Among the different social media platforms, LinkedIn is the most effective marketing tool for B2B businesses. According to LinkedIn Marketing Solutions Blog, it is the most-used social media platform by Fortune 500 companies.
For some business owners, it may be a great opportunity to reach out to the big players in the industry. But others may be too scared to try it because they fear that they will post the wrong thing and ruin the opportunity.
So, we’ve interviewed several expert tips to share their tips on how to effectively use LinkedIn to help your business grow.
Create a Skill Related to Your Niche
Make sure that you create a skill that is congruent with what you do. In my example, I have created LinkedIn Unlocking as a skill and use this in my headline summary and experience. Creating the same hashtag also is a huge benefit as Google finds it and it can be used as a tag on LinkedIn for all your content and in hashtag communities. Always add it to comments and content that you deliver and you will get noticed and connected with.
Use Your Profile to be a Resource and to Start Conversations
I have two tips actually. Firstly, your profile needs to be a resource – not just a resume. Use your Summary, Experience and especially your media and Posts and Activity session to share content that is of VALUE to your prospective audience. No one really cares about you – but they do care about how you can help them.
Additionally, use your profile and engagement to start conversations. At Vengreso we call it C2C or Connections 2 Conversations. Any time someone likes or comments on a post, or invites you to connect, or views your profile, or has a birthday or work anniversary – these are trigger events you can use to start conversations.
Use LinkedIn to Stand Out not to Fit In
LinkedIn is all really all about storytelling. A properly optimized LinkedIn profile will tell a story and should take readers beyond the title so that they will clearly see the person behind the title.
This is your moment to STAND OUT not fit in! Use your background photo, as your cover page. Don’t live a LinkedIn Default Life. Customize the background photo to give me information about you and don’t forget to use this visual space for business branding. (i.e. reference to your company’s visual identity/ logo, highlighting your credentials, personality, and achievements, an attractive banner with a CTA-call to action such as contact details and invitation to reach out).
Take advantage of the tagline (branding statement) to clearly state your UVP-unique value proposition; think competence, confidence, and charisma! And, use all 2000 characters, of your story. Unlike your resume, LinkedIn is about relationship building, so speak to your audience as if you were face-to-face. Write in 1st person and think of telling your real-life career story. Make it catchy yet professional. Reveal the human within! This is networking just the online version!
Be Real and Authentic
Be authentic. Don’t beat around the bush. Provide upfront value to your customers by informing them or inspiring them around themes that are related to their life. Once you forge a human connection with them, they are less likely to forget your brand. It can be used in the future to make them a loyal customer.
Create a Killer LinkedIn Profile
To be truly effective on LinkedIn, you need to make an incredible profile that clearly summarizes what you do and then consistently put out thought-provoking content. This will sometimes include some of your own work, but it should always be highly relevant to your personal brand. Once you position yourself within a community, you’ll soon have an inbound funnel of interest.
Use Different Types of Content
Diversify your forms of content. Different users prefer varying content types and mixing in multiple formats will generate better results.
Articles are great for organic SEO and evergreen content. Regular text posts work really well for engagement. Image posts are suitable for stats and quotes. Videos have been on the rise since mid-2016. And lately, LinkedIn has introduced Slideshows, allowing you to embed a presentation or ebook as your post media.
Act Like a Human
People know that LinkedIn is a business social network but one aspect that escapes most is the fact that business is still based on relationships. Establishing a connection to other experts can yield unexpected results in the long run. My best tip would be to always interact with others – whether you’re the CEO of a company, a Marketing expert or a Sales one.
Take a few minutes of your day and comment, share, and like other people’s posts, especially the ones asking for recommendations on various topics. However, you should not be aggressive about plugging your own company or people will find you disingenuous. Be natural in the way you communicate and your business will profit from it as well.
Engage and Get Social
We have a very specific two-pronged strategy for when we’re working with C-level executives to build their personal and business brand via LinkedIn:
- Do anything required to become a speaker at a conference or other meeting people attend in person. I’ve given over 200 speeches the past few years, with some venues as large as the New York Stock Exchange, and some as small as a local Rotary Club. Paid or unpaid, I speak in public as much as possible. When you’re on stage, those in the audience assume you’re an expert in your field. After all, you’ve already been vetted by someone (e.g. a conference organizer) who’s involved with an association/group they trust.
- Connect with those in the audience on LinkedIn and engage in two specific activities:
- Produce content focused on helping educate your target market (this is the marketing component)
- Send personal messages to those with whom you’d like to have further conversations (this is the sales/business development component)
Use LinkedIn to Transform and Develop Your Business
There are a lot of great Social Media tools out there that you can use to grow your business, but in my opinion, LinkedIn is the best. Every company wants more leads, traffic, and sales, and there are a few key things that can be done on LinkedIn to transform and develop your business.
Firstly, and most importantly, create a company LinkedIn page. People cannot connect with your company if there isn’t a page there in the first place.
Next promote that page, whether this will be encouraging company employees to follow and share posts, or adding the company LinkedIn profile to the footer of all emails. Add a follow-button onto the company website, and share on other active social media channels.
Thirdly, be active. This is a very important step and means content should be posted and shared regularly. LinkedIn users like to see that you have something to say, and increased content exposure helps to establish a business with both authority and respect. The more you post, the more people you reach, the best LinkedIn pages are ones that are constantly updated to ensure that visitors have lots of new content to consume and share.
There are a few added things that can be done to ensure that your posts are successful, such as adding links in posts, images, and responding to comments, all of which have proven to increase post engagement.
Another way to utilize LinkedIn to grow your business is to use it to showcase Thought Leadership. This means sharing your companies unique perspective on your industry, product or organization to create interest in your business. Thought Leadership is critical for determining which companies consumers want to learn more about, and it is a good way to demonstrate your position in the industry. LinkedIn can also be employed to target Sales Prospects.
The platform provides you with tools to target your ideal audience, and with LinkedIn users being more likely to keep their profiles updated than any other Social Media platform, it is much easier for you to target the right kind of people. A big area of LinkedIn that some may overlook is the part that it plays in informing job-seekers career decisions.
A lot of candidates want to see good company-culture over anything else when researching the business; are they going to enjoy working there? And what will they be getting up to? Encourage employees to create ‘Day in the Life’ content, and post pictures of team-building activities held by the company.
Lastly, LinkedIn is a great tool for hiring freelancers. Finding the right talent for the task at hand isn’t as hard as it once was, even if you can’t afford the salary of a full-time employee.
LinkedIn is an amazing tool that, if utilized effectively, can boost a company’s success.
Share Your Advice Instead of Your Products
As an event planning agency, we use LinkedIn to showcase highlights from our recent events and share blog posts on industry trends. We find it valuable to comment/share on other articles related to our industry; the more often your followers see your name, the more they will come to trust you as an expert in your field.
Another great tip is to join groups where you can offer advice and interact with those looking for advice. It’s important to use LinkedIn as a platform to share advice instead of sharing your products.
Handy Tips From the LinkedIn Guy
Here are three strategies and tips to use LinkedIn to grow and promote a business:
- Establish the right mindset. LinkedIn is not a marketing or sales channel in and of itself. LinkedIn is a relationship channel. It’s where you build and nurture relationships with people you know (1st-degree connections) so that they readily introduce you to people they know (2nd-degree connections) who may need your products and services. I like to say LinkedIn is not about 1st-degree connections-the magic is in growing your relationships with 2nd-degree connections.
- Make sure your LinkedIn Profile is 100 percent complete. Use all the 2000 characters-with-spaces LinkedIn gives you for your Summary section. This is where you talk about who you are, what you do, what sets you apart from others in your industry. Let people know of any awards or accomplishments you may have achieved. Take a sentence to talk about your interests and hobbies. You’d be surprised at another whole level of connections you make by sharing some of your personality.
- LinkedIn is not a parking lot for one’s resume. You need to be active on LinkedIn. I recommend allocating 10 minutes per day to building out your relationships with your connections (and theirs), creating trust, credibility, and goodwill. Which in the end is how you grow and promote your business. Here are action items to take:
- Invite and accept 10 invitations to connect
- Post 2 status updates per week
- Endorse 5 clients per day
- Write 1 recommendation per week
- Respond to communications
- Post 1 discussion in a group per week
- Respond to 1 discussion in a group per week
- Ask for 1 recommendation per week
- Ask for 1 introduction per day
- Identify 3 people you don’t know to connect with through keyword searches
Aim for an All-Star Personal and Company LinkedIn Page
Regularity is key. Based on the insights of your company marketing strategy, create and carry out 2-3 post themes and monthly measure their performance (copy post, format, time of publishing among others).
Think like a publisher. Accustom your audience what they could expect from your Company Page/ LinkedIn Page. So check out a Content Suggestions’ feature to inspire and design content to be more compelling for your followers.
Don’t fear to make experiments with a different kind of post formats. For example, while native video stuff could help to reach an audience, who is not your followers, it’s attributed with low CTR. PDF/ document format, in turn, is a dark horse. So take advantage of it.
Use a few (3-4 recommended) hashtags along with publishing every post. Look at LinkedIn pieces of advice that appear below a post.
Your employees are your micro-influencers on LinkedIn. Don’t forget about it.
Until recently, managers of Company Page/ LinkedIn Page couldn’t go outside to interact with people based on a certain thread. LinkedIn has unlocked this opportunity for some time. Now you can pick a favorite three hashtags and monitor conversation on LinkedIn based on them, then.
It may sound weird but SEO rules are important on LinkedIn too. Scrutinize all sections on Company Page/ LinkedIn Page. Similarly to your private account, you should be satisfied in case you reach All-Star grade of your Company Page.
Make a Good First Impression
LinkedIn is more than just a platform to find and recruit new employees. It has become a mainstream content marketing platform for companies and professionals.
One of the best ways to use LinkedIn to grow your business is to post regular content and promote it on LinkedIn. Posting articles, videos, or other posts on trending industry topics can help you establish yourself as an industry thought leader. It can also improve your company’s image and help you get more qualified candidates.
Another way you can use LinkedIn to grow your business is to build a solid Company page and promote it. Your Company page is where prospects will go to learn more about your company. That is your chance to make a good first impression and get people interested in your business.
Also, make sure that you optimize your Company page for search so that relevant people can easily find it. Optimizing your Company page can help you gain more visibility and get more leads for your business.