LinkedIn wants to be part of your breakfast.  That part where you open your tablet, review the LinkedIn stream of news &  read some brand advertorials.  Your LinkedIn stream of news has more noise than the WSJ, but you can take steps to edit out the noise & read things are informative and congenial.

And advertorial in a print magazine was deliberately made to look similar to the editorial page.  Although titled "Advertisement", some readers who regularly skipped display ads were interested in the conversational format of the advertorial.  So, they read & some bought.  The newspaper made money matching a supplier with a customer.

LinkedIn is doing something similar.  It is allowing franchise brands to post their ads directly into your LinkedIn update stream, even if you aren't currently following the company. 

These sponsored updates are different from the LinkedIn paid ads which you see around the edge of the LinkedIn stream, usually in widget  on the right hand side.

Since the sponsored update programs was announced a couple of weeks ago, Joe and I have been trying some of the features out -using our company page.

First, buying impressions is relatively simple.  You figure out what a target audience is, fill in a few buttons and then you are presented with screen that looks like this.

Ok, this campaign would cost us $23.74 for each 1,000 impressions we want to buy.  We are targeting the 104k LinkedIn users in Restaurant or Hospitality industry, Senior Director or VP and above.  We are also targeting it to the people who are in business development, sales or marketing.  So, 10K impressions would cost $237.40.  

But, before we tried to buy the interest or impressions, Joe and I thought we should experiment.  How many impressions could we get using the company page?  

Well, we tried out some ideas and look what happened!  

On May 5th, were able generate, just with 2 articles, 29,031 impressions.  This would have cost us $689.19

But, we generated these impressions organically - as you can see we have gone from essentially zero impressions to almost 30,000 impressions in less than a couple of weeks. 

Now here is thing. Both articles that we tested were advertorials or sponsored updates.  We were using articles that were asking people for a sale.  People read them, just like you are doing now.  Because of their conversational tone.

When your brand needs to make an impression in LinkedIn, and you want your brand to go from 0 to 30k, or more, send me an email in LinkedIn.  Use the title "I want to make an impression."

Or, you can just sign up for more of our ideas about how to publish on LinkedIn. Just click here and Mail Chimp will take over.  Thanks.   Oh, and we never give out your email.