B2B Marketing: How to Use LinkedIn to Run Your Online Competition

Facebook is undoubtedly the king of social media. In fact, it currently has 1.7bn users. That’s about a fifth of the world’s population. All the same, it’s a grave mistake to think of Facebook as the be-all and end-all of social media.

Indeed, you’ll miss untold possibilities by ignoring other platforms. LinkedIn, in particular, is still in the social media race. It is focused on a very different type of user and is an excellent platform for running competitions online.

This may sound a little odd. When you think of social media contests, you probably mainly think of giveaways from makeup or cosmetics brands. Granted, this tactic is less commonly used in B2B marketing, but it’s every bit as effective.

Here’s why.

Why You Should Run A Competition on LinkedIn

Consider these statistics. According to Social Media Examiner, LinkedIn has over 500 million members around the globe, with more than 100,000 new users joining every day. 

And this growth shows no sign of slowing down.

Source: LinkedIn

Then there’s the geography factor. LinkedIn users are spread over more than 200 countries and territories.

Even better, LinkedIn users are more likely to be key decision-makers than users of other platforms. On LinkedIn, 20 percent of users are senior-level influencers and decision-makers. 92 percent of Fortune 500 firms are active on LinkedIn.

The University of Massachusetts says that LinkedIn is the second most popular social media platform among INC magazine’s top 500 companies, only after Facebook. The INC 500 represent the fastest-growing, privately owned businesses in the United States:

Source: UMass Dartmouth’s Center for Marketing Research

But what does this all mean? 

In short, LinkedIn is great for B2B businesses. A user doesn’t create a LinkedIn account to broadcast to the world what he or she wrote. The goal of each person across the platform is basically the same – to improve his or her professional life. 

As we’ll see later, LinkedIn also has the best organic reach of any social network. Obviously, this is great for lead generation. In fact, based on LinkedIn data, 93 percent of B2B marketers consider LinkedIn as the best platform for generating leads.

The same data found that almost half of all social media traffic to B2B blogs came from LinkedIn. 

Why You Should Run Your Competition On Your Company Page

When you run a competition on LinkedIn to generate leads, it’s best to do this on your company page. The reason for this is simple. You can post more frequently on a company page, and you will get more reach. 

To maximize the benefit of this, there are a couple of things you should look out for to ensure that your contest will turn heads. Here are two critical elements of a good LinkedIn strategy.

• Continually communicate with your audience in exciting ways
• Offer professional value to your audience

So for instance, you can run sweepstakes which challenge your audience’s professional skills, like so:

In this example from CodeChef, you see the call to action and the sense of urgency in the caption. For the contest to reach other people, the company called on participants to tag their friends in the competition, too.

The contest is also not that complex, but it’s fun all the same. There’s nothing that coders love than proving that they’re the best at what they do.

5 Tips to Grow the LinkedIn Following of Your Company Page

So now we know why you’d want to run a LinkedIn contest. But before you do this, you have to make sure that that page has a strong following. Remember, your goal is to reach as many people as possible to generate leads. 

After all, it pays to have your house in good order.

Creating a LinkedIn company profile is not enough for you to get that strong following. In this section, we’ll look at five ways to increase the number of your followers in a short period.

1. Complete your LinkedIn Company Profile Fully

This is a no-brainer. According to LinkedIn itself, profiles that are complete get 30 percent more weekly views. By the way, this applies to your personal profile too.

Also, people generally don’t want to read an incomplete profile on social media. If your business has an incomplete profile, it can be perceived as unprofessional. That’s a real problem. In business, as in life in general, first impressions are everything. 

Incomplete profiles can also look fake. Anyone can create a LinkedIn profile, so you need to incorporate as many details as you can into your profile. This assures people that you’re a legitimate business eager to make transactions.

These are the necessary details you should include:

• Logo
• Company image
• Company description
• Website URL
• Company size
• Industry
• Company type
• Location

Source: LinkedIn

All your imagery should be high-resolution to project prestige. Your pictures should also reflect who you are as a brand, naturally.

2. Create a Consistent Posting Schedule

LinkedIn says companies that post weekly see a two times lift in engagement with their content. 

But what kinds of content should you post?

The best performing content on LinkedIn contains the following elements:

• A descriptive caption – The more details you have, the better. Use engaging language.
• Attention-grabbing imagery – This helps your content stand out in users’ feeds.
• Hashtags – These increase the visibility of your content.
• Stand-out elements – Questions keep people engaged. Emojis also add a flavor to your content.

This post from Google, for example, is performing very well because of its engaging message with a very obvious pun. Even the image, mostly composed of Google map pins, is cute and is an example of strong visual branding.

You can also implement an RSS feed for users who like a steady stream of high-quality content. However, don’t just post a headline and an image. Just like the content you post on your personal account, curated content should contain at least one or more of the elements above. 

3. Re-buffer Top Content

Let’s face it. It isn’t easy to come up with ideas for quality posts. Sometimes, the creative juices just run out, and the result is, well, you get stumped.

Creating content is also time-consuming and expensive.

Don’t fret, though. There’s always the option of re-buffering content you published in the past. If you do decide to do this, make sure it’s content that performed particularly well in the first place. 

There are several reasons to do this.

For one, it is still your content, so why not use it? For another, there’s always a chance that some people on LinkedIn did not see it when you posted it the first time. 

Check out the numbers. Because of sophisticated social media algorithms, it’s possible that as little as 2% of your followers saw your original post on LinkedIn. This is not surprising. According to LinkedIn, 130,000 posts are made every week.

This is not to say, however, that you should practice re-buffering top content all the time. Do this only sparingly. You don’t want to be accused of recycling content all the time or bore your audience and get unfollowed.

4. Encourage Employee Engagement

Employee advocacy has been one of the buzzwords in marketing, sales, and human resources in recent years. However, not all companies practice this. Still, it’s a mistake to downplay the power of employees to promote business content.

The figures speak for themselves. According to Statista, many LinkedIn users have 1st level networks in the 1,000s.

Source: Statista

Multiply those by the number of employees at your company, and what do you get? 

Obscenely large organic reach.

As for your employees, it wouldn’t even be too much of an extra burden to do this. After all, they already spend a lot of their time on social media. Maybe even too much. 

According to Broadband Search, in 2018, the average person spends almost 3 hours a day on social media. That’s a 65.2 percent increase from the figures recorded in 2012.

Shockingly, data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics even showed that most people spend more time on social media than they do with their real-life friends.

Source: Broadband Search

To further ensure that your employees are on board, you can put in place an incentive and rewards system. This approach is backed up by scientific data. 

A recent report from the Harvard Business Review found that 72% of managers believe that recognition has a significant impact on employee engagement. 

For example, you can start an employee of the month program. One of the criteria should be how often your staff share your social content and blog content. You can use a clock timer app to measure the time they spend doing this.

Potential rewards could be concrete things, like additional holiday hours. Alternatively, simply recognising your top employees will boost morale.

Promoting LinkedIn Business Content

There are several ways your employees can promote business content.

The mere act of creating a LinkedIn account is actually an act of promotion itself. If you are a company of 100 people, you already have 100 profiles with your company’s name. The more profiles with the company name, the more times the company name can appear on LinkedIn.

This is also a free SEO boon.

And if you urge your employees to include a link to your company page on their LinkedIn profile, that’s added promotion for your brand. Encouraging employees to utilize the features of a comprehensive tool such as a LinkedIn Premium plan can further amplify the impact.

And then there’s traditional content promotion. Besides sharing your content, employees can also leave positive comments on the posted content to encourage conversations.

5. Promote Company Page Beyond LinkedIn

You can also use LinkedIn to promote your content outside of that social media platform.

For instance, you can link to your company page in your marketing communications, email signatures, and blog. 

You can also add the LinkedIn button to your employees’ email signatures so that they can link to the company page in blog posts.

Another way to cross-promote your LinkedIn company page is to add the LinkedIn follow button to your landing pages or use sticky social media sharing buttons in your blog posts.

This will make it easy for the reader to share content while they’re on your site.

How to Run Your LinkedIn Competition with Woorise

Woorise is a powerful tool for promoting LinkedIn contests. 

With Woorise, you can create contests that are as simple or complex as you like. This could be a basic email-based sweepstake or a more complicated survey-style contest with multiple dropdowns and data-fields.

The app also offers conditional options. That means you can display different options based on user responses. You can also send confirmation messages, and tailor-fit your contest form to the needs of your audience.

Additionally, Woorise allows you to reward users with bonus entries for referrals. This is an excellent way to improve the organic reach of your contest.

Similarly, you can provide users with a short-form URL for your contest. They can share this on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, or email with the press of a button.

You can also track the performance of your contest with easy-to-understand tracking data. Don’t worry about how it integrates with other marketing apps because Woorise does it seamlessly.

Running a LinkedIn Competition – Wrapping Up

There we have it! We’ve seen why LinkedIn is an excellent platform for B2B businesses, as well as the unique benefits it offers for competition marketing.

To take advantage of this, you should first ensure that your company profile is fully completed and optimized. On top of this, you should create a consistent posting schedule, rebuffer top content, and encourage employee advocacy. 

Once you have these things in place, you’re ready to start creating engaging competitions with Woorise.

Now it’s over to you. If you follow these tips, there’s no reason why you can’t generate massive numbers of leads with your online contest and grow your business.