Dear LinkedIn, Help Us Help You

When Facebook opened to the public in 2006, companies scrambled to make profiles, which later became pages. Brands knew that this platform was a then cutting-edge way to reach their customers. A way to “fish where the fish were”.

Over time, though, Facebook has become less of an idyllic fishing sanctuary, as discarded plastic bottles and appliances now line the shore and a distinct biofilm seems to scare off birds. As I detailed in my previous article, organic reach for brand Facebook pages has been stuck in single digits for almost a decade.

Too harsh? OK, Facebook can still deliver results for certain companies, especially paid campaigns for ecommerce. But if you're talking B2B, forget it. Granted, FB was never great for this kind of targeting in the first place—but you could always talk yourself into it. If I'm reaching people who follow Brand X and live in city Y and are in demographic group Z, then I'm probably circling around the right audience.

Most marketers today know this kind of site targeting just isn't worth the effort, as the business prospects you really want to reach are not looking for your business on Facebook. The real action is on LinkedIn, which has somewhat quietly become a huge marketing platform with unparalleled targeting functionality.

If you can't tell already, I'm a huge advocate for LinkedIn, and I'm about to tell you about the many, many things it's great for. I'm also a critic, though, because there are a lot of ways LinkedIn could be EVEN BETTER if only they'd listen to power users.

Where LinkedIn Excels

Jokes about "I'd like to add you to my professional network" were common even a few years ago. But LinkedIn has really come into its own recently. The hard data is compelling, as the site now has nearly 800 million members across the globe who submit 200 million+  job applications every month to the 57 million+ companies listed there. (LinkedIn actually claims that four people are hired every minute there.)

What's more, these millions of professional users have little incentive to gravitate elsewhere, as there are very few serious competitors to LinkedIn—at least not as a definitive CV directory that can directly connect employers with potential employees.

My anecdotal experience supports this, and I suspect yours does as well.  The last three hires my firm made applied through the site. And recruitment is only one benefit. Professionals actually really do use the site to engage with one another! When I post sales and marketing questions there, for instance, I get thoughtful responses from people I'm only loosely connected with. It's such a welcome change of pace from other social sites—especially Facebook!—which seem to bring out the worst in people.

Because LinkedIn has become a site people regularly check out, that means it's also by far the best social channel for targeting business audiences and reaching key personnel. The site's targeting options allow you to filter ads and paid posts for:

• Company (size, name, industry)

• Experience (job function, title, seniority)

• Education (degree, university, field of study)

• Skillset

• Professional interests

These options are especially important for B2B marketing, where you often need to reach the decision-makers who can choose your product or service. LinkedIn offers the perfect platform to find them when their attention is focused on work.

How LinkedIn Could Be Better

As much as I adore LinkedIn, the platform would be even better if it offered marketers more functionality and increased access to data. So many marketers are ready to cut the cord with Facebook entirely, but LinkedIn won't get us the data and tools we need to justify the switch.

Here's what I'm looking for:

Listening capabilities. Conversations relevant to our organizations, products, industries, and more are happening on LinkedIn, but there’s no good way to get alerts, spot trends, or understand the sentiment. We’re doing manual searches—like cave dwellers—to uncover these conversations. Meanwhile, competitive social media platforms offer up this data via API in real-time, so we continue to over-index on incendiary Tweets even though more meaningful conversations take place on LinkedIn.

Competitive analytics. Competitor benchmarking is critical for reporting, but LinkedIn doesn’t allow you to see page analytics unless you’re the admin of the page. Without knowing what our comp set is doing, we can’t tell how we stack up. So many of our reports are still using Facebook or Twitter performance as a proxy for overall social performance, but the platforms are wildly different, and so our audiences and goals for them are different, too. I need to know how my LinkedIn page is performing relative to peers.

Link preview penalty. Savvy social media managers try to avoid link previews on LinkedIn because the algorithm is said to penalize links for taking users off-platform. Instead, we bury our links in the comments to try to maximize impressions or suffer drops in reach with a link preview. In both cases, the result is the same—our reporting shows that LinkedIn drives less traffic to our website than Facebook and Twitter. Even though we know that traffic is more qualified, it makes the “kill Facebook” argument a harder sell to leadership.

Third-party publishing. Lastly, I wish third-party publishing tools had access to all of LinkedIn’s native features. For events and polls, social media managers are forced to mock up content on the platform and send screenshots via email for content review and approval—like the olden days of content calendars in Excel files. We can’t even tag individuals in our pre-scheduled company posts. These little nuisances aren’t deal-breakers, but they also seem like easy fixes in LinkedIn’s quest to become the ultimate corporate social channel.

Now, I also recognize that opening up user data to marketers like me is clearly a step that should be taken with caution. Right now, LinkedIn expressly prohibits the use of any third-party software that scrapes, modifies the appearance of, or automates activity on its website—which is one of the reasons why LinkedIn is the most trusted social network in the U.S., with 73% of social media users at least somewhat agreeing that LinkedIn protects their privacy and data. Compare that to just 53% for Facebook.

But I'm confident there's a way to open up the API to developers who could help optimize functionality without alienating core users.

This is my plea to LinkedIn on behalf of marketers worldwide: Help US help YOU become the dominant social platform. We’re all so ready to leave Facebook behind forever.