There’s no denying a large portion of the battle for market clout is now waged through the social media and a company’s ability to masterfully use them as a marketing tool can literally make or break its success. However, it can be quite challenging to harness their potential and make it work for you if you haven’t got a clearly-defined strategy or a clear sense of which media are likely to yield the best results.
Thus, few people have grasped, as yet, LinkedIn’s tremendous potential as a tool to promote their business and most content themselves with using it as resume site. Yet LinkedIn may actually prove a more effective marketing vehicle than other more popular social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter, if used properly.
To begin with, LinkedIn is a search engine, which is to say it weighs a lot with Google and other popular search engines. Following are a bunch of useful tips to help you leverage LinkedIn’s potential to give your company a boost.
1. Create a Comprehensive & Appealing Profile
It’s advisable to fill in your LinkedIn business profile as thoroughly as possible, which means you should include education and qualifications, all relevant jobs, past and present, various distinctions and awards you’ve received and boards you’ve sat on. It also pays off to write a well-wrought and persuasive summary, where you should explain what you do, highlighting those aspects that could recommend you as an expert in your field.
2. Come up with a convincing title
The headline you will start your content with is of the essence since this is the first thing users will see, even before they decide to check your profile details, so, ideally, it should grip their attention and persuade them to read further.
3. Create a Company Page
LinkedIn now offers a company page section where you can create a listing for your business, separate from your personal profile, as a way to provide additional information about your products and services or your team.
4. Leverage Keywords to Improve Your Search Engine Visibility
Make sure you use wisely-chosen keywords in your headline and other content to enhance your search engine visibility. Experts point to five tactical areas where you should place keywords, in order to optimize your profile for search engines:
Headline – Your “pitch”/ How you advertise yourself to the community
Current Work Experience – Your current activities, summed up using well-chosen keywords
Past Work Experience – Past jobs which fall under relevant experience
Summary – A longer presentation of your qualifications
Specialties – Your areas of expertise
5. Promote your page on your other social media users or on your business site
You should also introduce a LinkedIn link, icon or widget on your website or blog, in a place where it’s sure to catch a visitor’s eye.
7. Promote Your Website/ Blog on LinkedIn
You may want to add links to your website and/or blog to your LinkedIn profile. It’s more effective to use custom anchor texts when providing the links instead of default text. If you have a blog, you should add your blog’s RSS feed to your LinkedIn profile, thus ensuring any new post is displayed automatically. There is also a WordPress application available for WordPress blogs.
8. Build Relationships, Use Existing Contacts
Remember the success of a business crucially depends on building a lasting, mutually satisfying relationship with clients, which is what makes LinkedIn such a valuable tool for business. Therefore, make sure you use its potential to the fullest, connect with others and build useful relationships with prospects and peers. You can always start with existing contacts, be it friends, business partners or clients, inviting them to join your network on LinkedIn.
9. Join Groups
A surefire way to reach out to more people is joining various groups, whether they are relevant to your particular field or covering a wider range of expertise, as messages are displayed to the entire group and it’s a great place to meet prospects or peers.
10. Create Your Own Group
One of the most effective strategies to market your business or website is creating your own LinkedIn group. The best way to go about this is to set up a group related to the key competencies or services that your company provides. This will become a meeting-place where people can discuss specialized topics and ask questions, which affords you a great opportunity to introduce your company to people with an interest in the field and to showcase your expertise by answering their questions.
11. Answer Questions
You can also gain credibility as an expert by answering questions related to your field asked by other professionals. By providing a qualified answer you can boost your visibility, make new contacts and promote your expertise. However, make sure your answers are pitch-free.
12. Get Recommendations to Enhance Your Appeal
Recommendations are one of the perks that set LinkedIn apart from other social networks. Indeed, there’s probably no better way to promote your business than having your colleagues and clients vouch for your expertise. The best method to get recommendations is to abide by a time-honored piece of advice: “Give and you shall receive”. In other words, recommend others and they will return the favor.
Remember, LinkedIn can be a highly effective tool for marketing and these are just some of the ways in which you can use its tremendous potential to promote your business and reach out to a wider community.