Email the Bridge between LinkedIn & Facebook and the key to Maximin ROR
Often, I have heard people say that LinkedIn is B2B and Facebook is B2C. On the surface, this may seem self-evident but I do not agree.
If business is based on relationships, the relationship between you and your customer or prospect, you want to take every opportunity to develop & nurture that relationship.
So, forget B2B or B2C, think ROR, Return on Relationship.
You might have made initial contact with prospects & customers on LinkedIn but there is a very good chance they are on Facebook as well.
Not only are the on Facebook but according to this article in the NY Times people spend nearly an hour a day on Facebook.
An hour day is around 1800 minutes a month
Pity the poor B2B marketer who restricts him or herself to engage with their prospects on LinkedIn only. In 2016 the average user spends 17 minutes a month on LinkedIn. Now that is not a typo, I did say a month, not a day.
It’s not much, is it?
17 minutes a month on LinkedIn against 1800 minutes a month on Facebook. That’s a lot less time for you to have your prospects reading your marketing messages, to buy into your brand.
B2B marketers think they can only look on in envy at their B2C cousins as they take all the time they need to engage and nurture their prospects on Facebook.
Well, it does not have to be that way.
One thing Facebook and LinkedIn have in common is you must create an account to use both platforms.
You also need to supply an email address in both cases when creating your accounts.
In many cases, people use the same email address on LinkedIn as they do in Facebook and that common element is the bridge that allows you to take your marketing from LinkedIn to Facebook and enjoy all the advantages Facebook has to offer marketers.
So, let’s say you have 2000 high-value connections on LinkedIn and you want to build on your relationship with them.
- Export the email addresses of your connections (all you need is the email, nothing else)
- You can then import those email addresses into your Facebook account.
- Facebook will look at the email addresses you have imported and see if they match the email addresses used by people when creating Facebook accounts.
- Facebook will then create what is called a Facebook Audience in your Facebook account. This audience is made up of your high value LinkedIn connections who used the same email address on LinkedIn and Facebook when creating their account.
- You give this audience a name, say “LinkedIn connections”
You can now run ads on Facebook and use the Facebook Audience of your LinkedIn connections as a target for those ads. Note that I said you use the Facebook audience as a target for Ads, you must run ads on Facebook to take advantage of audience you created.
Now on Facebook, you have the time to promote your message, to build your relationship with your prospects or customers.
Facebook is a fantastic marketing platform. It has many tools you can use that are not available on LinkedIn.
Your prospects will also be impressed to see you on two platforms and the chances of your message actually registering with them increase dramatically.
But there is more…
For marketing to be successful you need to be talking to the right people.
A half-baked marketing campaign has some chance of success If you are targeting the right people. If people are hungry they will eat even if the food is not quite what they were after.
A really well put together campaign has no chance if it is targeted at the wrong people. People who don’t want, can’t use or pay for what is on offer.
So, targeting the right audience is key to success.
Well Facebook can help you with that.
Everybody on Facebook has an account. Everything you do on Facebook (and things you do outside Facebook, big brother is alive and kicking) is recorded and a profile is built up of all your activity.
All your activity, the stories you read, the pages you like, the links you follow. All is attached to your profile. Gathering this information is actually the whole point of Facebook.
Remember the Facebook audience you created of your LinkedIn Connections. You can get Facebook to
- Look at the profiles of the people in your Facebook Audience
- Create another list of the top 1% of people in your target country that have profiles that closest match the profiles of your audience.
This is called a LookALike audience and you can now use it as a target for Facebook ads.
If your original list is a tight list where people have a lot in common then there is every chance Facebook will find you, people, just like the hot prospects on your original Facebook Audience. This audience is certainly worth testing to see if it can find you more hot prospects.
So email is the key to tracking your hot prospects from LinkedIn to Facebook and then leveraging that to find even more new hot prospects on Facebook
If you have any questions about this please feel free to reach me on 00 353 87 6778855 or email jmcgarry@Webworks.ie and will be happy to help.