How Can Charities Use LinkedIn?
LinkedIn is predominantly a business-to-business (B2B) network. This clear difference between LinkedIn and other forms of social media, such as Twitter or Facebook, enables charities to connect with corporations in their professional spheres.
LinkedIn allows charities to share their expertise in long and short form content. By promoting informative content on LinkedIn, organisations are able to establish thought leadership and credibility in their field – a key driver of success in B2B marketing.
Establishing credibility on LinkedIn is an invaluable asset for charities from the perspective of recruiting corporate fundraisers, securing event sponsors, or becoming an organisation’s ‘Charity of the Year’. LinkedIn’s primary purpose is networking, thus helping organisations foster collaborations with businesses and landing corporate partnerships.
What are LinkedIn Newsletters?
LinkedIn newsletters are long-form content published in-platform to your organisation’s profile. These newsletters are a great way to delve into specific subject areas in a more detailed way compared to posts to your feed. Showcasing your organisation’s expertise in this way is a great way to both foster trust and credibility in your specialisms, and also boost brand awareness in the B2B space.
LinkedIn newsletters appear in in-platform search results. Therefore, producing quality newsletter content in your niche can attract the following of other stakeholders and potential partners. Once you have gained newsletter subscribers, LinkedIn will notify them via notification and email when you post new newsletter content, allowing you to continue engaging with this group.
By subscribing to your newsletter, users are indicating that they find your content engaging and informative. But, further to this, it is likely their network will contain more people who share the same interest in your organisation’s cause. LinkedIn harnesses this by showing a user’s newsletter subscriptions in their profile and allowing readers to share newsletter articles with their network.
Expanding the reach of your newsletter does not stop at just the LinkedIn platform itself – you can also attract readers from Google search results. LinkedIn newsletters are indexed by Google. This, alongside LinkedIn’s strong domain authority, could make publishing content to a LinkedIn newsletter more effective than publishing that same content on your own website.
Changes to LinkedIn Newsletters
LinkedIn newsletters were already a great way to establish trust and expand the reach of your organisation, but this feature has just got even better.
LinkedIn noted that “newsletter readership has tripled over the past year, now with more than 1.3M daily readers”. To help brands and organisations share their newsletter content in a more seamless and user-friendly way, LinkedIn are rolling out some new features:
- Improved publishing experience
- Ability to host up to 5 newsletters
- Automatically follow author profile after newsletter subscription
Improved Publishing Experience
Previously, LinkedIn had received feedback that their in-house article editor was sub-par. Writing newsletter content can be daunting enough, let alone editing, designing and formatting that content ready for publishing. To overcome this, LinkedIn have updated the newsletter article editor to make it more user-friendly and intuitive.
The new and improved newsletter editing platform lets you format and add multimedia elements to your content with ease. This is good news for the charity sector, as a quicker and easier publishing process allows you to expand into this effective B2B platform with minimal marketing resources.
You can also add SEO titles and descriptions to each LinkedIn newsletter article, which is great for driving traffic from Google search results. For organisations who are struggling with domain authority on their own site, utilising this user-friendly SEO feature and piggybacking off LinkedIn’s website authority can be a great way to boost the organic traffic of your content.
Host Up to 5 Newsletters
Another great addition in this latest update is that your organisation can now host up to 5 different newsletters. This is particularly useful if you’re a multi-faceted charity, with several fields of expertise that you’d like to establish credibility in.
Multiple newsletters allow you to go further than a typical monthly newsletter, which is often a general round-up of different topics. Instead, you can use your LinkedIn newsletters to deep dive into topic areas that would appeal to different sectors of a B2B audience.
A more tailored approach to newsletter content allows you to lean into the aspect of your charity that you think would appeal most to that professional audience. Connecting with potential corporate partners in this way positions your charity as a reliable source of relevant information, and increases positive engagement with your content.
Multiple newsletter streams can also assist with creating general LinkedIn content. This is because long-form content can be broken down into multiple newsfeed posts. Remarketing your newsletter content not only saves on marketing resources, but also further embeds your organisation as a thought leader in your fields.
Automatic Follow
The final update rolling out in August 2023 is that a subscription to your LinkedIn newsletter will now mean an automatic page follow.
As previously mentioned, your newsletter can be found via Google search, LinkedIn search, on another person’s page or via shared content. This means that people who discover your newsletter, still may not yet have discovered your charity or organisation. But now, you can use your compelling newsletter content to expand your B2B network.
Readers who subscribe to your newsletter are showing an interest in your field of expertise, so they are likely to be engaged and invested page followers. On LinkedIn, having an engaged following can have a snowball effect on boosting awareness of your organisation. Everytime a user likes, comments or shares your content, it will appear on the newsfeed of their connections, thus getting your charity in front of an even wider audience.
Another great thing about transforming subscribers into followers is the importance of connection on LinkedIn. By following your charities page, users are able to be involved in the conversation, engage with your updates and generally develop a closer affinity with your organisation.
In Summary
LinkedIn is a valuable resource for charity organisations due to its focus on fostering partnerships between professionals. Corporate fundraising partners are a valuable source of income for charities, and by leveraging the network of LinkedIn, you can expand your B2B connections.
Newsletters are a feature of LinkedIn that allow you to write informative content that places your organisation as a reliable source of information – putting you at an advantage when it comes to corporate fundraising and sponsorship decisions.
The recent updates to LinkedIn newsletters try to improve on the host of benefits already available. An improved publishing experience, being able to host up to 5 newsletters and automatic following mean that now is a great time to delve into the B2B world and begin your organisation’s LinkedIn newsletter.
If writing B2B content is new to your organisation, or you’d like some support with launching your LinkedIn presence, get in touch with our team at Atelier who can provide you with extensive B2B and digital marketing expertise.
FAQs
What is B2B marketing?
B2B stands for business-to-business and refers to promoting your products or services to other businesses. When thinking about charities, B2B marketing refers to a charity promoting their message to professionals and encouraging businesses to support their charity.
How is B2B content different from other content?
The core difference between B2B and B2C marketing is who you are promoting to. In B2B marketing, you’re promoting to decision makers in businesses, and need content that is informative, establishes credibility, focuses on business benefits and has a professional tone.
B2C (business-to-consumer) content tends to be more casual in tone, and is more entertaining and emotionally-driven.
What does ‘indexed’ mean?
If a page is indexed it means that Google has analysed and stored that webpage so that it can be shown in the Google search results.
What is domain authority & how do I check my website’s strength?
Domain authority is a measure used to indicate how likely your website is to rank on search engine results pages.
You can use tools, such as Moz’s Link Explorer, or ahrefs’ Website Authority Checker to assess your website’s authority.
What is an SEO title & description?
Also known as the title tag and meta description, they appear in the search engine results pages, and tell search engines and searchers what your webpage is about.
What is organic traffic?
Organic traffic refers to the number of people driven to your content without using paid methods.
What is a thought leader?
An industry thought leader is someone who has established credibility and trust in writing informative content in their field of expertise. Semrush describe thought leadership as being about “sharing inspirational, research-driven content that drives change and creates educational value”.