LinkedIn is the largest professional social network in the world with over 850 million users. There are many reasons why your business should use LinkedIn, it offers professional networking and career development as well as the ability to connect with other users and hear their news. It has become a very powerful marketing tool for businesses.
Below we have included what you need to do, in order to use LinkedIn as an effective marketing tool.
Create and optimise company profiles
Setting up an accurate company profile for Linkedin is important, as it helps to rank your business in search results. Therefore, optimising company pages with relevant and important information about your business is useful when ranking in SERPs. A good way to optimise your profile is to use keywords in your company’s description and add the company’s branding to the profile and cover image.
Linkedin also includes statistics on your account, showing how it has improved over the last week and graphs on previous months. These stats help you understand how well your business is doing on Linkedin and how your following is growing. It will also give you insights on your customers so that you can change and adapt your content to meet their needs better.
Having a Linkedin profile is also another method to spread brand awareness and industry knowledge to help your business grow.
Personal Profiles are just as important
A personal profile on Linkedin is just as important as a company one, so ensure all of your staff have a Linkedin account. Their personal account needs to show their current job description within the company and their profiles should link to the company’s page. Whoever they connect with on Linkedin will see that they work for your business and this could increase brand awareness for you.
It is also important to ask your team to connect with their work contacts on Linkedin. If you have a meeting with someone, a phone call or just email contact it gives you a chance to grow your connections on Linkedin and ultimately, get more people looking at the company. Employees who are liking and sharing posts from the company page, will help increase brand awareness as more viewers will be seeing what you post.
Posts
Linkedin is as important as Facebook and Twitter when posting blog posts. It is important to post regularly, to reach a wider range of audience. The more you post, the more likes you will get, which in turn means that your reach will expand. When a viewer likes a post, their ‘followers’ see they have liked it. Thus, their followers are also seeing your posts. They in turn may choose to follow you too if your post is relevant to them. By sharing your knowledge and experience, posts can increase your businesses credibility and industry authority.
If uploading to several different social platforms is hard for you, consider using social media scheduling tools such as Buffer or Hootsuite. These scheduling tools allow you to link all social profiles and you only have to write posts once to share it across all your social platforms. You can also schedule posts to be uploaded at certain times to make it post automatically over holidays or throughout a busy week.
Join an industry group
There are many industry groups on LinkedIn. By joining one you can share your knowledge with others in the same field and give / get advice too. This is a great way to increase the company’s credibility and also grow your connections.
You can find specific groups by searching keywords or by checking out your connections to see if they follow a useful group that you might want to join.
Create a group
If there are no groups that are appealing to you, you could create a company-branded group for your clients and / or colleagues to discuss issues / ideas for your industry. This is a great way to get your company name out there and to receive credibility. You can answer viewers’ questions directly or share specific blog posts (from your website) on items raised. These in turn will direct viewers back to your website, promoting further engagement.
Job Opportunities
You can also post job opportunities on LinkedIn. Posting a new job opening at your company is a great way to advertise for applicants whilst spreading business awareness.
Linkedin jobs also allow you to view information about applicant’s education and past jobs. This initial insight into prospective team members can be incredibly helpful during the interview process
Final thoughts
In conclusion, Linkedin is a platform that all businesses can benefit from. It is a professional network that allows businesses to establish themselves, build credibility and brand awareness and also exert industry authority. As the platform is free, it is a very cost effective way to reach out to new and existing clients and share industry news. It is also an excellent way to network and keep an eye on what your competition is doing too.
