Social networks are at the heart of any lead acquisition strategy, whether they are business prospects or candidates. 

They are in some ways the "sounding board" for your quality content, as well as today's best way to create connection between thousands of people. 

LinkedIn, founded just over 15 years ago, has emerged as the world's leading professional social network, with nearly 400 million active users in over 200 countries.

What are the advantages and disadvantages of LinkedIn in Inbound Marketing and Inbound Recruiting strategies?

How to use LinkedIn ?

With this brilliant infographic by Make A Website Hub, you'll know which formats to use to best present your content on a LinkedIn page.

1 - Generate leads with LinkedIn

According to the State of Inbound report published by Hubspot,43% of B2B companies found customers using LinkedIn. 

There's no denying that, properly used, this social media is a formidable weapon for contacting prospects. Much of social selling, by the way, revolves around the effective use of LinkedIn by salespeople.

The tools offered by LinkedIn are of several kinds

• ultra-targeted B2B campaigns, allowing for the highlighting of high-value articles or white papers to a targeted audience by industry, geographic area, etc.
• Display ads allowing for banner rotation
.
• the Sponsored Email, which should be handled with care to avoid spam
• the active participation in groups where you can exchange with professionals
• dedicated landing pages for each campaign, if you don't have one on your own site
• sponsored advertising with the ability to control your CPC and/or CPM budget very closely
.

With so many possibilities, it is wise to analyze the different acquisition costs and ROI of each campaign to be able to compare your results with other channels.

2 - targeting prospects on LinkedIn (Inbound Marketing)

LinkedIn aims to become the leading platform for publishing and sharing professional content, incorporating quality information from the best professional publishers in every industry. As such, LinkedIn is totally incontrovertible in an Inbound Marketing strategy oriented towards the pro sector.

Benefits

• High visibility with B2B leads, especially decision makers
• High quality of the contents published on the platforms Pulse and Slideshare
• Opportunity to showcase your expertise by becoming an influencer (linkedin fluence)

Disadvantages

• Low impact for B2C campaigns 
• Distribution of video limited to influencers
• Direct interaction hampered by a perfectible interface

LinkedIn was originally designed as a professional profile management platform more than a lead generation solution. For this reason, some features (such as career page management or out-of-group exchanges) are significantly less powerful than on other social networks like Twitter.

Now, with a little practice, the results are quickly impressive.

3 - Targeting candidates on LinkedIn (Inbound Recruiting)

The use of LinkedIn as a candidate sourcing tool seems pretty obvious. With proper use of Boolean operators it is easy for a recruiter to target candidate profiles.

Using LinkedIn in an Inbound Recruiting type approach is very different. It's about attracting passive candidates by cleverly delivering content that will drive them to your career site.

Benefits

• Excellent visibility of content on highly qualified tertiary profiles
• Ability to engage directly with the candidate who interacted with the content (comment, like, share, etc.)
• Relevant linkage of published content with the "jobs"

Disadvantages

•  
• Low content visibility for some technical type profiles
• Many candidates have a profile but don't check their "timeline"
• Need to duplicate content on Pulse to increase chances of impression

While LinkedIn has an important place in an Inbound Recruiting strategy, it can be paradoxically less relevant than Facebook  or Snapchat.  

By working in depth on your candidate persona, you'll know whether or not to invest in this social network.

What about you? In what ways do you use LinkedIn in your Inbound Marketing and Inbound Recruiting strategies?

Let us know in the comments!