10 Free Tools to Help You Understand Your Social Media Audience

We often recommend crafting your social media posts according to your audience.

But how you know who the individuals that make up your social media audience are? And how do you know what content they like?

Answering these two questions is essential if you’re looking to execute a successful social media strategy. And often, you’ll find the answers by turning to data and social media analytics.

In this post, I’ll share a few ways of using data to find out more about your social media audience across the major social media platforms — Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest.

How to learn more about your social media audience on the major social media platforms

Here’s an overview of the tools that you can use to help you understand who your followers are. Feel free to click on any of the social media platforms to skip to its section.

Facebook: Audience Insights, Page Insights, and graph search

Instagram: Instagram Insights and SocialRank

Twitter: Twitter analytics, Followerwonk, and SocialRank

LinkedIn: Linkedin analytics

Pinterest: Pinterest analytics

Facebook

Audience Insights – Demographics, Page Likes, and more

The most powerful tool to help you understand your Facebook Page fans is hidden within the Facebook Ads Manager: Audience Insights.

Here’s how to access your Audience Insights:

1. Click on the dropdown menu in the upper-right corner of any Facebook page
2. Select “Manage Ads”
3. Click on the “Facebook Ads” menu
4. Select “Audience Insights” (you might have to hover over “All Tools”)

Or you could access it via this direct link: https://www.facebook.com/ads/audience-insights.

Once you’re at your Audience Insights, select “People connected to your Page and enter your Page name under Connections > Pages.

Facebook might have, by default, selected “All United States” under “Location”. If you want a global view of your Facebook Page fans, hover over “All United States” and click on the cross.

Now, let’s find out who your Facebook Pages fans are!

Under the “Demographics” tab, you can get the following information:

• Age and gender distribution
• Lifestyle
• Relationship status
• Education level
• Job title

Under the “Page Likes” tab, you can get the following information:

• Top categories that your fans might like
• Pages that your fans might like

Under the “Locations” tab, you can get the following information:

• Top cities
• Top countries
• Top languages

Here’s the other information you can dig into:

• Activity – as in Facebook activities and their device usage
• Household – as in household size, income, etc.
• Purchase – as in purchase behavior

Household and purchase information is only available for audiences in the US currently.

You can get a good understanding of your Facebook fans from all this information. For example, here’s what I found about Buffer’s Facebook Page fans:

• In terms of age, the biggest group (45 percent) is people between 25 to 34.
• We have slightly more male (57 percent) than female fans (43 percent).
• Most of them work in “Management”, “Sales”, “Arts, Entertainment, Sports, and Media”.
• They also like software and internet companies like Hootsuite, MailChimp, and Social Media Examiner.
• In terms of location, the biggest group is people in the US (31 percent), followed by people in the UK (9 percent).

What did you find about your Facebook fans?

Page Insights – When your fans are online

Besides knowing your Facebook fans’ demographics, interests, and locations, you can also find out when they are using Facebook in a typical week and day.

In your Page Insights, under the “Post” tab, you have a section called “When Your Fans Are Online”. (It should like the screenshot above.)

Under the section, “Days”, you’ll see how many of your fans are active on Facebook on a given day. Under the section, “Times”, you’ll see how many of your fans are active on Facebook during each hour on a typical day. This is a great way to find your best times to post.

Most of our fans seem to be on Facebook every day of the week. On a typical day, they tend to be most active between 12 pm and 9 pm EDT. How about your fans?

Graph Search – Other Pages that your fans Like

While Audience Insights tells you the Pages your fans might like, Facebook’s Graph Search can tell you the Pages they have Liked.

To do this, type “pages like by people who like (your Page name)” on the search bar at the top of any Facebook page.

In the results, there’ll be a section, “Pages liked by people who like (your Page name)”. As the section title suggests, those are the Pages like by your Facebook Page fans. One thing to note is that the results seem to prioritize your friends. So essentially, these are Pages liked by your friends who also Liked your Facebook Page.

So what do you know about your Facebook Page fans now?

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Instagram

Instagram Insights – Demographics, location, and more

With a business profile on Instagram, the best way to learn about your followers is through Instagram Insights — Instagram’s free native analytics. (If you don’t have a business profile and want to convert, here’s how. If you don’t want to convert, read the next section.)

Here’s how to access your followers’ information in Instagram Insights:

1. Tap on your profile photo in the lower-right corner of the mobile app
2. Tap on the analytics button (the chart icon)
3. Scroll down to the “Followers” section and tap on “See more”

Here’s the information about your Instagram followers that you can get from your Instagram Insights:

• Gender distribution
• Age range distribution (men and women)
• Top locations (cities and countries)
• Times and days when your followers are most active

Tip: If you tap on the bar charts for age range and location, the percentages will be revealed.

Our Instagram followers are quite similar to our Facebook Page fans.

• We have slightly more male (52 percent) than female followers (48 percent).
• In terms of age, the biggest group (45 percent) is people between 25 to 34.
• In terms of location, the biggest group is people in the US (38 percent), followed by people in the UK (8 percent).
• They are most active on Tuesday and Wednesday on a typical week and between 9 am and 6 pm for most days.

How does this compare to your Instagram followers?

The follower information in Instagram Insights doesn’t tell you your followers’ interests. A way to figure this out is to look at your top posts. In the third step above, instead of tapping on “See more” in the “Followers” section, tap on “See more” in the “Posts” section.

Here, you’ll find your top posts by impressions – the total number of times that each post has been seen. I would recommend filtering your top posts by engagement, instead, to find out which types of posts your followers like to engage with. To change the filter, tap on “Impressions” at the top and select “Engagement”.

Sometimes, it might not be immediately obvious which type of posts your followers like. In such cases, you could make hypotheses, test a few types of posts, and see what works.

Social Rank – Interests, activity, and more

If you don’t have a business profile on Instagram or prefer not to convert, you could use free Instagram tools like Social Rank.

Once you have connected your Instagram account to Social Rank, click on “Show Summary” in the top-center of the page. Here, Social Rank will show you the many different information about your followers, such as the following:

• Gender distribution
• Top followers locations
• Popular bio words
• Popular hashtags
• Popular time to post
• Followers distribution (how many followers your audience has)

The information under “Popular bio words” and “Popular hashtags” might reveal the interests, job title, or industry of your Instagram followers. For example, our Instagram followers like to use words like “marketing”, “social”, and “media” in their bio, which is what our ideal audience does — social media marketing.

The “Popular time to post” section shows you the times your followers are posting, which is when they are online and when it might be best for you to post.

You could also make some inferences about your followers by looking at your most engaged followers. To do that, sort your followers by “Most Engaged”. Social Rank will show you the followers that have interacted with you the most in the past 45 days. Click on the top 20 to 30 profiles and check out their bio and websites. Are there any similarities?

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Twitter

Twitter analytics – Interests, demographics, and more

The native Twitter analytics provides comprehensive information about your Twitter audiences — your followers, your organic audience, and your tailored audiences.

Here’s how to access this information:

1. Click on your profile photo in the upper-right corner of any Twitter page
2. Select “Analytics”
3. Click on “Audiences” in the top navigation bar

Here are some of the key information you can get from the various tabs (e.g. “Overview”, “Demographics”, etc.):

• Interests
• Gender and age distribution
• Country
• Occupation
• Household income categories
• Consumer buying styles

Here’s what I found about Buffer’s Twitter followers (again, they are quite similar to our Facebook fans and Instagram followers):

• We have slightly more male (56 percent) than female followers (44 percent).
• In terms of age, the biggest group (54 percent) is people between 25 to 34.
• In terms of location, the biggest group is people in the US (36 percent), followed by people in the UK (12 percent).
• They are mostly interested in “Business and news”, “Technology, and “Tech News”.

What about your Twitter followers?

Followerwonk – Job title, activity, and more

Followerwonk is a great Twitter tool that provides a bit more information than Twitter analytics. And it’s free for analysis of accounts with up to 25,000 followers.

To analyze your Twitter follower base, type in your Twitter handle and select “analyze their followers”.

Here are some of the useful information about your followers that you can get:

• Locations
• Most active hours
• Word cloud of their bios
• Gender

Tip: Followerwonk integrates with Buffer so that you can easily create a schedule based on when your Twitter followers are most active.

Social Rank – Interests, activity, and more

Social Rank can also be used for Twitter, and it provides similar information as it would for Instagram.

For example, here are the popular words and hashtags used in our Twitter followers’ bio and posts respectively (they are similar to those of our Instagram followers):

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LinkedIn

LinkedIn analytics – Job titles, locations, and more

The LinkedIn Company Page analytics provides a good amount of information to help you define your LinkedIn followers (and visitors).

Here’s how to access your LinkedIn follower information:

1. Click on “Manage Page” on your Company Page
2. Click on “Analytics” on the top navigation bar
3. Select “Followers”

The LinkedIn analytics offers seven types of demographic data about your followers:

• Country
• Region
• Job function
• Seniority
• Industry
• Company size
• Employment status

I find it helpful to look at the job function and industry data to get a sense of who our followers are. From our data, it seems that most of our LinkedIn followers are marketers and founders in the digital space.

You can find similar information about your visitors — people who aren’t following your Company Page and have visited your Company Page. Instead of selecting “Followers” in the dropdown menu, select “Visitors”.

What does your data tell you about your LinkedIn followers and visitors?

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Pinterest

Pinterest analytics – Demographics, interests, and more

If you have a business account on Pinterest, the best way to understand who your Pinterest followers are is to use Pinterest analytics. (You can set up your Pinterest business account here.)

Here’s how to access your follower information in Pinterest analytics:

1. Click on “Analytics” in the upper-left corner of any Pinterest page
2. Select “People you reach”
3. On the right side of the page, click on “All audiences”
4. Switch to “Your followers”

Or you could access it via this direct link: https://analytics.pinterest.com/audience/.

Here’s the various helpful information you can get:

• Audience size
• Country and metro
• Language
• Gender
• Interests
• Boards (Boards by your followers with many of your Pins)
• Brands (Businesses your followers follows and engage with)

Our Pinterest follower base is slightly different from our follower base on the other major social media platforms. Perhaps because of the demographics on Pinterest.

• We have more female (74 percent) than male fans (21 percent). 5 percent unspecified.
• In terms of location, the biggest group is people in the US, followed by people in India.
• They are mostly interested in “Technology”, “Design”, and “Travel”.

How does your Pinterest follower base look like?

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What do you know about your social media audience?

Understanding who your social media audience is can help you craft the right content for them, boost your engagement, and increase your reach. And by using the amazing social media tools around, you can learn so much about your followers — for free.

Once you have analyzed your social media following, I would love to hear what you have found out. Who is your social media audience? What are their interests? What do they do?

Also, do you know of any other analytics tools for understanding one’s social media following? It’ll be great if you are up for sharing.

P.s. If you found this post helpful, you might like our guide to optimizing your social media content — helping you decide what to post on each social media platform.

Topic: Social media strategy

Image credit: Unsplash

Thank you, Natasza Libich, for asking this question in our Buffer Slack community. 

Thank 10 Free Tools to Help You Understand Your Social Media Audience for first publishing this post.

Conversion Rate Optimization

At its most basic understanding, conversion rate optimization is about improvement. If you run a website or a social media page, you want to know how your content is doing.

To get a good idea of how your site is performing, you’ll look at a series of metrics and analytics that tell you what works and what doesn’t.

You can use CRO to measure how active any part of your site is, but it’s mostly used to learn how to acquire new customers, how to obtain new downloads, which features do a great job at attracting attention, and so much more.

Return on Investment

At the end of the day, CRO is about looking at the numbers. You’re paying good money for ads to drive traffic to a specific website, blog, or page.  In turn, you hope that driving enough traffic will result in obtaining a new customer who buys from you.

The CRO numbers tell you if you’re losing money paying for ads that aren’t working, if you’re just breaking even and might need to make a few adjustments, or if you’re on fire and don’t need to change a thing.

For every dollar you spend on ads, what are you getting back?  In email marketing, for every dollar spent, the average person gets a return of $38.  That’s an impressive rate of return!

Not every campaign will see that number.  Some even lose money.

If things are moving a bit slow in your online marketing, you may be pulling out your hair and wondering exactly what you’re doing wrong.  It’s a natural question.  All you want is to create the perfect campaign and BOOM, you’ll be making big money.

The problem is, nothing ever works as planned.

Why You Need to Optimize

Online marketing is a fickle business.  Odds are, you’re not going to get it right the first time around.  A lot of the successful marketers have been around the block a few times, learned from their mistakes, and went back to the drawing board.  Don’t fret if you find yourself making these same mistakes.

The good news is, only a small change may be required to bring in the sales you want.  Or maybe you’ll need a completely new vision.  That’s the power of conversion rate optimization.

We all know that words can be extremely powerful.  Your ability to tell a story can make all the difference when it comes to copy that works and copy that fizzles.

Headlines and other facets of the process are equally as important.  Does your wording encourage subscriptions and buys?  Or discourage them?

So many marketers fail to properly engage regularly and follow-up with their customers.  Good business sense isn’t just getting the sell and being done with them.  You MUST foster a relationship with your customers.

Learn about them.  Grow with them.  Your product or service should evolve as their needs evolve to remain successful.

The attention span of an adult is about 2.8 seconds.  They want to read a quick headline and move on to the next one.  Therefore, it’s important to have a content strategy that matches the way people consume it: quick, easy, and visually biased.

Why Conversion Rates Are Important

All the issues pertaining to marketing go back to whether you could optimize your process.  You get to track what people do with your content.  If you don’t get the type of numbers you’d like to see, then you change the process with the hope that the numbers increase.

Let’s take a look at the different terminology you should know.

1) Total Conversions

If your campaign was successful, you should have a number of people who did exactly what you wanted them to do.  If you directed traffic from Facebook for them to sign up for your newsletter, the number of people who did that will be reflected.

Your success would then be measured by the percentage of people who saw your ad, those who clicked on it, and those who went through with the process.

2) Conversion Rate

Your goal is to get a certain percentage of people to act.  You can check the percentage of people who ‘bought in’ by dividing the number of conversions by the number of people who made it to your site.

3) Bounce Rate

The bounce is when people go to your site, but don’t act.  They show up and leave.  This is not a good metric to have!  If your bounce rate is high, that means people aren’t sticking around for whatever reason.

4) Exit Rate

This will show you what pages people are bouncing from.  Maybe they get through the first page, but then you lose them on the second.  So, the exit rate will reveal where people leave specifically on your site.

5) Engagement

If you have a high engagement or “time on site” rate, that’s a good thing.  It lets you know that people are lingering around on the site.  They’re browsing and not immediately leaving.  That means they’re considering their next move.  Sometimes they buy, other times they leave and come back later.

6) Average Page Views

This is another good indicator to see how long people are sticking around to view your site.  It averages how many pages visitors look at while they’re visiting.  The higher the percentage, the better, as it shows they aren’t leaving immediately, but hanging out awhile.

Improve Your Conversion Rates

If it’s one common thread a lot of online marketers and business people have in common, it’s that initial struggle trying to figure out how to convert leads into buyers. It’s this area in which a lot of marketers get stuck. Their mind keeps going back to the same thing: we need more traffic!

If we need to make more sales, we think of it as a traffic problem. But a lack of traffic is rarely the problem. You can throw $20 into a Facebook ad and instantly generate enough traffic to sell your product or service. Yet, a lot of these marketers are throwing thousands of dollars at their ads, but the focus is still on driving traffic.

If you truly desire to become successful, it is important for you to know what the real issue is behind you not making the sales that you want. You’re not having a traffic problem. You have plenty of traffic as it is and adding more traffic will not help you if you do not know how to convert that traffic.

For whatever reason, your content, your blog, your websites, sales page, your opt in, etc. is failing at taking the plentiful traffic you already have and making them want to open up their wallets for you. Here are five easy tactics you can employ to convert traffic.

Strategy #1: Follow Amazon

Amazon might not be a perfect website, but just digging around and taking a good look at things can give you ideas and inspire you in ways that will help you convert your traffic. The people at Amazon are experts at converting traffic.

They pull out all the stops because they do all the testing find out what works and what doesn’t. If it increases sales, you can bet Amazon is already doing it.

Let’s look at a quick example. Have you ever bought anything on Amazon and went to check out with your items and noticed how they took away navigation options at the checkout screen? If you take away navigation at the checkout screen, it will prevent abandonment and lead to more sales because there’s nothing to distract them. It forces you to buy.

Strategy #2: Create a Tool

Number one way to build authority in your niche is by providing value to the customer. If you can give them value and you’re not 100% focused on pitching, you will increase your leads and your conversions. People want content that helps them and your job is to give that to them.

Have you seen the Progressive insurance commercials? What do they regularly boast their website has? They have a tool that allows you to compare insurance rates between companies. You might be thinking it’s not a good idea for a company to share rates of their competitors because they might end up losing money that way.

That’s not necessarily true. Other companies have calculators that show how much money you’ll be saving or a way to compare spends. Just offer value and it will attract people to you if you don’t think it will.

Strategy #3: Embrace Reviews

You might think you’re the greatest marketer who has ever walked the face of the earth. You can sell a bag of ice to an Eskimo. One of the top reasons why people struggle in converting is a lack of trust and authority. We’ve discussed ways to improve your authority, but there is still one group of people who can sell better than you and it’s imperative that you tap into their power.

Customers. No matter how good you think you are at selling, your customers are better at it than you are. At least that’s the way you need to look at. Why? Because nothing will sell your product faster and better than with good reviews.

Nothing will sink your business faster than bad reviews. Listen to the people and embrace reviews. If you seek to improve bad reviews, good ones will always drown them out.

Strategy #4: Virtual Receptionist

You’re a very busy person. Constantly worried about posting new content, building relationships customers, playing out the future, and doing about 100 different things to make sure your business takes off. It can be time-consuming and complicated. But sometimes, you’re too busy to do work because you’re always on the phone chasing leads.

Converting isn’t an exact science. Someone can visit your site at 1 PM, yet not decide to buy until six that evening. It’s common for people that want to sit on it for a while and think the purchase through. But at 6 PM, you’re out of the office. Maybe your grabbing dinner, fighting traffic, or just unable to reach the phone. How many leads do you think you miss after business hours?

This is where the virtual receptionist can help you convert more leads and give you extra time to do your job. You might be thinking that virtual receptionist cost a lot of money, but compared to hiring someone new at the office, you can hire a virtual receptionist for peanuts. It usually cost between $200 and $300 per month. It’s worth the cost.

Strategy #5: Personalization

One of the newest strategies popping up these days is custom personalization. If you’ve ever done email marketing, and you know how important it is to speak directly to the person you’re sending the email to.

There are different types of emails to be sent to different consumers. You send one email to someone who just joined your list, and an entirely different email to someone who has been on your list long time.

You’re customizing your traffic in a way that makes it personal to the user. Some sites, like Product Hunt, have a bar over the top when you’re shopping it recognizes you as a person. It treats you like a person and greets you like person. This is a great way to build trust with your customers and the new visitors who come in.

Conclusion

The internet is an amazing tool you can use at your disposal to become successful.  No matter what niche market you’re in, you must pay attention to the numbers and adjust.  It might take you time to learn new strategies, but the only way to figure it out is by testing and knowing what the numbers mean.

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The Silent Rise of LinkedIn to 500M Members: What Marketers Need to Know for 2018 [SSM069]

What if I told you that LinkedIn, a social media platform that is now 14 years old, is the next big opportunity for marketers and brands?

While much of the focus over the last few years has been on perfecting our Facebook and Instagram marketing strategies, LinkedIn has been silently growing their user base to more than 500 million users.

The reason for this sudden growth?

LinkedIn is no longer known only for their résumé and job searching capabilities. It’s evolving into a thriving network of incredible content, influencers, and networking opportunities unmatched by other social media platforms.

In episode #69 of The Science of Social Media, we explore the many features that make LinkedIn such a powerful platform for brands and what marketers need to know going into 2018.

Let’s dive in!

How to listen: iTunes | Google Play | SoundCloud | Stitcher | RSS

The silent rise of LinkedIn: What marketers need to know

The LinkedIn journey to 500M members

If you were to ask me to describe LinkedIn in 2015, I might have said something along the lines of, “a great professional network” or “the perfect place to find a job.” Now, as we close out 2017, it’s clear that LinkedIn is quickly becoming a force to be reckoned with in the world of B2C and B2B marketing.

Microsoft must have seen something in the rising star as well – officially acquiring LinkedIn for $26.2 billion at the end of 2016 in one of the largest social media deals in history.

A quick look at LinkedIn’s journey to 500 million members:

• 2003 (0 members): Launch
• 2005 (1.6M members): Introduction of Jobs & Subscriptions
• 2006 (4.2M members): Launch of public profiles for members
• 2009 (33M members): Jeff Weiner joins LinkedIn as president
• 2011 (140M members): LinkedIn goes public
• 2013 (250M members): 10th anniversary of LinkedIn
• 2015 (330M members): $1.5B acquisition of Lynda.com. Launch of Pulse
• 2016 (400M members): Microsoft acquires LinkedIn for $26.2B
• 2017 (500M members): 100,000 new articles published weekly

What’s most astonishing is how fast LinkedIn has grown over the last six years. Between 2011 and 2017, LinkedIn’s user base grew from 140 million to 500 million – shattering the growth rate in previous periods.

LinkedIn demographics

One of the more intriguing aspects of LinkedIn is the demographics of their users.

• Twenty-nine percent of online adults use LinkedIn
• Fifty-six percent of users are male and 44 percent are female
• Fifty-one percent of users have a college degree
• Thirteen percent of millennials (15 to 34-year-olds) use LinkedIn
• Forty-four percent of users earn more than $75,000 a year
• Forty-one percent of millionaires use LinkedIn
• The average CEO has 930 connections
• Statistical Analysis and Data Mining are the top skills on LinkedIn

CEO Jeff Weiner plans to “develop the world’s first economic graph” with the hopes of “digitally mapping out the global economy.” A goal not far from reach seeing how LinkedIn has an in-depth dataset of company, industry, and individual contact information for more than 500 million members.

In the long-term, this will be a game-changer for marketers and brands in the B2B space.

Becoming a content-first platform

Written content

Did you know that LinkedIn Pulse started as the Pulse app – a class project at Stanford University in 2010? It wasn’t until 2015 that LinkedIn fully integrated Pulse into the platform and established themselves as a content-first social media network.

Before Pulse, LinkedIn didn’t offer users or influencers much in the form of organic content. When they announced that they’d be opening up their Pulse publishing platform to the public in February 2014, it opened the floodgates to a world of content.

Today, Pulse no longer operates as a separate application within LinkedIn. It’s seamlessly integrated into members’ feeds as articles to help enhance the content-first experience.

It’s working, too! More than 100,000 organic articles are published weekly on LinkedIn, many of which are written by top-level executives at brands around the world. Startup Founder, Gretta van Riel, explains just how powerful LinkedIn has been for her content:

Video content

On August 22, 2017, LinkedIn launched what might be their biggest update since Pulse – native LinkedIn video.

Just a few months after launch, the evidence seems to be pointing towards videos performing extremely well on LinkedIn. Videos from the limited release are getting shared 20+ times more than any other content. Our team has been hearing the same sentiment from marketers everywhere.

We also had the wonderful opportunity to speak with the LinkedIn team at MarketingProfs B2B Marketing Forum this year. LinkedIn plans to roll out the native video feature to brands and businesses in the near future — an update that we’re all excited for!

Our teammate, Paul Thomson, has been experimenting with native LinkedIn video with great success.

Several of his videos are performing two to three times better on LinkedIn than they are on other social media platforms. A great sign for LinkedIn as a video publishing platform.

Becoming a platform for influencers

An interesting trend that we’ve been keeping a close eye on is LinkedIn’s development of their invite-only Influencer Program.

As Daniel Roth, Editor in Chief at LinkedIn writes, “LinkedIn’s Influencers — an invite-only group of some of the top minds in business — have access to briefings, data, and experts that the rest of us can only dream about.”

Offering Influencers an exclusive platform to publish content was a brilliant move on the part of LinkedIn. One, because it offers Influencers a guaranteed way to get their content in front of hundreds of thousands of members. Two, because naturally, Influencers will bring their own audience to the LinkedIn platform by simply sharing their content with their followers. And three, it bolsters LinkedIn’s reputation as a thought-leader in multiple sectors.

The Influencers so far include Bill Gates, Richard Branson, Sallie Krawcheck, James Altucher, and more.

In fact, 36 percent of LinkedIn members now read interesting articles they find in their feed, an increase of 20 percent since 2014. Activating influencers to write great content gives LinkedIn a unique advantage over other social media networks.

Becoming a platform for personal branding & networking

Personal branding

Ultimately, LinkedIn’s biggest value proposition and its reason for growth lie in the ability for members to develop a strong personal brand.

• Seventy-nine percent of professionals say that networking is valuable for career growth
• Sixty-one percent of professionals say that regular online interactions with networks can lead to job opportunities

But what does this mean for B2C and B2B companies?

When brands have employees that feel empowered to build a brand and start side projects outside of their traditional work, it’s a win-win for both the individual and the brand.

Having creative hobbies has been shown to make people more helpful, collaborative, and creative in their job performance.

Networking

I can’t tell you how many relationships I’ve made by simply reaching out to someone on LinkedIn and saying hello.

Many of the guests we’ve featured on The Science of Social Media were first introduced to us via a private LinkedIn message.

Whenever I have a question about social media or marketing, one of the first places I turn to is LinkedIn.

Check out this incredible infographic put together by the folks over at Number Sleuth showing just how important LinkedIn has become for personal brand and networking:

Where we go from here

We predict that 2018 will be an amazing year for LinkedIn – both as a social media platform and a marketing channel for brands and businesses.

It’s a fast-growing network with exciting features being released regularly. These features will continue to open up lots of great opportunities for marketers to connect with highly-targeted audiences in new and engaging ways.

Keep an eye on the growth of written and video content as well as an increased focus on activating influencers by brands within their community.

It’s a great time to be on LinkedIn!

More awesome resources from the show

• The Rise of the New LinkedIn [Infographic] – SocialMediaToday
• Harnessing the Power of LinkedIn to Monetize and Grow Your Business – Buffer Blog
• Once a Running Joke, LinkedIn Is Suddenly a Hot Social Network. Here’s What Changed – AdWeek
• Microsoft officially closes its $26.2B acquisition of LinkedIn – TechCrunch
• Applying to Be a LinkedIn Influencer – LinkedIn
• LinkedIn opens video uploads to all as part of a bigger video push – TechCrunch
• How to Publish on LinkedIn Pulse: A Beginner’s Guide – HubSpot

How to say hello to us

We would all love to say hello to you on social media – especially Twitter!

• Hailley on Twitter
• Brian on Twitter

Thanks for listening! Feel free to connect with our team at Buffer on Twitter, Buffer on Facebook, our Podcast homepage, or with the hashtag #bufferpodcast.

Enjoy the show? It’d mean the world to us if you’d be up for giving us a rating and review on iTunes!

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About the show

The Science of Social Media is your weekly sandbox for social media stories, insights, experimentation, and inspiration. Every Monday (and sometimes more) we share the most cutting-edge social media marketing strategies from brands and influencers in every industry. If you’re a social media team of one, business owner, marketer, or someone simply interested in social media marketing, you’re sure to find something useful in each and every episode.  It’s our hope that you’ll join our 10,000+ weekly iTunes listeners and rock your social media channels as a result!

The Science of Social Media is proudly made by the Buffer team. Feel free to get in touch with us for any thoughts, ideas, or feedback.

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Image credit: Unsplash, TechCrunch

Thank The Silent Rise of LinkedIn to 500M Members: What Marketers Need to Know for 2018 [SSM069] for first publishing this post.