Mining the Data of LinkedIn Showcase Page Performance.

LinkedIn Promotions vs Other Platforms.

As part of our Industrial Content Marketing activities, a few months ago I started a Facebook "Showcase" Page, Mining Photos & Videos. This Page has gone from strength-to-strength. It currently has over 3100 Followers. The key element to it's success is ultra-cheap paid boosts of posts. Here's an example of the stats on one of the posts, achieved with just a few pounds (£) spend.

Facebook Marketing of Mining Photos and Videos.

Clearly boosting Facebook posts is strategic marketing, because for the price of a coffee a day, we achieve results which would be impossible by any other means and which save us enormous amounts of time in growing a follower base.

Recently, I have been experimenting with replicating the Facebook Showcase Page across other channels - this is not like-for-like comparison with Facebook, because I have not paid a penny on these other channels, but this is the main point to which we will return. On Google+, Mining Photos and Videos now has 47 Followers and over 70,000 Views. To put this in context, the largest mining related Community on G+ has just 1500 members. It's not a mainstream subject there, so this could be considered good. The newest addition to Mining Photos and Videos is over on Twitter and, still only a couple of weeks old,  it already has 90 Followers and 14,000 Impressions. On Pinterest, it's a little bit more difficult to assess, as M.P.V. exists there only as a Board. Certainly, one feels that Pinterest is not the right place for such content per se. Nevertheless, Pinterest is still useful for embedding and sharing the content elsewhere.

However, by far the worse performing (and by far the hardest slog for getting traction or engagement) is the version of the M.P.V. Showcase Page on LinkedIn. The irony is that LinkedIn is the one platform where one might expect that Industrial Content would fly off the shelf. Just search LinkedIn  Groups, Companies or People for "mining", for example, and you will grasp the extent of the potential audience. Indeed, Mining & Metals is massive on LinkedIn. Yet I have struggled to amass just 13 Followers of the Showcase Page to date, with perhaps a total of just a couple of thousand impressions over a multitude of posts.

So I looked into to doing a fairer comparison with Facebook by "sponsoring" some of the posts on the LinkedIn Page. But when I got to the "checkout" I was horrified.

LinkedIn Advertising Costs.

LinkedIn want £13 for 1000 impressions alone!? So to get the equivalent reach as the targeted Facebook post above would cost me nearly £2000 on LinkedIn! Or a video I boosted yesterday for £1 on Facebook, which reached 13,000 people and has had 4500 views, would cost me £170 on LinkedIn. I did not need to proceed to payment to know there simply is no comparison to be made. Especially when it is completely uncertain to me how much organic growth or how many followers that £13 for 1000 views will drive.

As I said above, the whole point of paying on Facebook is to generate results very cheaply which are simply unachievable otherwise. But 1000 views is not that hard to achieve (as I know from the analytics of this very blog). Just not via a LinkedIn Showcase Page it seems.