With over 3 million members and a new one signing up every two seconds, LinkedIn is the world’s number one online business networking platform. But still many of us don’t understand what makes it so useful to small businesses, or how to use it.
I’ve put together our top 10 tips to help you get your head round this exceptional business tool and use it to get results for your small business.
Perfect your profile!
Your LinkedIn profile will often come up first, before your company website or even blog, when someone searches Google for you. This profile is out there representing you 24/7, so make it stand out…make it work for you! Here’s how:
- Summary: include keywords that will help the right people find you; think about the challenges and objections your clients are facing and use your summary to show that you understand these issues and have a solution to offer. List your skills and specialities.
- Professional headline: don’t just put your job title here; include important keywords that will resonate with your target contacts.
- Links: make sure you include current links to your company site, your Twitter account and Facebook page
- Profile photo: make sure it’s a good quality photograph showing you looking smart and professional; definitely not whacky, but not too stern (smiling is good).
Get recommendations
Linked in is the perfect place to get people to say great things about you. High quality recommendations – especially from existing customers will give visitors a better idea of what you’re like as a person and hopefully encourage them to do business with you. Remember here that quality is better than quantity.
Invite people…but…
- Only invite people that know or have met – random invitations will annoy people and do little for your reputation
- Aim for good quality contacts, it’s better to have 50 good contacts, rather than hundreds of people that you don’t really know who won’t engage with you.
- Strike while the iron’s hot – whenever you meet anyone, online or face-to-face, follow up quickly with an invitation to join you on LinkedIn while you’re still fresh in their mind.
Look at who’s looking at you
Did you know that you can see who’s looked at your profile? Click on the “Who’s viewed your profile?” link to see a list of visitors who have looked at you (those with profiles set to anonymous won’t show). You can use the fact that they’ve looked at your profile to reach out with a connection request.
Make use of LinkedIn Sponsored Updates
Sponsored updates provide a better way to put your content in front of key influencers and decision makers on LinkedIn. You can customize updates based on company name, job title, job function, skills, schools and groups. This targeted approach can help you build your credibility as an expert in your niche and increase your exposure to people who are not in your network.
Don’t hard sell
The hard-sell approach is frowned upon on most social media platforms, but it’s especially unwelcome on LinkedIn. People are there to make connections that will enhance their careers and/or business, so pushing the hard sell onto them will only turn them off and make your company look bad.
Publish interesting and relevant content.
This seems so obvious, but it’s crucial: if you want to stand out, your content must have some value to your audience. Useful content establishes you as a thought leader and increases the likelihood of a warm inbound lead in the future. You can now post articles in Pulse which is great to encourage your audience to share.
Join groups
Joining groups that are relevant to your target demographic is a great way to “listen in” on what your audience is talking about and will provide opportunities for you to interact or offer advice. You can also message the members of groups you are in, even if you aren’t connected.
Create your own LinkedIn group
Starting your own group enables you to gather all your best prospects in one place. By sharing great content and demonstrating your expertise, you can increase trust and develop a reputation as an industry leader within a focus group of your core prospects/clients!
Connect, and then build relationships
As a business owner you should use LinkedIn to connect with partners, prospects, associates and other business owners. But, to make the site really work for you, you must nurture specific connections to grow the relationship and develop opportunities for your business.
LinkedIn offers enormous marketing potential to small business owners and, whilst there is a lot more to discover, implementing our Top 10 Tips will go a long way towards helping make sure that LinkedIn starts working for you.
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