It was the summer of 2013 and LinkedIn was on a mission to increase the number of college students and college grads to it’s user ranks. The question was, how?
That’s when Jeremy Schifeling, the Senior Product Marketing Manager for LinkedIn Higher Education, found Rachel Karl.
Jeremy explained the situation to Rachel and asked her to help him figure out how LinkedIn could use its Higher Ed Facebook page to reach more college students.
Instagram, believe it or not, was still in the beginning stages. At the time, it wasn’t a viable platform for businesses, but it was showing future promise. So Rachel kept this in her back pocket for the end of their session.
With that in mind, Rachel consulted with Jeremy on how LinkedIn could use Facebook to reach out to more college students. She helped Jeremy create a plan that involved three things:
- Create more engaging content on Facebook that appeals to a younger crowd,
- Run Facebook ads and
- Visit campuses to mingle with college students (give workshops, hand out stickers, make it cool to use LinkedIn).
At the end of their session, Rachel advised Jeremy to keep an eye on Instagram as signs were pointing to a dwindling younger audience on Facebook with these people switching to Instagram.
It’s evident now that most people under the age of 40 use Facebook as a messaging platform and a forum for groups to congregate. However, their favored social media platforms are Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat. You can see that these users are sharing their photos from Instagram over to Facebook and they straddle both platforms, but for different purposes.
Also, interesting to note: LinkedInU no longer has a Facebook page. You can see the company is now targeting a younger audience using Instagram and teaching people “How to Rock Your LinkedIn Profile,” while rocking the #LinkedInU hashtag:
