A PUBLICATION OF THE CAMPAIGN WORKSHOP. A Guide to. for Campaigns

Transcription

1 A PUBLICATION OF THE CAMPAIGN WORKSHOP A Guide to

2 Overview LinkedIn is a social media platform designed to help professionals connect with one another. The platform hosts upwards of 450 million users and allows them to build profiles to showcase their job experiences, education, skills, publications, and goals. Private individuals, businesses, candidates, community leaders, advocacy groups, and institutions alike can cultivate a presence on LinkedIn to engage with former, current, and potential colleagues, friends, and supporters. User Profile Previous employment list Keep up with coworkers and connections updates 2

3 LinkedIn is most often talked up as a tool for individuals looking to expand their professional networks to further their careers. However, the platform can be just as valuable to any campaign. For one thing, campaigns of any stripe can build and manage pages to share updates with supporters who choose to follow them. The platform also allows the creator of any page to start a group to spark discussions with likeminded people who share their passions and goals. What s more, LinkedIn allows you to search its user base with filters for skills, industries, workplaces, and beyond making it easy to expand your network. Plus, the site makes painless the process of advertising to highly targeted audiences and exporting your connections addresses so that you can make the most of your network outside of the platform as well. Campaigns tend to gravitate towards social media giants like Facebook and Twitter, but LinkedIn can be a gold mine for any political or advocacy campaign looking to expand its supporter base and message reach in ways that Facebook and Twitter cannot. LinkedIn is all about cultivating a professional rather than personal network. This means your campaign can find and activate folks with the resources or know-how you need to achieve your goals. 3

4 Unique User Base LinkedIn is unique in that it attracts a highly educated, high-income, and politically aware user base. According to Pew, 50% of college-educated adults who use the Internet are on LinkedIn, as are 45% of online adults with an annual household income of at least $75,000.* In fact, the average LinkedIn user s income is around $109,000 a year. Thus, the site can be a valuable platform for advocacy and political campaigns trying to reach influential target audiences who could turn into donors or grasstops advocates. *Pew Research Center. Social Media Update November 11, Source: Digital Activities of U.S. Internet Users, by Frequency, May The Buntin Group and Survey Sampling International 4

5 TCW A Guide to LinkedIn GrasstopS Gem In some ways, LinkedIn can reinforce a campaign s grassroots following, in that it allows candidates and organizations to share updates and opinions for their followers to like, comment on, and share. However, LinkedIn s real draw for campaigns lies in its potential as a great tool for grasstops organizing. While grassroots organizing is all about activating ordinary people to get them to volunteer for a cause or to put pressure on elected officials to act on issues, grasstops is about mobilizing folks who are influential in their communities or in policy debates to advance your candidacy or cause. Donors, opinion leaders, party figures, business leaders, and those who have the ear of elected officials generally fall into the grasstops category and when it comes to social media outreach, you re likeliest to reach these folks on LinkedIn. The platform allows you to find and engage with people you may not know personally but whose professional expertise, passions, and connections can bolster your campaign. If you re working on an advocacy campaign, you can use LinkedIn to reach specific communities that will care about your cause, whereas if you re working on a political campaign, you might want to reach out to folks who are connected with elected officials. You can also use LinkedIn to find new connections who will make your coalition more well-rounded, such as you might seek to do if you re working on a ballot measure. 5

6 Four Functions for Advocacy and Political Campaigns Once you determine your goal, your message, and your target audience, you can use LinkedIn to reach folks who can strengthen your campaign s capacity for success. Below, we list four of the functions that make LinkedIn such a valuable tool for any political or advocacy campaign. 1. Identifying Potential Supporters One of the best parts about LinkedIn is that you can easily search for users who are sympathetic to your cause and who might be willing to get involved to help it succeed. You can browse the platform for users who work in specific industries (like health care, education, or environmental policy) or who have been endorsed for certain skills (like fundraising). From there, you can do your research on the folks you want to ask for help in achieving your goals by checking out the content they list on their profiles. Find out their educational background, their work history, what they ve written on relevant issues, and whether they ve served on any boards. This way, you can effectively make the case to them that they can and should support your campaign. LinkedIn identifies any mutual connections (second- or third-degree) you share with any user, and prompts you to request an introduction from such connections to anyone new with whom you re hoping to connect. This can help you establish credibility with someone you don t know personally before you ask them to support your campaign. What s more, once you ve identified one LinkedIn user whose experience and interests make him or her a good recruitment for your campaign, the site makes it easy to find additional users with similar backgrounds and skills (and whose profiles appear in the sidebar to the right of the one you re viewing). 6

7 2. List-Building Another feature that sets LinkedIn apart from Facebook and Twitter is its contact-exporting capacity. It s great to have a strong professional network that you can engage with on LinkedIn itself, but it s also helpful to be able to reach these folks outside of the platform especially through . To use LinkedIn to help your campaign bolster its list, just follow these simple steps: A. From your homepage, click My Network in the top navigation bar. B. In the left sidebar, you ll see a box with information about your connections. Click See all. C. In the right sidebar, click Manage synced and imported contacts. D. Under Advanced actions in the right sidebar, click Export contacts. E. As of February 2017, you can request LinkedIn data about your contacts from here. After following the prompts on your screen to download an archive of your data, LinkedIn will you a link to the data within a few minutes. Unzip the folder it leads you to and open the Connections document. This spreadsheet will contain the names, s, and current jobs of all your LinkedIn connections. 7

8 This quick process allows you to export all of your connections addresses (or at least the addresses they used to sign up for LinkedIn) into a CSV file. While you don t want to abuse this feature by spamming your connections, the exporting tool allows you to add your connections to your campaign s list so that you can send folks regular campaign updates and ask them to take action on your behalf. You should plan to send an opt-in to these new potential supporters before asking for their help. You can also advertise to this audience on LinkedIn by uploading this list when you re setting up your target audience. What s more, if you re looking to acquire the addresses of people you re not connected with on LinkedIn (but who you think could help your campaign), there are several Google Chrome extensions that you can download for free or for a small fee to accomplish this. These extensions reveal or guess addresses when you visit the profile of someone with whom you re not connected. Lots of these extensions also allow you to export those addresses into a spreadsheet for easy follow-up purposes. Just to name a few helpful tools for this kind of list-building: Hunter - Free option: Reveals 150 addresses/month and gives you a confidence score if the address they provide is a guess (no exporting capacity). Premium options: Several packages (starter, growth, pro, and enterprise) give you more freedom to acquire addresses and to export your list. Skrapp Free option: Reveals 200 addresses/ month and export your list. Business plan: Costs $36/month for 1,000 addresses/month and exporting capacity. Finally, having a premium account on LinkedIn grants you access to InMail, which allows you to send messages through the platform to folks with whom you re not yet connected. This method yields a response rate that is 2.6 times more effective than than that obtained from or cold-call outreach since those you re reaching out to can immediately click on your profile to see who you are and why they should be interested in supporting your campaign. 8

9 3. Engaging With Your Network LinkedIn allows you to publish content to keep your network regularly informed about your campaign s activity and progress. You can post directly on your LinkedIn page, or you can share links to your writing elsewhere to highlight the issues you and network care about. When you post anything, the content shows up on the dashboards of your connections, as well as of those who follow your page. LinkedIn is thus a great place to share updates on fundraising, and to appeal to your network to donate to your cause. LinkedIn also gives you several options to boost your content to reach more people. For instance, you can use sponsored content to target your updates to LinkedIn users who do not already follow your page. You can further broaden the reach of your content by adding relevant tags to your posts. LinkedIn Pulse serves as the news arm of the platform, delivering trending topics to users based on their interests and the industries they work in. LinkedIn Pulse promotes organically popular content to users outside of your immediate network, allowing posts to go viral and reach those who will care about your campaign and turn into influential supporters who will take action on your behalf. Add your own post Articles posted by a connection Comment/Like Posts 9

10 4. Targeting the Right Audience Finally, you can use LinkedIn to advertise to its 450 million users including 40 million decision makers and 10 million opinion leaders with advanced targeting techniques. This way, you can reach the folks who are likeliest to respond to and engage with your messaging and get them to donate time or dollars to your cause. When you purchase ads on LinkedIn, you can pay either on a cost-per-click (CPC) or cost-per-thousand-impressions (CPM) basis. The higher you set your bid, the likelier your ads are to reach your target audience. In other words, LinkedIn does not charge a set CPM or CPC rate the platform recommends a bid range, but apart from having to meet the $10 daily budget minimum and the $2 CPC/CPM minimum, you are in control of your spend. Plus, A/B testing allows you to track the performance of your ads among your target audience so that you can make sure you re using your budget wisely. To start advertising on LinkedIn, you can set up a self-service program in Campaign Manager or contact a LinkedIn marketing representative to manage your ad campaign. From there, you can decide which kind of ads make sense for your campaign, depending on your goals. Sponsored content - Expand the reach of your page s posts through native ads delivered to users feeds across desktop, tablet, and mobile platforms. Sponsored InMail - Send messages with content or action requests to users. Dynamic ads - Serve customized creative to decision makers, segmenting your audience by professional skills and interests. Display ads - Serve ads across relevant LinkedIn pages on the righthand sidebar (as on Facebook). Text ads - Serve text ads at the top of relevant LinkedIn pages. 10

11 You can segment your LinkedIn audience using the following criteria: Geographic location (region of the world country state/province city) Job title Seniority at job Company (previous or current place of work) Industry Company size (as listed on the company s LinkedIn page) Company type (nonprofit, for-profit, etc.) LinkedIn group membership Skills (as self-reported by users or as endorsed by users connections) Degree College Age Gender Member persona (label assigned based on LinkedIn algorithms) The member persona-targeting option is what really sets LinkedIn apart from Facebook when it comes to advertising for political and advocacy campaigns. The platform s algorithm labels professionals with profiles on LinkedIn as decision makers and opinion leaders, for instance, making it easy for you to target influential folks and get them on board with your campaign. 11

12 So, Why LinkedIn for Your Campaign? While platforms like Facebook and Twitter give you the chance to reach the average voter, LinkedIn is your best bet for harnessing the power of professionals to achieve your campaign goals. Your advocacy or political campaign can use LinkedIn to strengthen its grasstops base or coalition, with advanced search, targeting, and address-exporting capabilities, rendering seamless the process of reaching the right folks to ask for support, donations, expertise, and access to their extended networks. 12