Insightpool Ads Optimization vs. LinkedIn Marketing Solutions

I recommend Insightpool for anyone looking to build and maintain a relevant follower pool on Twitter as well as anyone that wishes to use Twitter for event recruitment, white paper downloads, etc. With a small team, I strongly recommend the full-service model, especially when you first get started. It's like having an in-house social team when you opt for full-service and has enabled us to do much more on Twitter than was previously possible with our small team.

Although it offered great features, we didn't really see a lot of traffic or results from the ads we placed. Working in hospitality, we had to strategically time and place our ads around holiday seasons and it can be difficult to predict a marketing campaign. Depending on your market, LinkedIn may not be the best avenue to advertise with.

Incentivized

• Event promotion and registration: Insightpool's unique ability to search both the Twitter stream and profile data makes reaching B2B marketing professionals at key industry events a cinch.
• Building relevant follower pool: Insightpool's ability to target relevant users by profile data makes finding and nurturing the right individuals easier than ever before.
• The personalized and targeted approach is well-received and prompts engagement from the people we care about.

• Targeting - they have done a great job of allowing you speak to ideal audiences
• Support - dedicated customer service and account advising is always accessible and very responsive
• Curation of professional audiences - one of the biggest advantages to the platform is that its users are for the most part are professional

Incentivized

• Initial iterations of the tool were buggy and not all that intuitive, which is why we moved to a full-service model. More recent releases are much more intuitive and less buggy.
• The tool was limited before its ability to search Twitter steams, but now with stream search, we do not feel hindered in anyway.
• Personally, I'm not a fan of public message targeting. Use with caution. The DM feature works great and is very well received by our audience however.

• The Campaign Manager is not good. It seems like the Campaign Manager (where you create and manage your self-serve ad campaigns) is buggy and doesn't have a good flow. Contrast with FB Ad Manager of the Google Adwords/Ads interface, which has a much more simple process to create and edits campaigns, ad groups, ads, keywords, audiences, budgets, etc. LinkedIn Campaign Manager seems to actively work against you trying to make changes to your campaigns.
• LinkedIn Campaign Manager offers three options: sponsored content, InMail, and text ads. LinkedIn used to offer other ad services that you couldn't access unless you had a "managed ad account" run by LinkedIn Staff with a dedicated monthly ad spend. It seems most of those "hidden" features have disappeared, though you still have to contract with LinkedIn to offer dynamic ads. It would be better if LinkedIn empowered marketers to create the ads they want. (Perhaps with a dedicated acct. manager like how Google Ads works.)
• This is silly, but it isn't easy to navigate to Campaign Manager. I have a bookmark for Campaign Manager because if you want to click there through LinkedIn, it takes 2 or 3 different screens to get to Campaign Manager. In my opinion, when you click the "Work" dropdown from the LinkedIn header (by your profile picture) you should have a link to Campaign Manager.
• LinkedIn, in recent months, has made substantial changes to the Ads platform and Campaign Manager. Though these changes work to address some of the above issues, LinkedIn still has quite a ways to go before their platform is on par with their competition.

Incentivized

Just renewed for the rest of the year. Pricing is very reasonable especially when you compare it to the cost of paid Twitter campaigns. And, Insightpool campaigns have consistently outperformed direct Twitter campaigns.

in terms of promoted content reporting and usability, the platform is not as flexible or easy to use compared to more established social platforms like Facebook. However, it does offer plug-ins to Google Data Studio which makes pulling and manipulating data easier. My main usability gripe comes when looking at organic performance of a company page. There isn't an easy way to export organic performance data.

Incentivized

So, everything what I just said previously adds up to the value of LinkedIn Marketing Solutions. Definitely recommending it to a friend. It has its things to improve but its nothing major or nothing to worry about. So I give a 9 because it still has that, some user interface glitches that can be improved but do not damage the experience that you have with it.

Incentivized

We've used sponsored Tweets via Twitter directly with limited success. We don't see the same level of engagement or types of followers with paid Twitter promos as we do with Insightpool campaigns. Additionally, we receive a fair amount of negative feedback when we use sponsored tweets as they tend not to be as targeted as running Insightpool campaigns

If you want more precision in B2B targeting, then LinkedIn is without question the better alternative. However, as I established before, I've rarely seen LinkedIn campaigns be successful for anything other than brand awareness/thought leadership. And that's almost 100% what Twitter is for. Twitter campaigns almost always have a cheaper CPC AND CPM than LinkedIn and accomplish the same thing, so I would say go with Twitter. At times LinkedIn campaigns are just so you can tell someone at a higher level that you did precise targeting to the exact audience they wanted and check that box, because it's easier for them to understand how you'd do well on LinkedIn, and more difficult to tell that story on Twitter. But I honestly prefer Twitter and its platform for B2B awareness campaigns. Heretic, I know, but it's how I feel after several years of experience with both. Facebook is bottom of the barrel for B2B in my mind, so I'm not really going to discuss it. I would take LinkedIn over Facebook for many reasons, but Facebook is an option too, but more for SMB and just covering all bases, not as a primary choice for B2B marketing.

Incentivized

• Not just more Twitter followers, but more RELEVANT Twitter followers and more engaged followers from our target audience.
• A great tool for prospecting and event recruitment at key industry events.
• Effective at amplifying content distribution, especially when content is related to key industry events.

• We have seen a marked increase in inbound agent calls since we began LinkedIn marketing.
• LinkedIn marketing is an excellent way to put your content in front of people that are actually going to read it, this has led to a major increase in our content being consumed and acted on.

Incentivized