Will Microsoft’s LinkedIn Focus On B2B Influencer Marketing?

With Microsoft’s $26.2 billion dollar acquisition of LinkedIn announced by marketing ninjas on Monday morning, many are talking about the synergies to be gained from the company’s largest-ever deal. While LinkedIn’s stock price has suffered this year due to earnings reports that didn’t meet Wall Street’s expectations, Microsoft clearly saw past that and realized that, in B2B, LinkedIn has no true social network rival. LinkedIn has also made smart acquisitions like Slideshare and Lynda in recent years that helped bolster their dominance in the social space.

While a lot of B2B influencer marketing happens on Twitter, LinkedIn really owns the best platform for influencers in this space. With Microsoft building out its business services business in a huge way, the LinkedIn acquisition gives them an enormous amount of data the social network has about the most important buyers in the business world, which Microsoft has made their bread-and-butter. The opportunity to use that information to effectively build connections with the best potential Microsoft customers is massive.

While not all professionals in the world are on LinkedIn, smart people will tell you that the bulk of the most useful and the most lucrative are. They are a veritable army of influential leaders and workers within their organizations. While LinkedIn’s engagement numbers could be higher, that’s an opportunity for Microsoft to find more ways to engage them through their network of business apps. LinkedIn’s Pulse content could reasonably find a number of homes within Office 365 and Bing results. The more LinkedIn content gets out there, the more opportunity there is for influencer marketing on the platform.

Influencer Marketing On LinkedIn

LinkedIn took hold of the concept of influential people creating content within their site in 2012 with the launch of their Influencers project. While it initially included only famous business and pop culture figures, they later added influential folks from all walks of the business world. By 2014, the system grew into a content offering called Pulse and they opened it to all LinkedIn users. And, yes, there were plenty of product messages in among the brilliant stories about business success.

While some would say that opening Pulse to the whole user base diluted the power to provide quality content, it also opened the door to a larger number of influencers posting useful content. There are more than a million people creating long-form content there now. Not all of it is high in quality, but LinkedIn’s algorithms delivers content that is relevant to the user and social shares from the user’s network is another opportunity to discover quality work.

Facebook Live’s introduction worked in a similar way, with a slow rollout to celebrities first. The result of opening up the platform to everyone was the sensation we call Chewbacca Mom. LinkedIn may not have found that moment yet but brands working with the right influencers could be the way they finally find the superstar content that catapults the platform to a wider audience.

Influencer Marketing or Advocate Marketing

Content marketing is very popular in the B2B space, but it’s mostly done by the brands themselves. Last year, TrackMaven reported that most of that content goes without much notice because audiences rarely want to hear brands talking about themselves. The engagement is low and that is part of the reason for building interest in advocate marketing.

How is that like influencer marketing? They function in many of the same ways. Advocate contributions do tend to be different from the work of social media creators who partner with B2C brands. Instead of YouTube videos or Instagram posts, advocates usually write articles or blog posts, conduct speaking engagements and appear at events as a representative or guest of a brand. Just as B2C influencers worry about the authenticity of their content, influential business people worry that if their content appears to lack the core values that built their reputation in the first place, they will lose their audience. Advocates in the B2B space tend to be more specialized, and finding the ideal influencers with whom to collaborate can be challenging.

Despite the format differences and working on different channels, the same playbook for smart influencer marketing works.  Finding advocates that love your products and services because they line up with their personal philosophy provides marketers with partners, not one-time paid placement. Like B2C influencers, these creators also come with distribution channels to the right audience for your brand messages.

With quality content built in collaboration with advocates that possess an affinity for your brand, targeting the right prospects in the B2B space is much easier. When advocacy of your brand messages comes from a third-party that believes in your products and services, it is much easier to build engagement that drives sales and conversions.