When it comes to building your presence online there are plenty of reasons why you should create a profile for your business on LinkedIn.
First of all, LinkedIn is a business-focused social networking site.
Majority of its members are online entrepreneurs, business owners, marketers, and all sorts of business-oriented individuals.
This fact alone makes the social site a must-have for your own business. If you are not building your presence on it, then you are missing out on a lot of business opportunities.
Whether you are promoting a new product or service, looking to hire new employees, or simply marketing your business as a whole, LinkedIn provides you with a plethora of tools and resources that you may use to help you accomplish all these things.
Creating a LinkedIn profile for your business is an effective business strategy. Here are a few tips on how you should go about it:
1. Setting up a business profile on LinkedIn is free so there are no related costs that you have to be worried about. Just log in to the site using your personal account, find the “Companies” menu and just follow the instructions from thereon. LinkedIn’s wizard will guide you throughout the whole process.
2. Make sure that you complete all the necessary information in the registration process. Don’t leave any space blank. If you have a logo for your business, then add it. Don’t forget to place the location of your business as well. This is especially important if your business is a brick and mortar one. Including your business location is very critical if your online presence is for marketing purposes only. You have to let people know where they can find your physical store if they are interested in doing business with you.
3. Take time to write a brief but very informative description of your business. See to it that the description includes information about your business offerings, whether these are products or services or both. Most people don’t have the time to read through long texts so make the description as brief and as straight to the point as possible.
4. Place your business under the correct category. LinkedIn members will be using the site’s search functions to look for businesses on the site. If you placed your business in the wrong category or industry, your targeted customers or partners won’t be able to find your business profile.
5. If you have a business or company blog, get the feed of the blog and include it on your business LinkedIn profile. Anyone who follows your profile will be updated on the latest posts on your blog. If you don’t have a business blog, now is the time to start one. Putting the feed on your LinkedIn profile will keep the page fresh and entice other LinkedIn members to keep visiting your business profile.
6. LinkedIn will pull all the other accounts, feeds, and links on the site related to your business profile and connect them all together. These include your job listings, current employees, and even former employees. With that said, it’s crucial that you monitor these things to
make sure that everything that is being connected to your profile are legit.
When it comes to setting up a LinkedIn profile for your business keep these simple tips in mind and you will have a winning profile in no time!
When it comes to using LinkedIn many businesses seem to underestimate the “Groups” and “Events” features. Majority of the social network’s users are more bent on making personal connections via messages and one-on- one interactions. One-on-one interactions are great but you are not taking advantage of LinkedIn’s full potential if you are limiting yourself to such traditional strategies.
This is where the “Groups” and “Events” features enter the picture. You can tap into these features to double or even triple the amount of
connections you make on the site. LinkedIn has constantly improved these features to make them accessible to anyone. As long as you are
a member of the social network, you can be a part of any group or event.
First let’s take a look into the “Groups” feature and how you can use it to make connections. A LinkedIn group is just like any group. If you are
familiar with Facebook groups, they are pretty similar with LinkedIn groups. It’s just a bunch of LinkedIn users who share the same interests,
hobbies, or causes.
There are two common ways that you can get yourself involved with a group. You can either create a group or you can join one that’s been
created by another user. There’s no limit as to how many groups you can join. No matter what industry you are in, there are likely dozens of
groups for it on LinkedIn. Use the site’s in-built search functions to look for these groups that are relevant to your interests or niche.
Obviously, making connections with users who belong to groups you are interested in is much more effective than making connections with
random members. In essence, it is targeted marketing. You will be talking to people who will actually listen to what you ave to say.
For instance, let’s say that you are in the business of selling video games. You can log into your LinkedIn account and search for groups
about video games. You can then join these groups and start connecting with the other members. When you talk about video games,
there’s an instant audience for you. Of course, there are certain rules and regulations in these groups that you need to follow to make yourself
a helpful member.
The “Events” feature on the other hand is used to draw more attention or shall we say exposure for an upcoming event. Whether you are
conducting an online webinar, an offline conference, or you just want to let people know that you will be having a booth in some trade show,
creating an “Event” on LinkedIn would be very helpful.
Setting up the “Event” isn’t very hard. As a matter of fact you can have it live in a couple of minutes. Then all you need to do is invite all your
connections to become a part of it. You can also make use of external tools like Twitter and Facebook to promote the event.
LinkedIn’s “Groups” and “Events” features are invaluable tools for making connections. You should take advantage of them whenever you
can.
LinkedIn Answers is a nice feature of this particular social networking site where members can ask questions, answers questions posted by
other members, or simply browse through all the queries and solutions posted. It’s actually one of the more popular features of LinkedIn and is very similar to Yahoo answers.
If you are knowledgeable about a certain topic or industry, you can make use of the feature to build credibility not only for yourself but for
your business as well.
All you have to do is dive in and start answering questions that you have answers for. Be careful though as there are certain rules and
regulations that you need to follow when using LinkedIn answers. Read these guidelines very carefully before you commence answering. A lot
of users got banned from the site for not abiding by the rules. You don’t want this to happen to you so read the rules.
Here are a few practical strategies on how you can get the most out of LinkedIn Answers:
1. Focus on topics related to your industry or niche. You are building credibility for yourself and your business, remember? So if you want to
increase your credibility as an internet marketer, then you must focus on topics that are related to internet marketing like blogging, affiliate
marketing, social media marketing, article marketing, search engine optimization, etc.
The same applies to whatever niche or industry you belong to. As always, you can find your topics of interest by using LinkedIn’s search
functions. You can just go to the LinkedIn Answers page and start from there. You can just browse through the available categories and see
where your topic of interest falls.
2. If you are using a feed reader, try to set up RSS feeds for the categories on LinkedIn Answers that you want to follow. Add these RSS
feeds to your reader so that you get updated whenever there are new questions in the categories you selected. This gives you the chance of
answering the questions first. Let’s face it, the first few answers to the questions are the ones that get the most attention and exposure. If you
do this regularly, it’s not that hard to boost your credibility on the site. People will be constantly seeing you posting helpful answers. This
builds recognition and influence.
3. Don’t just answer questions. Try posting your own questions as well. Make sure though that the questions you ask aren’t queries that
you answered before. Ask questions that you genuinely want to be answered. This is also a great way to find people who are interested in
your topics. Those people who answer your questions are likely to be as passionate as you are about certain topics.
4. Follow up your answers to questions. There are instances wherein after you answer a question, the one who posted it will have a follow-up
question. This is why you need to watch over your previous answers so that you can elaborate more when the need arises.
If you do it right, the simple act of answering questions on LinkedIn Answers can significantly boost your credibility on the site.
Did you know that personal profiles aren’t the only types of accounts you can make on LinkedIn?
You can also set up pages for your company or business. Just log into your account and click on the tab that says “Companies”. From
there, adding your business or company is as simple as filling in the blanks and adding all the pertinent information for everyone to see.
It’s easy to set up and it’s free so there is no reason why you shouldn’t take advantage of the feature. I know I have said this before, but always
remember that LinkedIn is a business-focused social networking site. This means that you will be interacting with individuals who are either
owners or employees of a business enterprise. This makes LinkedIn a great platform for marketing purposes.
It doesn’t matter if your business operates online or offline. Or if it offers either products or services. You can effectively create an online
presence for it on LinkedIn. It has a lot of tools and resources that you can use to help you build and market your business.
Here are a few tips on how you can optimize your company’s profile page for the LinkedIn crowd:
1. Make sure that you include all the relevant information about your business. These include your products and services, location, contact
numbers, links to your business website or blog, and other important data. The objective is that when somebody views your business profile,
they will find all the information they need. Majority of those viewing your page will be LinkedIn users and most of these users are professionals so make sure that you meet them with a professional-looking business profile as well.
2. Use the correct category for your business. This is very important because the number one way that people find business pages on
LinkedIn are via the site’s search function or via the categories menu. If you listed your business profile under an inappropriate category, it will be very hard for people to find it.
3. Connect your other web accounts with your business page. For instance, you can connect it with Twitter so that your Twitter followers
will be updated when there are changes made on your business page. You can also grab the RSS feed of your blog or website and place it on
your business page. There are a lot of other tools that you can use to make your page more interactive and interesting. These entice people
to keep coming back to your page.
Once the LinkedIn page for your business is up and running, don’t just stop there. Make it a point to promote it wherever you can, whether it’s
inside or outside LinkedIn. We’re talking about promoting a business here so the more platforms your LinkedIn page is connected to, the
better. You can create a widget of your business page and have it embedded in your website or blog. This way, visitors of your website
can easily connect with your LinkedIn profile with just a click of a button, provided of course that these visitors have LinkedIn accounts as well.
LinkedIn has partnered with dozens of the web’s largest companies to help its users have more interactive as well as effective profiles. These
partnerships gave rise to what is referred to as LinkedIn Apps. The applications under the LinkedIn Apps banner allow users to connect
other web content to their LinkedIn profiles.
For instance, you can connect your business website to your profile so that whenever your website gets updated, your LinkedIn profile will get
the updates as well.
In essence, it’s content amplification. It’s a two-way process. Your LinkedIn profile promotes your business website and vice versa. Your
profile sort of serves as a content aggregator of all your online accounts like Twitter, blogs, etc.
Here’s a short list of some of the best LinkedIn applications out there:
1.The BlogLink app. This app allows you to stay connected with all the other bloggers in your LinkedIn network. It pulls and aggregates the
latest blog posts from them and feed them into your profile. This way, you stay informed about what’s happening around your trusted network.
If you have your own blog, add it to your profile as well so that your network will be aware of it. It’s as simple as getting the RSS feed of
your blog and placing it into the application. This a great traffic-building tool as well if you have a lot of people in your network.
2. The Twitter app. In using this app, all your Twitter updates will be sent to your home feed. This can get annoying at first but you and your
connections will soon get used to it. Furthermore, trends have shown that Twitter updates synced with LinkedIn get more interaction
compared to the same tweets on the Twitter homepage. Also, Twitter updates populating your LinkedIn page will make it look fresh and
updated.
3. The Amazon Reading List app. If you want to share what books you are reading to your network or you want to know what your network
is reading, this is the perfect app for you. It also allows you to share the books that you are planning to read. This is a great way to find books
that are relevant to your reading tastes.
4. The Box.Net app. This app enables you to share, collaborate, and exchange important data with your peers on LinkedIn. You have access
to free storage and collaboration features. You can even display documents right on your profile page. You can use this app to display
your latest works and portfolios.
5. The Company Buzz app. If you want to know what the internet is saying about your business or company, then you better install this app.
This app will tell you what people are buzzing about you. It curates the comments, tweets, and blog posts made about your company.
These are just a few of the LinkedIn apps. There are countless other and more will likely be developed in the future. All you have to do is find
the ones that are more relevant and appropriate to the kind of business you have.
