By Darren Gilbert

In a study earlier this year, HubSpot found that LinkedIn was 277% more effective in bringing in leads than its more glamorous social media siblings, Facebook and Twitter which as Rebecca Corliss points out in a piece on Ragan’s PR Daily, amounts to a conversation rate of 2.74%. It’s an impressive (and important) figure and provides even more evidence that LinkedIn can and should be used by both PR professionals and business.

Cloney agrees: “For communications professionals a LinkedIn presence has effectively become de rigueur. According to PR News Online, … 92% of journalists are now on the platform. This fact considered, in the context of public relations, it is crucial for result-driven practitioners to see beyond LinkedIn as a networking portal and engage with it as a communications platform.” So how do you accomplish this?

For Cloney, it comes down to a few things. “In the context of a PR campaign, before engaging with LinkedIn as a communications tool, it is essential to define the objectives of the effort.” Essentially, you need to ask yourself what do you want to get out of LinkedIn. How is your presence on the site going to help your overall business? Having answered this initial query, the real questions need to be answered, such as who your audience is. “Central to defining your objectives when using LinkedIn as a campaign tool is to evaluate the relevance of the platform to your target audience.” In other words, does your audience constitute a community on the site?

It can be argued that an answer to this depends largely on your type of business. However, it can also be argued that LinkedIn is a social media site that your business needs to make use of. To back this point up, one only need to look at a study down in January this year. It was found that there were 131 million members using LinkedIn, an increase of 15.4 million from the second quarter of 2011 with 87.6 million unique visits per month.

With such figures at hand, it is key to ensure that you identify the thought leaders within. The reason behind this, as Cloney says, is because it will potentially allow you the opportunity to engage with those people who have figured out how best to use the social networking site. Also, as she points out, “Building relationships with influential users can result in the establishment of mutually beneficially links and endorsements across several platforms.”

So, find the right people and you will most likely have found the right path to follow. Of course, this doesn’t mean the path is easy. It still takes time to establish these relationships. You’d first need to define your message and it needs to be clear reiterates Cloney. And with good reason. “The message should encapsulate the core objectives of the wider campaign or the organisation.” It’s a message which needs to be “in sync”, she says, with your organisations brand. Once this is done, it’s all about ensuring that message comes across on your actual LinkedIn page.

The LinkedIn page is one that needs to be done right. It’s also a fairly detailed topic so I’ll look at in closer detail next week. For now, it’s important that again, the message on your page remains clear and precise, says Cloney. “[R]eaders should not be over whelmed with extraneous details; each element should be finely distilled, precise and uniform in tone”. Once you have the page down correctly, you’ll have the opportunity to grow your opportunities of engagement.

This means that you will be able to build your “thought leadership status” as Cloney puts it. This includes engaging with the discussions instigated by those thought leaders that you had initially pinpointed and posting regular blogs or bits of information. As Cloney concludes, these are only some of the factors that need to be considering. However, it’s important to remember only one fact: LinkedIn has the capacity to communication your brand message. It’s up to you to use it.

What do you think? What other factors should business take into consideration when approaching LinkedIn?