Wednesday, November 30, 2016

Pinterest Statistics That Matter to Your Business

Image result for pinterest


Pinterest is not simply a network for spreading information, but one geared towards action. Users flock to the site to find ideas for cooking, wearing, decorating, building, creating, and—most importantly for your business—buying. 
Pinterest is a top resource for shoppers looking for that perfect product or gift, and your brand needs to be there. To get the most out of Pinterest you need to make sure you know exactly who you’re targeting and why.
To help you out, we’ve put together a list of Pinterest statistics so that you can strengthen your marketing strategy. Continue reading to learn what they are—and why they matter.

Pinterest user statistics

Pinterest has more than 150 million monthly active users

There’s no doubt about it—Pinterest is growing. In September 2015, Pinterest reached100 million users. Now, one year later, the site boasts over 150 million users. If you’ve been wondering whether your business needs to be on Pinterest, these numbers alone should be your answer.
With this substantial user base, there’s a good chance that your brand has a ready and willing community on Pinterest. People generally visit Pinterest to either solve a problem or get inspired, so ensure your brand is doing at least one of these two things.

80 million Pinterest users live outside the U.S.

Over half of all Pinterest users, and 75 percent of brand new signups, are from outside of the United States.
While it’s tempting to create content with an English-speaking audience in mind, it’s obviously important to ensure what you’re sharing is internationally accessible. As you create shareable content for your social media and online business channels, make sure that you are not overlooking cultural “norms” you could include to make your content more widely applicable.
Think about whether the clever pun or tagline you’re using will only be understood by those within your culture, and consider ways you can incorporate culturally neutral content across all of your networks.
Another aspect to think about is the reference to seasons or seasonal campaigns. Your summer might be someone else’s winter, so make sure you aren’t alienating huge portions of your audience with these types of easily-avoidable missteps.

84% of people use Pinterest across multiple devices

When thinking about your own social media use, it’s probably clear that mobile is paramount. User patterns on Pinterest are no different: 84 percent of users access the site across multiple devices, with over 75 percent of Pinners using Pinterest on mobile devices.
Users aren’t just using Pinterest on their mobile devices to pass the time, but for dedicated research. A whopping 67 percent of Pinterest users consult the site on mobile devices while shopping in brick-and-mortar stores. These consumers are checking for prices, reviews, and ideas based on what is being shared on Pinterest.
For any business looking to make their content mobile-friendly, Pinterest explains it’s “important for retailers to add high quality, impactful Pins that help people understand how the product works, why it’s a must-have and how else they can incorporate it into their lives.” Make sure this information is easily discoverable with clear and organized Pinterest boards.

67% of Pinners are under 40-years-old

While age is just a number, there are some occasions when a message needs to be tailored for a general age group. Keeping this in mind, note that 67 percent of Pinterest users are under the age of 40—a 27 percent jump from 2015.
To target this age group, consider how they (generally) use social media. Keep in mind that specific tactics will not work for everyone within distinct age groups as every individual is different, but do take note of certain patterns. The best way to do this is to conduct testing through classic trial and error.
Post a Pin or share a Repin, and use Pinterest Analytics to see which age groups respond and engage with your content. Once you have this information, you’ll have what you need to successfully plan and run future campaigns.

Male users have grown 120% in the past year

The number of disgruntled marketers I hear declaring “Pinterest is just for women” is astounding. Hopefully, the above Pinterest statistic can help defy this mind-boggling attitude. If you’re looking to specifically target men, Pinterest is a good place to be. In one year alone, male signups have risen by a whopping 120 percent. Men are, in fact, Pinterest’s fastest growing demographic, with males accounting for 40 percent of new signups.
One reason for this could be Pinterest’s 2015 introduction of a more targeted search feature, Guided Search. When users search for terms such as “watch” or “shoes,” they can now specify the results they want according to gender.  
According to TechCrunch, male Pinterest users “are favoring searches related to categories like apparel, technology, travel, gardening, recipes, gadgets, design, luxury cars, tattoos, and camping.”

Pinterest for business statistics

87% of Pinners have purchased a product because of Pinterest

If there’s any Pinterest statistic you walk away with today, let it be this one: 87 percent of users cite Pinterest as the reason for buying a certain product. Not only that, but 93 percent of Pinners have used the site to plan for a future purchase.
These numbers are significant, and indicate the need for brands to be on Pinterest. Online commerce is growing at five times the rate of retail overall, and Pinterest is the place to work with this growth.
Even if you don’t have a huge following at the moment, Pinterest users are 47 percent more likely to be introduced to new brands than users on other social media platforms.
To showcase your product or brand on Pinterest, Promoted Pins (Pinterest’s version of ads) are the way to go. Learn more about how advertise on Pinterest in our complete guide.

72% of Pinners use Pinterest to decide what to buy offline

While ecommerce is growing at an exponential rate, in-store shopping isn’t going anywhere. Pinterest is five times better at driving in-store sales than any other platform and 72 percent of Pinterest users use the site to research and decide what to buy when they make an in-person purchase.
Make sure Pinterest users are seeing and noticing your Pins while they’re conducting this research. Create Promoted Pins with product information, benefits, and problem-solving abilities to connect with shoppers at both an online and in-store level. AsPinterest shares, Promoted Pins help brands:
  • Increase awareness
  • Boost favorability
  • Shift perceptions
  • Get people to buy

83% of Pinterest users would rather follow a brand than a celebrity

One of the key reasons businesses should be on Pinterest is audience receptibility. Because Pinterest is so often used as a platform for browsing and shopping, users are open to marketing efforts. In fact, that’s what many of them are there for.
According to Pinterest, “When asked who they would rather follow—their favorite brand or celebrity—83 percent of people said they would prefer to follow the former.”
It’s hard to try and sell something to an unwilling audience, which makes Pinterest’s marketing-receptive audience is a boon for brands. However, this doesn’t mean you can stop putting in the effort. Continue creating quality content that adds value to your audience’s feed—and reap the rewards.

Over 5% of all referral traffic to websites comes from Pinterest

It’s no secret—Pinterest is a huge driver of traffic to websites. While five percent might not seem impressive on first glance, consider how much web traffic occurs over the course of any given day. For five percent of that to be from Pinterest alone is huge.
Pinterest explains: “This is second only to Facebook, which drives almost 25 percent of all referral traffic on the web. Twitter, StumbleUpon, Reddit and Google+ each refer less than a one percent share of the market.” As a great example of this, Pinterest is the second highest source of social media traffic to Shopify stores.

Active Pinners have a 9% higher average income than non-users

Pinterest users are valuable to your business for a number of reasons. One of the most enticing might be their incomes. On average, active Pinterest users have an income that is nine percent higher than non-users.
This highly sought-after group of users can be reached for a much lower cost than was previously possible with traditional advertising budgets. Active Pinterest users share that they spend less time consuming traditional media like TV, magazine, and catalogs. This means you have a greater chance of catching their attention—and making them a customer—by being present on Pinterest.

Pinterest ad statistics

Those who interact with a Promoted Pin spend 7x morethan others

Promoted Pins are Pinterest’s clever answer to traditional marketing. They look like regular Pinterest content, but rather than ‘tricking’ the audience, Promoted Pins actually offer valuable information—which is probably why they’re so successful with driving sales. As Pinterest explains, “Pinners are people actively trying to discover and save ideas—and they need your brand’s products and services to bring those ideas to life.”
Running Promoted Pins allows you to reach the most relevant audience possible. APinterest study compared users who’ve seen Promoted Pins to those who haven’t, and found that those who saw them had 40 percent more awareness of new products and 50 percent higher intent to purchase.
If you’re looking to drive more traffic to your website (and who isn’t?) you can run atraffic campaign with Promoted Pins. With a traffic campaign, you pay only when users click on your brand’s Promoted Pin to visit your website. This lets you easily reach relevant users when they’re looking to take action.

70% of sales due to Promoted Pins are from new customers

Pinterest users are not typically searching for specific brands—they’re looking for ideas. If you can show them ways that your product fits into these ideas, you will undoubtedly find success. By using Promoted Pins, you can make sure your brand appears in relevant search results and reaches new customers.
With 70 percent of sales coming from brand new customers, it’s no question that Pinterest is not only a powerful sales tool, but an invaluable way to boost brand awareness.
Now that you’re armed with the stats you need to know to develop a killer Pinterest strategy, it’s time to execute on it. Use Tailwind for Hootsuite to create new Pins, schedule drafts for later, or Pin to multiple boards at once.

Powerful Social Media Monitoring Tools


Social media has provided people the ability to voice their opinion on companies, brands, people—in short, anything and anyone. What people say can be good or bad, but that alone doesn’t determine your social media success. The way your company listens and engages with these social media posts is what dictates how those opinions influence your online presence and brand sentiment.
Social media monitoring (also known as social listening) allows you to gain powerful insight into your customers, competitors, and industry influencers. To take full advantage of social media listening, you need to spread your monitoring across several social media channels, and keep a constant watch for new opportunities. However, acquiring these insights takes time, and the use of the right tools.
To help you choose which social media monitoring tools to use, we’ve compiled a list of 11 tools to get you started—all of which are available in the Hootsuite App Directory or the dashboard itself.

Here are 11 effective social media monitoring tools

1. Reddit Keyword Monitor Pro

With over 234 million unique users and 8 billion monthly pageviews, listening and monitoring your brand on Reddit should be part of your social media monitoring strategy. Use the Reddit Keyword Monitor app to monitor who is talking about your brand, business, or competitors. The last thing you want is having some stranger host aReddit AMA (Ask Me Anything—a traditional Reddit Q&A session) on behalf of your company, and only finding out after it happened.
social media monitoring tool - Reddit Keyword Monitor Pro
Key features include:
  • Set keywords and phrases you’d like to monitor on Reddit
  • Select to limit keyword searches to posts or comments
  • Share Reddit posts easily across your Hootsuite social networks
  • Quick access to the posts to respond and engage
  • View analytics reports on keyword occurrences over time
  • Monitor unlimited keywords across Reddit

2. Geopiq for Instagram

With a community of over 400 million users (and a  majority age group being 18 to 29), wouldn’t you want to make sure you’re monitoring what people are posting on Instagram? Especially if the demographic of your audience falls in that age range. With the Geopiq for Instagram app you can monitor posts by location, hashtag, or username. The app within Hootsuite allows you to monitor and engage with users that are posting in your area, or an area you choose to follow. For example, you can use this tool for events to see what is being posted and to engage via comments to all those who attended your event.
Geopiq Social Media Monitoring 2
Key features:
  • View pictures being posted to Instagram by location
  • Monitor posts on Instagram by location, hashtag, or username
  • Engage with users by posting comments
  • Share your Instagram photos with your social networks
  • View your photos and a feed of photos for the users you follow, popular photos and your ‘likes’, all in your dashboard
  • View and post comments and ‘likes’
  • View user information: number of photos, plus follower and following count

3. Hootsuite Syndicator Pro

Manage and monitor all your favorite blogs and websites with Hootsuite Syndicator Pro. This tool provides a quick and easy way to view RSS feeds and share them to your social media channels, as well as rich filtering, monitoring and tracking tools, and most important, the ability to track which stories you’ve shared.
social media monitoring tool - Hootsuite Syndicator Pro
Key features:
  • Add streams of articles and stories via RSS feeds
  • Import and export OPML or XML files to add and share your RSS feeds
  • Easily manage large lists of RSS feeds with a rich toolset: set up Groups and filters, mark stories as ‘read’ or ‘unread,’ mark articles as favorite or ‘read it later’
  • Share articles and stories to your social networks, and track the stories you have shared
  • Leverage your Hootsuite teams functionality to assign items to your teammates for follow up
  • Save articles to other sources like Pocket, Evernote, OneNote, Google Drive, Tumblr, and more

4. Reputology

Online reputation management is extremely important and surprisingly easy. It’s crucial that your brand manages its reputation offline and online. With the Reputology app, you can monitor and check major review sites so that you can engage with reviewers and resolve any issues in a timely manner.social media monitoring tool - Reputology
Key features:
  • Monitor all the major reviews sites: Yelp, Google, Facebook reviews, and more
  • Track activity across multiple storefronts and locations
  • Respond quickly via quick links
  • Email reviews to all relevant parties for proper escalation
  • Keep tabs on how reviews are followed up with by assigning reviews as tasks to users and tagging reviews by status
  • Create user levels with different permissions

5. Hootsuite Insights

What do you get when you combine social media listening, analytics, and powerful social media monitoring capabilities? Hootsuite Insights. This tool allows you to gain powerful real-time insights about your brand; track influencers, stories, and trends; and visualize the metrics, all in one place.
Hootsuite Insights Social Media Monitoring
Key features:
  • More data sources in Hootsuite with results from more than 100 million sources now in your engagement platform
  • Engage directly from stream and take action on previously hidden results
  • Filter and tailor results by sentiment, platform, location, and language
  • Historical coverage: reach into the past to bring a stream of mentions to the forefront of your content and engagement team
The tool’s name says it all—watch your brand with Brandwatch. Strengthen your social media monitoring capabilities with the power of deep listening. With the Brandwatch app in Hootsuite, you can identify key insights from more than 70 million traffic sources across the web, including major social channels, blogs, forums, news and review sites, and much more. Make real-time, informed decisions with Brandwatch and take action on them.social media monitoring tool - Brandwatch
Key Features:
  • Never miss a mention with data from more than 70 million sources including blogs, forums, social networks, news, videos, and reviews
  • Monitor the tone and impact of brand mentions and surface important issues with Brandwatch’s advanced sentiment and impact scoring
  • Use Brandwatch’s advanced segmentation and filter your streams by authors, categories, tags, priority, and more for more targeted listening
  • Assign and respond to mentions found with Brandwatch instantly from your Hootsuite dashboard
Whether it’s a positive or negative online review, your response should be in the same place as that review. With the ReviewInc app for Hootsuite, view over 200 popular review sites across over 100 countries. Organize positive reviews for sharing on social media sites, and resolve negative issues instantly. 
Key features:
  • See a stream of online reviews from over 200 popular review sites in one place, including Yelp, Foursquare and Google Places
  • Monitor multiple streams of reviews, engage with customers, and share positive testimonials of your business
  • Workflow tools allow you to coordinate responses to a review across your teams
  • Multiple account support: manage multiple locations, companies or set detailed filters for the app

8. Synthesio

It’s no secret that social listening arms you with the information you need for deeper insights and better-guided business decisions, and Synthesio is a comprehensive option to help you with this. The tool lets you and your team listen to the social media conversations most important to you, analyze these conversations, and engage with them.
Synthesio
Key features:
  • Monitor multiple mention streams at once
  • Share more efficiently using Hootsuite’s unparalleled share-to-social networks tool
  • Reply, Retweet, or DM with Twitter users directly from the app in Hootsuite
  • Assign mentions to other teams or members of your organization to resolve them

9. Crowd Analyzer

If you or your customers are based in the Middle East, Crowd Analyzer is an invaluable tool for social media monitoring and analytics. As the first Arabic-focused social media monitoring platform, Crowd Analyzer works “through sophisticated natural language processing algorithms” to analyze “Arabic content in terms of relevancy, dialect and sentiment.” Crowd Analyzer not only monitors major social networks, but blogs, forums, and the news as well.
crowd analyzer
Key features:
  • Monitor multiple streams at once.
  • Use more than 60 powerful filters such as language, location, gender, and sentiment to filter through your content.
  • Search your content by keyword.
  • Reply, Retweet, or Tweet directly from Hootsuite.
  • Tag your content directly from Hootsuite and use these tags to drive your analytics on Crowd Analyzer.
10. 76Insights
If content marketing is an important aspect of your Facebook marketing strategy, use76Insights. This social media monitoring tool measures the resonance of your social media content and breaks down your resonance score, which is the number that measures how much social media engagement someone receives after publishing something.
Social media monitoring tool - 76Insights
Key features:
  • Measure the resonance of your social content
  • See resonance score breakdowns by social network
  • See your content performance with intuitive visualizations
  • Group social accounts into handy watchlists
  • Share the most resonant content with your social networks
11. Hootsuite
On top of all the social media monitoring tools mentioned above, Hootsuite Pro provides social listening capabilities right in the dashboard. Monitor specific keywords, hashtags, regions, and so much more. Stay on top of what people are saying about your brand and listen to your customers and competitors to gain competitive advantage.

Key features:
  • Grow your followers and monitor conversations
  • Save time publishing content to your networks
  • Improve ROI and analyze campaign performance
  • Up to 50 social profiles
  • Access to premium apps
  • One enhanced analytics report
  • Bulk message scheduling

The Ultimate Marketing Guide: LinkedIn for Business:




You may have heard that LinkedIn has 433 million users, 40 percent of whom check the platform every day. Those numbers are certainly substantial, but they aren’t the statistics that really matter for a business-oriented network like LinkedIn. What really matters is that one in three professionals in the world has a LinkedIn account, and 49 percent of key decision makers use LinkedIn for business purposes.
With that level of professional engagement, LinkedIn is a social network your business cannot afford to ignore.

Why your business needs to be on LinkedIn

If your LinkedIn business presence is currently a personal page—especially one with a bare-bones resume that’s hopelessly out of date—it’s time to up your LinkedIn marketing game. You need a company presence on the network to gain access to the full range of benefits LinkedIn can offer to all business departments, from recruiting to sales.

1. Attract top talent

LinkedIn is the first place top talent looks for work, at all rungs of the career ladder. More than 40 million students and recent college graduates are on LinkedIn, but 41 percent of millionaires use it, too.
LinkedIn allows you to publish job postings, of course, but the more valuable recruiting approach is to empower your HR team to find potential candidates using LinkedIn search, then reach out to them directly and encourage them to join your team.

LinkedIn for Business: The Ultimate Marketing Guide | Hootsuite Blog
Image via LinkedIn.

2. Grow your network—and your potential supplier and customer base

Using LinkedIn for business is all about the network you build and the connections you make—think, for example, about vendors, the people you work with, and the people you meet at events.
With LinkedIn’s advanced search capabilities, it’s not only about who you know, it’s about who they know. You can leverage existing relationships to build new ones and grow your network.

LinkedIn for Business: The Ultimate Marketing Guide | Hootsuite Blog
Image via LinkedIn.

That’s the real power of LinkedIn for business: the ability to tap into existing connections and grow your brand through word-of-mouth. Rather than simply racking up followers and connections, think about how you can work those relationships to uncover new opportunities to grow your business.
And just in case you’re unsure about whether all that effort will pay in terms of real dollars and cents, consider this: 50 percent of B2B buyers use LinkedIn as a resource when making purchasing decisions, and 76 percent of B2B buyers prefer to work with recommendations from their professional network.

How to promote your business with a LinkedIn Company Page

There are a couple of key ways to promote your business on LinkedIn. Let’s start with what you need to know to create a great LinkedIn Company Page.

What is a LinkedIn Company Page?

Company Page helps LinkedIn members learn about your business, your brand, and job opportunities with your company. Company Pages are also a great way to establish industry expertise. For example, the Hootsuite LinkedIn Company Page has more than 155,000 followers tuned in to the valuable and timely content we share—and that’s not including the 1.3 million people that follow CEO Ryan Holmes’ thought leadership articles.

LinkedIn for Business: The Ultimate Marketing Guide | Hootsuite Blog
Image via Hootsuite on LinkedIn.

The benefits of LinkedIn Company Pages

Originally, LinkedIn Company Pages were viewed primarily as HR landing pages for brands. Though this is still one way to use LinkedIn, the network is also becoming the perfect place to drive business results, raise brand awareness, promote career opportunities, and educate potential customers on your products and services.
Think of your company page as a supplement to your website: It helps you drive traffic to your site and provides an outlet to promote your products, services, and content. Your LinkedIn Company Page provides free marketing opportunities and enhances the credibility of your company. Rich content and compelling status updates can also establish your brand as a leader in your industry.
Your Company Page can also help increase brand awareness by boosting your company’s presence in search engine results. Use tools like Google Adwords and SEMRush to uncover the keywords that are important to your business, then incorporate them into your Company Page to help searchers discover your business online.

How to create a LinkedIn Company Page

The process of creating a Company Page is very simple—but don’t let that lull you into slapping something together without a strategic plan for your page and how to maximize its benefits. Let’s start with the nuts and bolts of getting your Company Page up and running.
Note: If you don’t have an existing personal LinkedIn profile, you’ll need to set one up before creating a page for your company.

1. Add your company

Head to the Add a Company page and enter your official company name and your work email address. LinkedIn will send an email to verify that you are eligible to create the Company Page.

2. Choose who can administer your page

You don’t need to be in this alone. LinkedIn allows you to choose which employees can administer your page.

3. Fill in your company details

You’ll provide your company details using several drop-down menus that indicate your industry, company size, and so on.

4. Add a banner and logo

Upload your company’s logo, and choose a banner image to capture the feel of your business.

5. Create a company description

You have 2,000 characters to describe what your company does, and why potential followers should care. This is important text, so get your marketing and content teams involved in crafting your messaging. Click “publish,” and your Company Page is online.
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Wistia video thumbnail - Optimizing Your Profile Settings On Linkedin Company Pages
Learn how to get even more out of LinkedIn with free social media training from Hootsuite Academy.

LinkedIn Company Page tips and best practices

Just because you build a Company Page doesn’t mean that followers will come. You can boost your chances of success with the following LinkedIn for business tips and strategies.
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Wistia video thumbnail - Engagement and Best Practices On Linkedin Company Pages
Learn how to get even more out of LinkedIn with free social media training from Hootsuite Academy.

1. Enhance your page with your brand’s personality

Think of it from your customers’ point of view. Ask yourself why they should be spending time reading your company profile. Make your banner image creative, and include relevant links to your other prominent channels like your website, blog, and so on.
Holiday Inn Express uses a sense of humor consistent with its advertising in other channels throughout the content it shares on its LinkedIn Company Page, helping to convey a unique brand personality. Its Stay Smart LinkedIn campaign, featuring brand-appropriate humorous videos, helped increase online awareness of the brand by eight percentage points.

LinkedIn for Business: The Ultimate Marketing Guide | Hootsuite Blog
Image via Holiday Inn Express on LinkedIn.

2. Empower your employees to connect with your company’s LinkedIn Page

Your colleagues and/or employees are your best resources to start growing an audience. They are your biggest advocates, and by adding them as followers you also tap into each of their networks, expanding your reach tremendously. Encourage them to add your Company Page to their personal profiles, which automatically makes them followers and enables them to easily share company updates.
L’Oreal, for example, has more than 56,000 employees on LinkedIn and features them prominently in the content posted to the L’Oreal Company Page.

LinkedIn for Business: The Ultimate Marketing Guide | Hootsuite Blog
Image via L’Oreal on LinkedIn.

3. Provide valuable content and reply to followers’ comments.

The best way to grow your audience and keep your followers is to provide them value by posting articles or company updates on a regular basis. Make sure you are consistent in your posts, and try posting various types of updates—like company news, thought leadership, or industry expertise. Keep things interesting for your audience. Try actively engaging with them as well by asking what matters to them most, or what they’d like to see.
When ADP relaunched its LinkedIn Company Page with a tighter focus on providing quality content, primarily from its in-house research team, the company doubled its followers. Better yet, its follower base switched from 70 percent employees to only 30 percent employees, meaning more external followers and an expanded network reach.

LinkedIn for Business: The Ultimate Marketing Guide | Hootsuite Blog
Image via ADP on LinkedIn.

How to promote your business with LinkedIn Groups

Once your Company Page is up and running, it’s time to expand your LinkedIn reach with LinkedIn Groups.

What is a LinkedIn Group?

LinkedIn Groups provide a place for professionals to network, share content and ideas, recruit talent and look for work, and establish industry expertise.
To find a group with interests that align with your business goals, use the search feature at the top of your LinkedIn homepage or check out LinkedIn’s suggestions of Groups you may like.
You can also create a new Group based on whatever topic or industry you’d like.

LinkedIn for Business: The Ultimate Marketing Guide | Hootsuite Blog
Image via Social Media Marketing Group on LinkedIn.

The benefits of LinkedIn Groups

There are numerous benefits to joining LinkedIn Groups, no matter what industry your business is in. Being an active participant in a Group can help you and your business network with other professionals and businesses in your field, especially those outside of your immediate circle of current and present colleagues, classmates, and employers. LinkedIn Groups can help you build your company’s online reputation by sharing valuable information relevant to your industry. Participating in a Group discussion will also attract views to your Company Page.
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Wistia video thumbnail - Building Your Community On LinkedIn
Learn how to get even more out of LinkedIn with free social media training from Hootsuite Academy.
If you are a content marketer, Groups can help you get more eyes on your content, and get constructive feedback from other professionals in your field. While it’s important to consider the competitive nature of many industries (and not be overly generous when sharing unreleased content or ideas), it can also be incredibly helpful to brainstorm ideas with professionals inside your industry but outside of your organization. Alternatively, Groups can help you gain insight into your target audience. You can join Groups with audience demographics you think may be interested in your brand’s product or service to see what kind of information the participants deem valuable and worthy of sharing.
With over 1.6 million existing Groups out there, finding the right ones for your business can at first seem like an impossible task. To make the task easier to tackle, we’ve come up with these tips to help you navigate LinkedIn Groups.

Tips for engaging in LinkedIn Groups

1. Join groups relevant to your interest and profession

If you have taken the time to fill out your LinkedIn profile completely, LinkedIn will send you Group recommendations based on the skills and experience you’ve chosen to include. Those relevant to you personally will likely also be a good fit for your company.
To take matters into your own hands, you can use keywords and search Groups in the directory. For example, to find a group that focuses on content marketing in Australia, type “content marketing” and “Australia” into the search bar, then choose “Groups” from the drop-down menu on the left, and you’ll find the Content Marketing Australia LinkedIn Group. Make sure to take note of the date of the last posting in the group—you want to spend your valuable time on active Groups only.
If you belong to an association, check to see if it has a members-only LinkedIn Group, which can be a valuable source of professional networking and development. The American Institute of CPAs, for instance, sponsors a LinkedIn Group with more than 63,000 members, where in-depth professional conversations can continue for months.

LinkedIn for Business: The Ultimate Marketing Guide | Hootsuite Blog
Image via CPA & Business Professional Group on LinkedIn.

2. Share your company’s content in Groups to increase traffic to your site

Contributing to a discussion will make both your profile and your Company Page more visible, and can also help establish you and your company as thought leaders.
Be sure to provide value and context to your post when sharing—don’t just copy-and-paste the URL. If you know of a blog post or a news article from an external source that fits a discussion, share it with others. Even if the content doesn’t originate from your team, it will contribute to credibility among group members.
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Wistia video thumbnail - Best Practices for Sharing Content on LinkedIn Company Pages
Learn how to get even more out of LinkedIn with free social media training from Hootsuite Academy.

3. Engage in Groups by providing insight and commenting on other people’s posts

If all you do in a Group is promote your own content, others will quickly catch on, and may dismiss the value of your content or your brand in general. To avoid this, be courteous to others—after all, there may be many opportunities to learn the skills of the trade from other experienced professionals. Take note of inquiries, and don’t hesitate to share your own experience.
Above all, remember that LinkedIn is a professional network that allows you to build credibility, create a meaningful network, and glean insider expertise from established experts in your industry. It’s a valuable tool in your social marketing arsenal, so make sure you’re using every opportunity it provides, such as its advertising options.