How to use LinkedIn to streamline your gated-content landing pages
LinkedIn, the site trusted by 180 million monthly visitors with their professional details can provide social media marketers with a huge opportunity to get to know their audience better. Since the site is concerned about privacy and is focused on peer-to-peer relationships (very few real people with 10000 'friends' on here), an anonymous request to connect is likely to be ignored. So how can marketers make use of this resource?
As I've been discussing for a while, Landing Pages provide a great way to get some information about your most engaged audience, in exchange for a giveaway of some kind - a free piece of content is a common one. An appropriately kitted-out landing page allows a visitor to login with LinkedIn to authorize access to his or her public profile quickly and easily, and open the gate to download content in return for the favor.
It should be noted that this gets the landing page owner access to the user's public profile, the same information that could be found by browsing around LinkedIn. Nothing extra is being shared, which takes the pressure off the visitor to share more than he wishes to. Although software developers can set up authorizations to ask for more information, experience shows that far more visitors will abandon the process, concerned with what you are planning to do with their data.
So, how does it look in practice? Pretty simple actually. After persuading a visitor about the value of the content you have on offer, a simple registration message and button is shown.
Reinforcing your privacy policy and how you intend to use the visitor's information is essential. Be open about what you are doing and limit your usage of personal information to help visitors feel comfortable sharing.
When the user clicks the Register button a new page pops up showing the standard LinkedIn authorization. As you can see, the number of pieces of information requested is limited (for the developers, this is set as the 'scope' of the request). This makes the request less threatening and therefore less likely to be abandoned.
Assuming the visitor authorizes this, the next step can be to either collect some additional information and verify the information pulled from LinkedIn, or to just skip this step and jump to the download. If you are verifying the information pulled from the LinkedIn profile, a form like this could be displayed:
Additional fields could be displayed here, unpopulated if other info is needed. But hopefully what I've shown is enough, otherwise you risk losing visitors at this point.
Hopefully, the visitor will click next and will get to the final page: to download the promised content.
The value to the visitor, especially when skipping step 3 with the additional form, is that the whole process is fast and streamlined. Especially for users working on mobile devices, limiting typing is a good thing.
The value for the marketing owner is not just the capture of the obvious information shown in the previous example form. In addition the URL to the visitors profile is also captured and linked to an email address and the main profile text. This makes it faster to review which visitors may be worth closer follow up and additional engagement, especially if the same email address had been used for activities such as email newsletter signups in the past. Multiple requests for your content from the same visitor shows an interest in what you are saying, and in some circumstances may represent a buying signal.
As with any information a visitor chooses to share on a website, there must be a level of trust that the data won't be abused or sold or used to start emailing unwanted junk. Landing pages and gated content only work when the deal appears to be stacked in favor of the visitor, especially with really unmissable content or e-books. This is certainly true when using LinkedIn, which users see as a reflection of their professional lives, and therefore hugely important to protect from abuse.
Although you may find that fewer visitors are willing to share LinkedIn authorizations, by gaining a limited set of visitors in this way can indicate that your brand is targeting those visitors incredibly successfully.
Consected SACRMento Landing Pages make it easy to capture visitors' information through LinkedIn and Twitter logins. Learn about how SACRMento can help you run your next gated-content campaign.












