Most business people have a LinkedIn profile - or have actively chosen not to have one. So it might seem strange to talk about the value in using LinkedIn for business gain. Doesn’t everyone in business appreciate the need for a LinkedIn profile and the potential gains to be made by being more proactive there?Well perhaps not. Here are 7 ways that you can use LinkedIn to help your business achieve greater success - and in my experience it’s far from the case that all business people are exploiting these opportunities to their full potential. How about you?
Create your professional LinkedIn profile and company pages.
Aim towards creating an All-star personal page in your own capacity and then you can create a company LinkedIn page to amplify your brand with potential clients, business partners and hires. A company page lets you highlight your services, thought leadership and put the spotlight on your employees and your company culture. It can help build your external credibility and create your very own community of people interested in knowing about your business and learning about your areas of expertise.
Find And Participate in relevant LinkedIn Groups.
LinkedIn reports the average user joins 7 LinkedIn Groups. Your clients, influencers and competitors are likely already using this great means of gaining visibility amongst the LinkedIn community. Indeed I’ve seen stats that state over 70% of customers use groups for research, networking and referrals. Joining groups makes you more accessible to other group members, particularly if you regularly participate and engage in conversations, in a non-promotional way. After all, lots of the business wins achieved on social media actually derive from conversations started there and then nurtured to a full-blown business relationship.
Search For Customers.
With over half a billion people in over 200 countries, LinkedIn provides the perfect platform to grow your business! Your presence on LinkedIn will increase opportunities in your industry. But you can also be more proactive, by searching for people interested in your particular niche market and then reaching out in ways that bring in a consistent source of new business leads. That’s before we talk about the user-friendly advertising platform which offers a variety of means for targeting your ideal prospects with your most effective calls to action.
Post Valuable Content.
Experts agree there’s a lot of value to be had by becoming an ambassador or thought leader in your industry, posting content which provides value to professionals in your particular market. The key to any social media strategy is being consistent and providing value to your audience, which in turn increases both engagement and sharing of your content, which then ultimately translates into more leads and potential clients or candidates. Turn your profiles into a magnet for your ideal prospects by distributing thought-leadership, interviews, reports, trend data and must-read resources.
Empower your employees.
Encouraging your employees to become ambassadors for your company on social media can significantly increase your reach. And as we say at Social-Hire, results on social media are a function of your reach and your effectiveness at converting that reach into end results. Recent studies show that less than 10% of a company’s followers overlap with their employees’ followers. This means that your employees have the potential play a major role in expanding your company’s reach - and helping them share content that’s on brand more consistently is one great way of achieving this.
Scout New Talent.
In a well-documented survey, 89 percent of recruiters reported that they had hired someone recently while searching through profiles on LinkedIn. One feature of the platform enables you to set search parameters to locate employees with the precise experience and skillset you require. You can also save searches with automatic alerts when someone makes changes that mean they are now a strong fit for what you’ve been looking for.
Blog On LinkedIn.
Technorati reports that 31% of customers are influenced by blog posts, so it makes absolute sense for businesses to leverage blogging as an overall marketing strategy. This blog can be placed on the company website or it can be posted on social media platforms - with LinkedIn’s own publishing option being a great way of getting started easily and reaching a ready-made audience of business prospects.
Just be sure that what you post on LinkedIn is of the highest quality - and focus on promoting each post as much as possible and generating as many views for each post as possible, rather than getting sucked into the false promise of publishing extensively but only getting a modest number of views for each post.
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