How to take advantage of LinkedIn

A couple of weeks ago we published the article ‘Help grow your business with social media, for free’ and focused our attention on Facebook and Twitter, the two giants in the social media field. In this weeks blog we’re going to discuss Business-to-Business social networking using LinkedIn and Connect as our guinea pigs.

LinkedIn

As we have mentioned time and time again, improving your social status will assist your SEO, but importantly, it’s a free way to connect with your existing/ potential clients and gain more business. Unlike Facebook and Twitter, whose free business marketing options are mainly used to interact and engage with your clientele, LinkedIn’s ethos is to encourage collaboration between professionals. With over 53 million users, it’s certainly at the forefront of business-to-business social networking, so if you’ve yet to tackle this platform, we’re about to help you head forth and conquer.

Here’s a guide to what steps you’ll need to take to do so:

Setting up a profile

Sign up: Once you’ve signed up for an account, you’ll be asked to provide some information for your profile, similar to, but more basic than what you would display on your CV e.g. work experience, qualifications, a personal statement and valuable skills. Then you can add a pretty picture of yourself too.

Shout about it: Inform your existing contacts that you’ve arrived on LinkedIn. You can do this through email or another of your social platforms.

Get recommended: You can invite existing contacts or other work colleagues to recommend you. If they do, you can display their rave review on your profile page. And these can act as testimonials and references.

Get Endorsed: You can list your skills on your LinkedIn profile and clients/ work colleagues can endorse your skills. You can list as many skills as you think you possess but perhaps stick to around 10 of the most relevant ones to begin with.

Cross-Market: You can promote your company/ website, blog and other social pages from your LinkedIn profile by providing the links in the contact section of your site. Also start to integrate LinkedIn into all your marketing.

Tips:

If you link your Twitter account to your LinkedIn profile, you can post your LinkedIn updates to Twitter, and vice versa. Peachy! It’s really simple to do:

- Scroll over your thumbnail sized profile pic, in the top right hand corner of your profile page
- Select to manage privacy and settings
- Sign into Twitter & manage Twitter settings
- Add your Twitter account
- Select whether you want this to appear on your LinkedIn account in the contact information area

Some online guidance articles for LinkedIn explain that you’re able to import your blog RSS feed but these are past their sell by date. Previously, if you wrote blogs that were relevant to a LinkedIn group you were apart of, you used to be able to import them automatically into the news section, but sadly, this is no longer possible. There are other ways to go about it:



The more you optimize your profile, the more times it will get viewed because you’ll appear in the search results more frequently. Hopefully, leading to more business contacts and potentially, new clients/ business partners. You can add a ton of information to further help you do this, for example, you can add what languages you speak, what causes you care about, projects that you’ve been apart of, and so on.

Networking on LinkedIn

Groups: Once you’ve setup your profile, you can start networking. The best way to do this would be to join relevant groups and start sharing your knowledge and contributing to conversations. The link to all groups appears beneath the interests tab at the top of your profile page. You could also create your own group. This would offer you another way to reach out and engage with potential/ existing clients.

Tip:

If you’re going to create your own group, we would suggest creating one for your industry rather than your company. Your group reach would extend past your clients and attract/ engage other businesses. You can create topical discussions, write about relevant news and send announcements. Invite your contacts, colleagues, customers and even industry pros to join and start discussions about relevant topics.

Stay regular: Whether you decide to create your own group, or simply join others, or whether you decide to only focus on your profile page, make sure your updates and contribution stays regular. Just like Twitter and Facebook, it’s best not to leave your LinkedIn page deserted.

For SEO

When creating your LinkedIn profile, there are ways you can customise your profile that will complement your SEO, such as:

Customise your public profile URL with your name. On your profile page, click ‘edit’ next to your public profile URL, and then click ‘edit’ next to where it appears on the right hand side. And then you’re done.

Add custom anchor text to your links. You can have up to 3 links on your profile leading to other websites.

Make sure to include a selection of keywords in your summary section and possibly in your work experience section too.

LinkedIn offer premium paid services and pay per click ads as well. We like to enlighten our clients on how to make the most out of all the free online marketing tools, but if there’s room in the budget to accommodate paid advertising, then it’s definitely worth considering.

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