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LinkedIn is a social networking platform that is business-focused. Geared specifically for career professionals, it is an ideal platform for B2B content sharing, recruitment and professional networking. According to Hootsuite, LinkedIn has 562 million active users and that number is expected to grow throughout 2020. LinkedIn’s power comes from its ability to connect business contacts in a variety of different ways. Read on to learn how to create a winning social media strategy for LinkedIn.
Business Benefits
Real world networking is great, but online professional networking can be done more quickly and more efficiently, and can connect you with people in your industry from all over the world! Essentially, LinkedIn acts as an online resume and portfolio for a person. On LinkedIn, you can see reviews, recommendations, and the professional experience of individuals before making a connection. Depending on how much information a person has filled out, their profile shows you their education, experience, skills, referrals and awards, and it lets you know if you already share any mutual connections. LinkedIn profiles have been known to lead to new business partners, distributors, customer referrals and even future employees.
Where to Start
When scrolling through LinkedIn, you’ll see prompts to connect with different users. It’s recommended that when you send a connection request you add a personal note, such as “I enjoy your work perspective posts and would enjoy connecting.” If you are connecting with someone you have briefly met, like “It was great talking with you last week. Reach out if you ever need anything.”
Make sure you are following up! Don’t forget about those connections that you’ve made in person or via LinkedIn. After making the connection send a follow up message to check in to see about setting up a meeting for coffee to meet the old fashioned way, face-to-face.
Set monthly goals to grow your amount of connections. Starting out can be difficult to build your network, the key is to set attainable goals. Try setting a goal of 175 connections in two weeks and then repeat that for the next few weeks. After some time, you should have a great network of connections built up. Remember, this is a professional networking site, so the more users seeing your profile and connecting with you, the better!
Increase Exposure
Like all social media, one of the main goals of LinkedIn, beyond the personal profile, is to feature your products or services. This is a great way to increase exposure to potential employees and distributors to learn more about what your company has to offer. Listing your company’s website on your profile will increase overall traffic and exposure to that page. Additionally, you can post any job openings and showcase any press releases, company news, industry content, products, services, and launches.
Recruitment
People are constantly on the job hunt and LinkedIn is a great place to seek out new employees. Your business profile has a section that allows you to post open job opportunities. Usually, potential candidates that are job hunting on LinkedIn tend to be more innovative and ambitious. The allure of LinkedIn is that you can get a quick snapshot of a prospect’s skills, experience, and personality through their profile and connections. Look at LinkedIn as your ticket to professional networking that will help you attain more talented assets to add to your team. 122 million people say they received an interview through LinkedIn and 35.5 million were hired by the person they connected with through the platform. Many great potential employees are out there on LinkedIn, start posting your vacant positions today and see what you get!
New hires aren’t the only reason you should be on LinkedIn. It’s also a great place to attract new customers and clients for your company. When you receive recommendations and followers on LinkedIn this presents a great opportunity for your business to grow. As stated above, follow up with those connections! When you make a connection and let them know more about your business, you never know where it can lead to, maybe a new client or big sale?
It’s important that a company is on LinkedIn to continue to build their business by professional networking. Running a successful business is not just sales and money - it’s about building connections. LinkedIn offers many benefits that will help your business increase exposure, network professionally, and attract quality employees & new clients.
For more best practices on social media, check out How to Make Social Media Work for Your Business and How Businesses Are Successfully Using Facebook.
