This article below is sad, because it's actually "just" a sales pitch for LinkedIn (LI).

Obviously not a surprise, don't forget that LI make no money from us posting articles and commenting.  They make no money from us building our networks and they make no money from us looking like experts to our buyers.  They make money by you buying ads and you buying sales navigator.  (Sales navigator, being the number one lead generation tool.)

The problem brands / companies have is that nobody is interested in them.  Of course you may like certain brands such as Vans or your favorite handbag but the average cloud based accounting software or cyber-security product or salesforce plug-in, I'm sorry but nobody cares.

We are far to busy, getting that report out for our boss to hit a deadline, we need to get the shopping in for the weekend, our in-laws are coming for a bar-b-que, little Johnny needs to go to Football and little Jane needs to go to hockey.  I'm sorry but you cloud based, whatever, where you are market leader .... it's just noise.

Let's not forget, you are an "expert" at Cloud based talent management, where as, I, the buyer, am not.

The last thing you should do is buy ads on Linkedin to promote the brand I don't care about.  You are wasting your money.  As Jay Baer says “Advertising is a tax paid by the unremarkable”.

What you should do is invest that money in empowering your employees to talk about you and your brand.

This is not about stuffing your employees social media accounts with corporate rubbish.  The same as above, we will just mute or unfollow people.  I'm aware of a person that followed a company and it's sales team as he was interested in them.  The sales team just posted corporate rubbish so he unfollowed them.  The other reason you shouldn't do it is that we all know you shouldn't do it.  If you do, we all then know that your Marketing department don't have a clue.  So apart from laughing at you, you are going to jeopardize getting your next role, as your future employer will and can see how useless you are.

This is about empowering your employees to talk in an authentic and human way. Obviously, you need to train them in the right etiquette of working on line.  You need to explain the boundaries.  But working as a collective, not only will you get brand recognition, but you should get inbound (so sales) and people wanting to come and work for you.

So rather spending the money on adverts that nobody will read, invest in your people and you will get additional revenue and a reduction in your recruitment spend as spin off.  Now that is real brand recognition.