LinkedIn is an extreme­ly valu­able resource of infor­ma­tion on your tar­get audi­ence. The best way to get infor­ma­tion on the con­tent you should be cre­at­ing for your audi­ence is to real­ly dive into LinkedIn your­self – to real­ly “meet” with your audi­ence. The infor­ma­tion is there and rea­son­ably acces­si­ble using the advanced search. There is how­ev­er no easy route. You real­ly need to make an effort to find the right infor­ma­tion. This is a lot of work, but if you do make the effort, it will be worth it.

Yes, LinkedIn is anoth­er social net­work, and yes, mil­lions of peo­ple use LinkedIn. But that doesn’t mean you should be using LinkedIn as a bill­board, like we said in the first arti­cle of this series. If you start shar­ing con­tent and start spam­ming LinkedIn, chances are you will quick­ly dry out the poten­tial of the plat­form.

There is how­ev­er anoth­er, for some hid­den, poten­tial of LinkedIn. This is what I use LinkedIn for more than any­thing else. I’m shar­ing (for brand­ing rea­sons), I’m con­nect­ing, but most­ly, I’m research­ing. So I can find exact­ly the top­ics my audi­ence wants to read about.

Research On Other Platforms

So many arti­cles have been writ­ten about research­ing what peo­ple want to read about. “Con­tent mar­ket­ing” is now a must-do,  but that has result­ed in a lot of (most­ly worth­less) con­tent on the web, mak­ing it even hard­er for brands to stand out. So mar­keters try and find a tool that works.

Research­ing con­tent usu­al­ly begins on a plat­form like Twit­ter, doing analy­sis to see what is being shared the most. It’s what makes tools like Buz­zSumo so use­ful.

Con­tent mar­keters see what top­ics are pop­u­lar and write about those. The result? More of the same con­tent, not nec­es­sar­i­ly stand­ing out.

Being There Before The Answer Is Given

When research­ing your audi­ence, you should try to fig­ure out not just by look­ing at which top­ics are hot. While they help, and are a good first step, you should strive to answer ques­tions.

When peo­ple share links to arti­cles they like, it will be to arti­cles that have already giv­en them an answer (in most cas­es). So writ­ing anoth­er answer prob­a­bly isn’t the best way to go, unless you’re sure your answer is bet­ter than all the oth­ers (but you’ll still have to con­vince them of that, mak­ing it extra dif­fi­cult to cre­ate out­stand­ing con­tent).

For your con­tent to be shared, your con­tent must be first to pro­vide peo­ple with an answer to their ques­tion. That means you need to know their ques­tions before they find the answer.

And this is where LinkedIn comes in.

LinkedIn will give me the prob­lems my tar­get audi­ence runs into in their every­day lives, because it’s a more of a busi­ness plat­form than, for exam­ple, Face­book. Peo­ple not only share their issues in groups, their pro­files and their updates will tell me a lot as well.

Here are a few exam­ples of how you can use LinkedIn to research prob­lems.

Researching People And Businesses Using LinkedIn

As we know, LinkedIn is orig­i­nal­ly a con­nec­tion tool. This means peo­ple are putting a lot of infor­ma­tion on their pro­files that is use­ful for us. This infor­ma­tion will help us under­stand our audi­ence a bit bet­ter and will help us find the right audi­ence to tar­get, both with our con­tent, as well as with their out­reach.

Advanced Search

I talked about the advanced search option before in my arti­cle on using LinkedIn as a con­nec­tion tool. There I explained you can find influ­encers using the dif­fer­ent fil­ters avail­able. You can use those fil­ters as well to under­stand dif­fer­ent met­rics from your audi­ence. When you start search­ing, LinkedIn will give you infor­ma­tion on dif­fer­ent lev­els, from peo­ple to top­ics, to groups.

This means the search is a great start­ing point. Have your list of key­words ready and start search­ing. Write down groups, write down names, and write down (relat­ed) top­ics that show up.

Using search you will also gath­er oth­er inter­est­ing infor­ma­tion about your audi­ence: how are you relat­ed to them (you might be clos­er than you think), what type of com­pa­nies does your audi­ence work for and what are issues from those com­pa­nies. And if peo­ple have prop­er­ly set up their per­son­al pro­files and busi­ness pro­files, you will also see the kind of solu­tions they are giv­ing to their tar­get audi­ence. This is valu­able infor­ma­tion because it will tell you what they already know and where they prob­a­bly want to learn more about.

The key to not get­ting lost in the enor­mous amount of infor­ma­tion LinkedIn has hid­den for you: using the right fil­ter­ing.

For exam­ple, if you know that you’re tar­get­ing brands, you will want to fil­ter your search accord­ing­ly: choose the right indus­try, the right size, and the right region, for exam­ple:

After that you can start zoom­ing into com­pa­nies. Look at Updates, the groups they are fea­tured in, and see what relat­ed com­pa­nies peo­ple also look for and specif­i­cal­ly look at peo­ple relat­ed to the com­pa­nies.

Why is it nec­es­sary to look at a per­sons lev­el? Because it will give you much more infor­ma­tion. No, you don’t have to look at every­body, but look­ing at a set of peo­ple in depth will be much more valu­able than look­ing at big chunks of aver­age data.

The Next Step: Finding The Topics

The next step is the real­ly inter­est­ing part of research­ing: actu­al­ly find­ing the top­ics. Again, we start off with search. By search­ing our key­words Linkedin gives us some valu­able infor­ma­tion already. Just look at this (not even fin­ished!) search on influ­ence mar­ket­ing:

This search already gives me stuff to look at. There are the com­pa­nies and show­case pages that will give me con­tent relat­ed to the top­ic, but I’m most inter­est­ed in the groups. It’s even eas­i­er if we just fil­ter on groups in advanced search.

I want to find the right groups on these top­ics. These groups will tell me a few things:

• How inter­est­ed are peo­ple in the top­ics: are the groups big? Is there a lot of dis­cus­sion? This might be a good top­ic! Are they small and aban­doned? Maybe not so inter­est­ing.
• Are the groups full of peo­ple ask­ing ques­tions or are peo­ple just shar­ing their own con­tent in it? If the last one is the case, I’m up for some fierce com­pe­ti­tion, if it’s the first one, hel­lo con­tent!

The groups with ques­tions are the ones I’m inter­est­ed in most, because they will pro­vide me with con­tent ideas that are before the hype. This is where peo­ple ask ques­tions about their every day (work) life. This is where they look for those in the same posi­tion, as they are, who might have the right answers.

I have to tell you: most groups are just about shar­ing your links, but if you find the right one, you can find a lot of ques­tions for you to answer. And some­times part of the answers are there as well. Like this one:

People’s Updates

Final­ly there are people’s updates on LinkedIn. These can be found using the advanced search. Start by fil­ter­ing on posts, and search the terms you’re inter­est­ed in.

This search will take you through the pub­lished arti­cles from LinkedIn mem­bers. Now be aware, that these arti­cles already writ­ten, so you will have to look fur­ther than just the top­ics. The num­bers of views and shares are inter­est­ing here, as are the num­ber of fol­low­ers and the dates shared, but I’m most­ly inter­est­ed in the com­ments.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, LinkedIn doesn’t show this in the search results, so you’ll have to actu­al­ly look at posts. Start with the most read ones and you will prob­a­bly find rel­e­vant com­ments soon.

What Do The Comments Tell You?

Com­ments tell you a cou­ple of things:

• They will give me more ques­tions; some peo­ple fol­low up on arti­cles with more ques­tions or ideas.
• They will tell me if peo­ple have sim­i­lar issues as the arti­cle dis­cuss­es.
• The more com­ments, the more peo­ple are inter­est­ed in the top­ic.
• It might lead me to more peo­ple and oth­er posts with rel­e­vant infor­ma­tion and ques­tions.

Have you unlocked the pow­er of LinkedIn as a research tool for your con­tent?