For professionals and businesses alike, LinkedIn is no longer optional. These days, everything from sales and business development to content marketing and online learning is done through LinkedIn. When it comes to your boosting your business, here are 10 tips for getting LinkedIn on your side.
Humanize Your Brand
In the current culture, brand voice is everything. In order to connect with your potential clients and partners, your company’s voice has to resonate. If your company’s page — or your own — is riddled with dry facts and stock images, it’s not exactly inspiring.
Even if your target audience is another business, it’s comprised of people, too. Make sure your page displays your company’s personality by:
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Showing off you and your company’s accomplishments.
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Talking about internal, as well as external, events.
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Relating your company to industry trends.
Connect Strategically
Your connections should be about quality, not quantity. Having a few high-quality relationships is often more valuable than blanketing the space with invitations to connect. If your goal is to connect with potential clients or partners, make sure you do your research first and target narrow and deep to find significant relationships.
Publish Content
Take advantage of LinkedIn’s “Publish a Post’” feature. Use long-form content to explore topics that are important or related to your business. Blogging on LinkedIn gets your content out to the full LinkedIn community via LinkedIn “Pulse” and provides a way for you to easily monitor engagement via comments, likes and shares.
By positioning yourself as a thought leader or influencer, you’re bringing validity to yourself and your brand within your field and establishing trust.
Share Regularly
Curate content from your network and put it out there for your potential clients and partners. Your audience wants to see that you’ve got eyes on the industry and its key players, and sharing others’ posts is a great way to demonstrate that.
Promote Employees’ Profiles
Actively encourage employees to get out there and interact with your audience. And as the business, share what your employees are doing. Showcase their experience and projects on your company page, and let your audience see that you value your people and their skills. This puts you in a good place not only with future clients, but with future employees as well. It’s a great way to highlight your company culture.
Participate in Groups
Being a member of industry or interest LinkedIn groups can go a long way with potential customers. You and your employees can use group discussion forums to your advantage by:
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Offering advice on topics you’re familiar with.
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Promoting products and services to drive new leads.
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Posting job openings to find new talent.
Endorse and Be Endorsed
Let people know you have what it takes to do the job with endorsements. Endorse people you’ve worked with for the skills they used with you, and they’ll likely return the favor.
Additionally, ask current clients and former colleagues to write you a recommendation for your skills or services. Reading about the experience someone else had with you will let prospective customers see that you have success stories and are good to work with.
Reach Out
Instead of cold emails, use the more personal LinkedIn messaging service to get in touch with new prospects. If they have already accepted your invitation to connect, the hardest part is done.
Most people check their LinkedIn pages often, so you can be pretty sure that someone is seeing your message. Emails tend to get caught by spam filters or lost in the deluge of new business emails that people get on a daily basis.
Keep Your Competition Closer
Follow the companies and connect with the people you consider to be competition. Every company has its own page where they display basic information as well as stories about their products, people and events. Keeping these companies and people on your feed allows you to stay on top of what they’re doing in the industry and keep an eye out for people on the move. When you know what your competition is up to, you can better develop your own strategy.
Raise Funds
If you have a startup, you probably know that LinkedIn can be a huge resource for mentorship and advice. But did you think about using it for fundraising?
Connect with the people whose advice you want, and don’t be shy about asking to pick their brains. By connecting with venture capitalists, entrepreneurs and other mentors, you’ll not only learn a lot about starting, growing and (maybe) selling a business, but you could also pick up some investors along the way.
Everybody has a LinkedIn profile, and everyone is using it. By leveraging LinkedIn’s capabilities, you can easily make your company and your profile stand out.