A couple of months ago I wanted to increase referrals on our industry blog servicevirtualization.com. I had always automatically posted to my profile seeking LinkedIn referrals and got some clicks but my network was becoming saturated with service virtualization content since there is a post almost everyday. One day one of the sales guys wanted to so the same so I looked around for a solution that would scale.
I searched around for a bit and found that IFTTT, If This Then That, would probably work for us. I set up a recipe for the blog and LinkedIn and ran it for a while in my personal account. It worked well and I set up some public recipes for the sales teams and gave them some instructions on how to do it. Several did it right away with a few following and it helped us refer more traffic from LinkedIn. I focused on LinkedIn since that is where most of our potential influencers have accounts. If you are selling B2B, LinkedIn is the best and this is a really easy way to scale your content to extended networks at no cost.
Readership jumped immediately with our LinkedIn Referrals
The blog was a bout a year old and getting great traction. The red arrow above indicates when I sent the instructions to the distributed teams. Some set up the service immediately and we saw immediate results. You can see the increase in readership from only the LinkedIn channel after everyone followed the instructions. The increase is at a constant cadence since we posted about 4 posts per week. The increase was about a 400% jump from when I was the only one sharing every single post. Most of the readership happens Monday – Thursday and drops off on the weekends which is typical of a blog only covering a very technical product.