• May 06, 2021
• by fsadvertising

When you hear the word influencer marketing, the first things that come to your mind is young, attractive celebrities promoting immaculately designed products on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat etc.

This approach might work for certain products, brands and services. But influencer marketing might not necessarily work for certain B2B companies or other brands that might be looking for a little more formal approach.

Let us talk about LinkedIn influencers.

LinkedIn is the largest professional networking site in the world. There are about 600 million members and 300 million active users on LinkedIn. Irrespective of your industry, you can find individuals who wield a significant amount of influence as thought leaders.

Let us look at the differences LinkedIn influencer marketing can create.

Why should you choose LinkedIn influencers?

LinkedIn may not be as huge as Facebook or Instagram considering its small user base. Let us try to find why one should choose LinkedIn influencers.

1. LinkedIn influencers consist of key decision-makers in their audience.

LinkedIn is the ideal platform to choose if you intend to promote your product because LinkedIn influencers are followed by senior members of a company like CEOs, CMOs, CFOs, board of directors, etc and they pay close attention to what influencers say. If you want to promote your product, service or brand, LinkedIn is the go-to place.

2. The opinion of influencers is imperative.

LinkedIn influencers provide a greater reach, and their voice impacts other social media platforms. On Facebook or Instagram, you might be able to share content like memes, videos, photos, quotes etc and this may be the right way to attract the audience to consume the content. But what would work best for LinkedIn is the long form of content. The long-form of content attracts the readers on LinkedIn. The information users share on LinkedIn is engaging because the content is created by professional people in the form of detailed posts, articles, videos that build curiosity in the minds of the audiences.

3. LinkedIn is perfect for many brands.

For many brands, LinkedIn influencers are better for their brand than Facebook and Instagram influencers. Business to business brands that are looking out to distinguish themselves from their competitors may also prefer LinkedIn influencer marketing over other options. LinkedIn is the best platform to opt for if you want to generate business for B2B business. If compared to other social media platforms, 80% of leads are generated from LinkedIn.

Now let us discuss the best ways to find influencers on LinkedIn

How to find influencers who have a larger audience base?

LinkedIn Influencer List

You will find a highly influential list on LinkedIn with people like Melinda Gate, Adam Grant, Sara Blakely who are the most powerful individuals in the business fraternity and they are handpicked by LinkedIn.

Use the search bar to find LinkedIn Influencers

The best way to search for influencers is by searching for them on the search bar using keywords.

You can search for influencers who have specific terms in their job title or profile description but this is not an easy process. You can analyze their profile deeply by looking at how many connections or followers they have and the content they share and see if they relate to your business. Then you can check and see how many people interact with their content so that you can gauge if the influencer can be approached for your business.

Find and join LinkedIn groups

You would require joining popular groups to find out if any influencers can be approached that is related to your industry. To find these groups, you simply need to type the keywords related to your industry and ensure that you set the filter to 'Groups'. After joining these groups, you need to make sure to pay proper attention to who is posting on these groups and whose posts are getting considerable engagement.

Directly contacting influencers

After you've identified the desired influencers, you would want to contact them to check if they'd be interested to associate with you. Or if you are connected with the individual on LinkedIn, you can consider messaging them on the platform itself. But if you are not connected with them, you would want to consider upgrading to LinkedIn Premium which allows you to contact people you are not connected with. With LinkedIn Premium, you can use its premium messaging service InMail which touts to have a 300% per cent higher response rate than email.

You might want to try out influencer marketing strategies on LinkedIn to associate with the perfect influencer to promote your brand and build a social media engagement.