LinkedIn is currently the largest professional networking on the Internet, with more than 590 million members, and more than 30 million companies represented on its service. So if you haven’t been including this professional networking platform in your social media strategy much, here are five ways to help your business get more out of LinkedIn:
1) Optimize your profile
Make sure your company logo is up to date and high quality. Social media is fast moving, and visitors to your profile will often make equally fast decisions about your company based on what they immediately see. So take some time to create a polished, consistent looking profile, and complete all of the information fields about your business. People can tell when you’ve put time and effort into your public image, and it says a lot about how seriously you take your business.
2) Create worthwhile content
If you recently attended our January Membership Luncheon – Effective Modern Marketing, featuring keynote speaker Terry O’Reilly – you know what a powerful marketing tool storytelling can be. Start by telling the story of your business. Write about things that are important to you and to the success of your company, offer valuable insight and knowledge to those who are viewing your profile. LinkedIn is a great platform to showcase your expertise.
3) Take note of the people and companies viewing your profile
This is something quite unique to LinkedIn, and can be a powerful tool if used effectively. Once you become a little more active on LinkedIn, you’ll begin to notice more people and companies viewing your profile. This is an incredibly valuable insight into the types of individuals and businesses your profile is attracting attention from. What you do with that insight is up to you! Which takes us right into…
4) Engage and interact
Once you grow your network a little and start to attract some attention to your profile, you’ll be in a great position to really start using LinkedIn for exactly what it was intended; establishing and growing beneficial professional connections. Spend some time on LinkedIn; visit other business profiles, leave meaningful comments on posts and content that you find interesting, and tag others in your own posts that you think might find it interesting. Many people will be glad to return the favour, and leave a nice comment on your next post!
5) Take advantage of LinkedIn’s ‘Saved Search’ feature
The best way to make sure you’re getting the most value possible out of LinkedIn, is to take advantage of the useful features that are exclusive to the platform, and Saved Search is one of those features. Once you’re ready to take a pro-active approach to LinkedIn, and actively seek out like minded individuals and prospective clients or customers, you can used the Saved Search feature to quickly scan for any new individuals or businesses that meet your specified criteria. But the really handy part is that you can actually set up alerts for your Saved Searches, and be notified of all the new matches to your search!
LinkedIn can be a fantastic resource for your business, but, like most things, you’ll only get as much out of it as you put in. Take an hour this week to analyze your relationship with LinkedIn; look over your profile, revisit your Connections, and identify areas where you could be doing better.
Happy networking!
