According to LinkedIn’s February 27th, 2012 blog post, the long overdue “LinkedIn follow button” is out. Facebook, Twitter, and even Pininterest all came out with their follow buttons fairly quickly, but for some reason LinkedIn didn’t. Maybe they thought the “share on LinkedIn” button was enough. But many internet users feel that level of engagement is too much. Many like to just follow companies for a while before committing to deeper levels of sharing.
“How does the Follow Company button work?” The official LinkedIn blog goes on to say:
Click on the Follow Company button and, as long as you are logged onto LinkedIn, you will automatically “follow” the company. If you are not logged on, a box will appear asking for your LinkedIn credentials. Just type those in and you will automatically begin to follow the company. Companies will engage with you from their Company Page on LinkedIn and through status updates. Status updates will appear on your LinkedIn homepage – so check back frequently to see what’s going on.
OK, let’s imagine you’ve gotten us to install that LinkedIn follow button on your Yahoo! Store, now what? What does it mean when someone is following your company on LinkedIn? It immediately begs the question as to whether you are updating your LinkedIn company page, at least enough to make the investment worthwhile. It’s not necessarily hard to update a LinkedIn page. As you can see in the screenshot below, we have our FastPivot blog streaming through our LinkedIn company page updates. So, any of the 32 followers can keep up with us via their LinkedIn updates.
But if any of our 32 followers can just come to our website to see those blogs, why would we need to bring them to LinkedIn (and away from our site)? These followers actually found us on LinkedIn, and LinkedIn is where they prefer to engage, in the same way that we might post our blogs to Facebook or Twitter followers who prefer to engage there. But you might ask, Doesn’t giving my existing customers a LinkedIn follow button give them an incentive not to be on my site any longer? That’s a long standing argument, but the counter to that is more of what we said at the beginning of the paragraph: Give interested customers multiple ways of staying in touch with you. They are already on LinkedIn, and may not feel like going all the way to your site to read your blog, etc. Meet them where they are, and when it’s time, they’ll return to your site to take action.
Contact FastPivot.com today to learn more about adding a LinkedIn follow button to your Yahoo! Store.
