This year, mainstream social media news has been all about Facebook’s decision to go public and its struggles to earn the respect of investors, consumers and business professionals alike. Meanwhile, LinkedIn has quietly rolled out marketing products aimed at redesigning company Pages and making audience targeting through the social network easier. More, the professional network recently announced the release of its own ads API that will allow developers to create interfaces that provide marketers more control over their LinkedIn ad campaigns. The ads API helps marketers develop campaigns on platforms that they use to manage other outreach progress across numerous sites.
Currently, advertising accounts for 25 percent of LinkedIn’s revenue, but with the ads API, marketers might be encouraged to allocate new resources toward promoting services through the network. This could help LinkedIn scale its ad revenue and earn a greater share of the social marketplace.
Before the release of its API, LinkedIn required advertisers to log into its self-serve platform to run and manage campaigns on the network. The process worked, and users could oversee their campaigns, but the steps didn’t promote simplicity or scale. LinkedIn has already partnered with companies like Adobe, Bizo and Unified Social to test out the API possibilities, and Adweek reports that a large franchise client used Bizo’s API-enabled platform to reduce cost per lead by 60 percent.
Traditionally, marketers associate social media marketing with content marketing, as one practice distributes media for the other, and shared content on LinkedIn is more important than ever thanks to network redesigns that emphasize relevant headlines. Now, with LinkedIn’s improved ads API, PPC ads and social media content can work in tandem to grab prospects’ attention and promote services in both a push and pull manner.
