How can disruptive brands thrive on Linkedin?

As social media advertising continues to evolve, LinkedIn has emerged as a powerful platform for professionals and businesses alike. With its unique focus on connecting professionals, showcasing skills, and fostering networking opportunities, LinkedIn has become a go-to platform for B2B advertising. It has also become a platform for professionals to highlight great ideas, interesting new developments, and even perceived mistakes that other businesses make. In recent years, many disruptive and challenger brands have gained attention on LinkedIn for their unconventional and sometimes controversial approaches. Let’s take a closer look at disruptive brands on LinkedIn, examining the potential benefits and drawbacks, and helping you determine whether it is the right approach for your brand.

Here are some examples of some brands that have caused a stir on LinkedIn:

Surreal

This cereal company has recently gained significant popularity through its unique and innovative marketing campaigns. Their memorable brand with bright block colours and bold sans-serif typeface, is one that lends itself perfectly to outlandish campaigns that generate noise, both good and bad. Their playful and humorous tone demands attention in their competitive industry, and they certainly stand out from other health focused cereals.

Brand collaborations: Surreal have teamed up with other like-minded brands targeting a similar audience and have created a humorous visual that has gotten people talking. It is almost impossible to read “Harder, Feta, Faster, Stronger” without singing along in your head.

Influencer collaborations… or not? : Their clever ideas to gain attention stretch to using famous names for promotion, except they aren’t really famous at all. This campaign resulted in a huge amount of chatter on LinkedIn especially, with everyone sharing their opinions on whether or not it was ethical, legal, or even good marketing.

Innovation in attracting web traffic : Cereal isn’t the only thing they have sold. Over Black Friday in 2022 they decided to use their website to sell billboard spaces to anyone who wanted to have their face on an ad, as well as ‘stolen’ pint glasses, and even onions. Not only did they sell out on these weird and wonderful items, but they also attracted huge amounts of traffic to their website, where their Black Friday sales were highlighted, so they also sold a huge amount of their cereal. Oh, and it gave them yet another funny post for LinkedIn which again, got everyone talking.

Innocent

Everyone knows Innocent by now as their playful tone of voice with a purpose driven approach behind it. But what you may not know is that even on LinkedIn, where every piece of content is expected to be either life affirming or some brilliant revelation, around 40% of their content is “Branded random”. This is mostly posts about the weather or about clocks, but really, it’s anything that’s relevant at the time, might make people chuckle or just makes the brand feel more human.

Even when they are giving out some disappointing news, they manage to do it in a way that is humorous and self-deprecating, and gaining a whole load of praise and publicity from the many, many shares it received.

Not a disruptor? Not a problem

You don’t always need to be a disruptor, to disrupt, especially on LinkedIn.

Dove

Dove thrives on LinkedIn. In an environment where users love to highlight the good, as well as the bad (or rather, the social issues facing many in the professional world) Dove have really leaned into their Change Beauty messaging. By promoting real stories that are relevant for current trends and highlight important issues in beauty standards like racial inequality, social media’s impact on self-esteem and biases around different body types, Dove has managed to not only cement themselves as a brand who really does care, but also to grow their following and build a real community on the platform.

Top tips for how your brand can thrive on LinkedIn:

Choose your audience: This is probably not the same as your other social channels, or even your end users/customers and you should consider common job roles in your target audience. For example, if you’re planning to share what brilliant activities you’re doing on other marketing channels, then your content is going to get picked up and shared by a whole bunch of marketers.

Use eye-catching visuals: Sometimes all text posts work brilliantly on LinkedIn (usually if they’re really long, or really short), but most of the time people need something visual to grab their attention.

Be human: Yes you’re speaking as your brand, but your audience wants to be able to feel like they know you.

Give them something to talk about: If there’s one thing people on LinkedIn love, it’s having something to critique, praise and put into their own context. Create content that gives your audience something to talk about wherever you can, whether that’s your other marketing channels (like Surreal and Thursday), framing your sad company news in a fun way (like Innocent) or highlighting your social impact.

Topics that are perfect for disrupting things on LinkedIn:

Industry news and insights: People on LinkedIn are interested in staying up-to-date on the latest developments in their industries, so content that provides news, analysis, and insights into trends and innovations tends to perform well.

Your take on business and technology trends: People on LinkedIn are not only interested in staying up-to-date on the latest business and technology trends, but they’re also interested in hearing different perspectives, so content that provides news, analysis, and insights into these topics tends to get a lot of engagement.

Innovative or controversial ideas to get your brand noticed: It’s not a surprise to anyone on LinkedIn that brands are there primarily to promote themselves, be that to attract potential clients or customers, or to find new talent to join the company. So, highlighting the wacky, wild or bold ways that you’re promoting your brand through other channels is welcomed, especially if it can spark some healthy debate.

So, while it makes it easier in many ways, you don’t need to be a disruptor to create some noise on LinkedIn. By creating and sharing content that is relevant, innovative or different, takes a stand on a big topic and provides value to your audience, you can build your network, establish yourself as a thought leader, and drive engagement with your content.