats” with your audience. Add the link in the caption or
as a comment on the post.

LinkedIn articles
LinkedIn page admins can search their audience’s (page
followers’) interests and find trending articles, then share
them to their audience. Search through employees’
own high-performing content or mentions from your
community and share from the company page.

Videos
Fig. 15 // Source: LinkedIn
LinkedIn’s algorithm prefers posts with native videos
and users themselves are 20x more likely to share a post
that includes a video. Aim for one to two minutes and
include subtitles.
Sponsored Objective-Based
Content Advertising on LinkedIn
Sponsored Content are the native ads you can
promote on LinkedIn’s mobile and desktop news
feed. You can either publish your own content,
share industry articles, post videos, or advertise job
openings.

LinkedIn now has a new Campaign Manager that

is objective-based. Using the updated tool, you can
begin your ad campaign by choosing an objective
like brand awareness, hiring or website visits.
LinkedIn will automatically optimize your campaign
to your goal and give you tips on how to achieve
your desired results.

The platform’s Objective-Based Advertising goes

from the beginning of the campaign all the way
through to reporting based on your goals. Fig. 16 // Source: LinkedIn
Targeting
LinkedIn has one of the most specific audience
targeting capabilities of any other social
Job Experience Education
LinkedIn offers
network because it’s in the LinkedIn user or Job functions Degrees
targeting based on Job seniority Fields of study
job seeker’s best interest to provide data. Job these specific traits Job titles Member schools
Member skills
seekers want employers to find them based and categories:
Years of experience
on where they are, what education they
have, their interests, and their experience. Demographics Company Interests
By combining certain traits, like years of Age Company connections Member interests
Gender Company followers Member groups
experience and certain degrees, titles, or skills, Location Company industry Followed Hashtags
Language Company name
you can specifically find decision-makers with a Company size

skill or job function you’re looking for.

Create specific buyer personas and associated

audiences to create effective and cost-efficient
ads. The smaller your audience for each
specific target demographic, the less likely
you are to be paying to promote content to
the wrong people.
Tip: Use specifics like job function and years of experience rather
than age and gender whenever possible since demographic data
can reduce audience size due to lack of available information.
Launched a few months ago, LinkedIn Audience Templates are
sets of 20 B2B pre-populated targeting options to help advertisers
optimize set-up time.
Formats
You can create sponsored content in the following formats:

Text Images
Use LinkedIn Text Ads to drive people to your website or a Extend the content from your company’s LinkedIn page
specific page, attract job prospects, or launch a product. beyond your own audience using image ads.

Fig. 17 // Source: LinkedIn Fig. 18 // Source: LinkedIn

 Carousels
Promote visual campaigns with an interactive
story that lets viewers scroll through up to
10 cards to promote brand awareness and
display products.

Fig. 19 // Source: LinkedIn

Video
Sponsored video ads can promote events
and showcase products. They spread brand
awareness while serving as a storytelling tool.

Fig. 20 // Source: LinkedIn

 InMail Messages
Use these ads to drive downloads, convert
prospects, or directly interact with specific
companies and connections.

Fig. 21 // Source: LinkedIn

Lead Gen Forms

Generate leads directly from LinkedIn
and drive content downloads or event
registrations and gather data about
new prospects.

Fig. 22 // Source: LinkedIn

Chapter 5

Measuring Engagement
on LinkedIn.
Engagement on LinkedIn can be people reading and sharing content, Use LinkedIn’s analytics to evaluate
watching videos, asking questions, clicking links, and any other way both your page and posts’:
that members can interact with your brand or employees. To measure
engagement on LinkedIn, you can use LinkedIn’s built-in analytics tools ○○ Visitors
which provide metrics on page visitors, page updates, and
○○ Updates
your followers.
○○ Followers
LinkedIn engagement can indicate where there are opportunities for
conversation and action. Say you learn that the majority of your page
visitors are viewing on mobile. This would encourage your team to
prioritize mobile-optimized content and add captions to videos for on
the go viewing.

Engagement also incorporates communication with your community.

Platforms like Falcon can simplify community management by
bringing all of your social messages to one singular location. Not only
does it make your social media manager’s life easier, but it provides
data and commonalities among your users’ responses.
Organic Metrics on LinkedIn.
Organic metrics on LinkedIn represent anything you did on the platform without
spending money. This includes your company’s page and page updates (or posts.)

Organic data on LinkedIn

Data for posts or “updates”:

○○ Update reactions, comments and shares

○○ Update impressions, unique impressions, clicks, click through rate (CTR) – LinkedIn
defines impressions as an update being viewable for over 300 milliseconds on at least
50% of a signed in user’s screen

○○ Update engagement rate: interactions with your post added to the number of
clicks and new followers divided by total impressions

Data for your company page:

○○ Unique page visitors

○○ Page views
 Paid Metrics on LinkedIn.
Paid campaigns are measured like paid ads on other social media networks and include a feature where you can easily
compare paid and organic engagement on individual and page-level updates. Start by identifying your goal using LinkedIn’s
Objective-Based Reporting, then analyze where you have the biggest bang for your buck.

Fig. 23 // Source: LinkedIn

 Paid Data on LinkedIn
○○ Spend: how much you spent on impressions or engagement

○○ Results: how many times your ad campaign was successful based on your campaign setup and
objective

○○ Results are also known as your goal for the campaign. These include impressions, landing page
clicks, social actions, video views, conversions or ad clicks.

○○ Cost per result: depending on your goal, this is the cost per result (i.e. click, conversion or
impression)

○ Impressions/Views: the number of times LinkedIn members saw your ad – Each individual ad
type has a specific definition for how engagement and impressions are measured, for example,
video ad metrics break down views, plays, and even more specific data like how many times
people watched at least 25% of the video.

○○ Clicks: the number of link clicks from your ad

○○ Click through rate (CTR): clicks divided by impressions

○○ Cost per click (CPC): spend divided by clicks

○○ Average engagement: engagement (clicks, shares, likes or comments)

divided by impressions
Brand Metrics
on LinkedIn. Tailor your key metrics to your team’s
goal and focus on those. You won’t be
Brand awareness can be hard to quantify, but with certain metrics, you able to move the needle on every metric
can gather a good sense of how many people know who your company is. every month, so prioritize the areas
where you have good engagement
Brand data on LinkedIn
but low volume and start sending
○○ Page followers people that way.
○○ Reach

○○ Engagement

○○ Reactions, comments and shares: the total number of reactions, post comments and shares of both Sponsored
Content and organic posts

○○ Clicks: clicks on your updates, company name or logo by a signed in LinkedIn member, excluding reactions,
comments and shares

○○ Page views: the number of times your company page was viewed

○○ Unique page visitors: the number of times your page was viewed by LinkedIn members without duplicates for
return users

○○ Impressions: as defined above, this is when a post is shown to a user for more than 300 milliseconds

○○ Unique impressions: how many times updates were shown to individual logged in LinkedIn users
Chapter 4
Top 10 Takeaways.
01. Keep it personal:
It’s not always about your product: Even though
LinkedIn is the network for professional content,
the top performing content has a personal touch
that makes it friendly and relatable to others in
your network.
02. As a B2B marketer, make LinkedIn
your home base:
LinkedIn is 277% more effective at generating
leads than either Facebook or Twitter and
generates 80% of all B2B leads that come from
social media.
03. As a B2C marketer, be one of the first to take
advantage of LinkedIn’s global audience:
By targeting people who have recently changed
jobs, been promoted, or have some unique
professional qualifications, consumer marketers
are finding new ways to use LinkedIn.
04. Your company culture is your brand —
showcase it on LinkedIn:
Employer Branding is a huge part of your
company’s positioning. LinkedIn in the number
one resource for people looking to learn more
about your company.
05. To increase reach and engagement, take
advantage of your top influencers, your
employees:
Peer to peer comms is always more effective
than branded communications, so encourage
employees to share their own content, always
tagging the company page.
06. Experiment with new video and
rich media capabilities:
LinkedIn allows you to share not only videos
(always use captions!) but also whitepapers, PDFs,
and other assets that will give you an edge.
07. Use LinkedIn’s analytics and content
suggestions to see what your followers are
interested in:
Create content based on what works best among
your specific page followers.
08. If you’re new to paid ads on LinkedIn, use their
audience templates to save time when setting
up a new campaign:
By pre-populating audience filters, you can get
started quickly and start testing audiences against
your different messages.
09. Use LinkedIn’s rich targeting capabilities to
create unique audiences that you can’t target
on any other platform:
By looking at data like job title, location, years
of experience, and more, you can create highly
specialized and nuanced groups, perfect for your
campaigns.
10. Use LinkedIn’s lookalike tool to discover new
audiences — and apply filtering to make those
audiences more effective:
By combining the audience expansion tools with
your own smart filtering, you can great custom
audiences that perform well above industry
standards.
welcome@falcon.io