LinkedIn has now begun offering their new advertising product, ‘Sponsored InMail’, to businesses in Australia.
LinkedIn’s InMail feature has been around for many years, allowing users to connect privately with private messages. However, now LinkedIn is utilising this feature as an advertising tool. The social media platform for business executives describes their newest Sponsored InMail as “the equivalent of a personalised letter directed to your high-value target audiences.” For those who are clueless about this new release, it allows businesses to send targeted InMails (aka. direct messages) to a wide audience – within Australia and worldwide.
Furthermore, LinkedIn states that Sponsored InMail is a rival to the “cluttered inboxes” of traditional email marketing. However, if you’re a LinkedIn user, don’t fret that you will be inundated with Sponsored InMail because LinkedIn does state that users can only receive one Sponsored message every 60 days, and users will be notified if something is Sponsored with “a prominent notification on their LinkedIn homepage.”
Sponsored InMail is a strategic advertising move for LinkedIn as the feature is ideal for boosting conversation through targeted product and service promotions. LinkedIn boasts that they use “hyper-precision targeting” to ensure that businesses utilising this new tool predominantly reach members that “matter most.” While other social networks would be hesitant to implement this type of advertising, LinkedIn might be the right platform to implement this because of their large business-centered user base.