With the ever increasing rise in popularity of social media networks and its implementation for furthering business, we have seen social media become a fundamental tool for mainstream marketing. LinkedIn is one such social media channel which, if utilized to its full potential, can help businesses greatly. Followed by Facebook and Twitter, LinkedIn is the third most popular social networking website with an estimated amount of almost 255,000,000 regular visitors. It has around 396 million members with 2 new users registering each second.
LinkedIn – the Myth
While LinkedIn is undoubtedly one of the most widely used social networking channels, most of the people downplay its importance and the effective contribution it can make to their businesses. They see LinkedIn as a platform for recruitment and job hunting purposes and nothing more. After all, isn’t LinkedIn just an online resume of sorts? The answer is, No!
If you believe that LinkedIn is merely a recruiting forum for companies and businesses then you are terribly mistaken as well as missing out on the expansive opportunities that it has to offer. While it is true that LinkedIn operates as a platform for job seekers to find job opportunities in the industry and for recruiters to seek the appropriate candidates for a position in their firm, there is much more to LinkedIn.
Even though the website is primarily used for professional networking and making connections, LinkedIn also serves as an immensely powerful platform to grow your business as it helps businesses to keep up with the ever changing trends and strategies in the industry.
LinkedIn – the Benefits it Provides to Businesses
Even though it seems that businesses and companies prefer Facebook and Twitter over LinkedIn for marketing and business purposes, the latter is a much more stronger and effective medium. The benefits and opportunities it has to offer surpass all the other social media networks. While Twitter lacks in profile depth and Facebook is too crowded, LinkedIn brings value to both, individuals and businesses, where other sites are felt inadequate or found lacking.
Here are some of the ways as to how LinkedIn can help businesses online.
Stands out as the ‘professional’ social media network
Most of the social media sites came into being with the prime purpose of providing people with entertainment. While, the focus has shifted from entertainment to more serious goals like online marketing and social customer service, LinkedIn is one of the few social media channels that incorporates the concept of social media while making it suitable for professional and business purposes.
This means that people tend to take it more seriously than any other social network. Since the site is business-oriented, it is only logical that it will help in the success and growth of businesses.
Allows businesses to develop connections irrespective of geographical boundaries
Accessible in over 200 countries, LinkedIn offers businesses the opportunity to establish countless valuable connections. It is estimated that CEOs have an average number of 930 LinkedIn connections.
These myriad of connections allows you to connect with a far reaching audience, thereby increasing the value of your searches. This means that large connections boast a potential increase in customers as more and more people are able to find you and connect with you.
Offers media exposure without any expense on your part
Getting media exposure is extremely vital to ensure the success of businesses today. Owing to the dense competition, it is quite a difficult task for businesses to stand out, even if you have the best SEO company Toronto has. They need all the help they can get, and if it doesn’t cost big bucks, all the more better.
LinkedIn provides businesses, especially start-up operations with the opportunity to create awareness of their brand by gaining media exposure. According to a survey conducted by the Arketi media group, LinkedIn has over 94.2% of journalists and editors. Thus, it is a great chance for businesses to take advantage of the media exposure. You simply need to make strong connections with the journalists who are covering stories related to your product or company.
Helps you establish connections with ideal clientele
Identifying and connecting with prospective clients is one of the most daunting tasks a marketer or a business owner can face. LinkedIn with its varied and immense connections allows you to make connections with the most relatable and ideal customers.
The Advance Search featured by LinkedIn allows you to filter the connections based on the characteristics and the criteria that you are looking for. Search results can be filtered in many ways, be it based upon the job description, company name or their connection to the industry. Moreover, if you sign up for a premium account for a certain fee, then you have the option to save your search criteria which in turn will automatically alert you to the new people that have joined and add them to your network under the condition that they are pertinent to your required criteria.
Enables and fosters strategic partnerships
In an industry which is flooded with competitors vying for your market share every chance they get, it is exceedingly important that companies form strategic partnerships that add value to their business and help them grow their business. LinkedIn, with its dense community and diverse users, allows you the opportunity to find potential partners that can, for instance help you with your marketing strategies or with other departments. Thus, LinkedIn is extremely useful for finding potential partners, as well as connecting and forming a joint venture partnership with them to further your business.
Provides with a platform to build a following and connect with potential customers
Last year, LinkedIn opened its publishing platform for all of its members. This is greatly beneficial for businesses and companies all around because it allows them to build an expansive following. The content that you publish has the potential to go viral if readers find it particularly good and interesting. This means that it will get comments, increasing views as well as shares from members, and all in all generate interaction. LinkedIn itself is likely to publish your content in one of its galleries or homepage, thereby increasing your following and probably earn you potential clients. All of this virality of your content is also likely to gain you much needed media exposure and attention. Hewlett-Packard, owing to its diverse and fascinating content continues to draw customer engagement and has amassed more than 2 million followers on its LinkedIn profile.
Generates leads and expands your network through LinkedIn groups
One of the greatest feature of LinkedIn is the groups that act as the chamber of commerce. These groups provide you with a platform to generate conversations, build connections with like minded people and contribute to the web traffic.
Businesses should utilize this opportunity by using groups to share their organization’s content with the wider audience. There are numerous groups which focus on different topics, each ranging from financial issues to business news to sports. Find the group topic that interests you or relates to your company, join it and start sharing related content with the members. However, too many promotional posts or spamming is bound to get your business in trouble as members do not appreciate spammy tactics.
Extremely effective platform to do your research
LinkedIn is a significantly effective research tool. Apart from the filters it offers to connect with clients, it can also be used to research, for instance a potential client or partner before meeting them at a conference. Since LinkedIn, unlike many other mainstream social mediums, provides an in-depth profile in the form of an online resume, you can easily do your research before setting up a meeting with a prospective client, partner or supplier. Furthermore, when you search a person on your search engine, LinkedIn results appear before their blogs or websites.
LinkedIn – Tips on How to Use It for Businesses Development
Having established the profound importance of LinkedIn for online businesses, we will now further discuss some tips that you need to incorporate to ensure that LinkedIn increases the potential development as well as marketing of your business.
Make sure that your target audience is present at LinkedIn. Since its demographics mainly covers professionals with a university degree, it will make no sense if, lets say your target audience is early teens.
Optimize your company‘s LinkedIn profile so that it appears in search engine result page (SERP). You can use keywords, for which you wish to be found on SERP, in your summary. It is important that you complete your profile and not leave something unanswered as it is the first impression that you make on the viewer. To make your profile more useful for your audience, you should add a link to your company’s website and blogs. Airbus, Unilever and Nike are some companies which have absolutely powerful LinkedIn profiles.
Uploading a professional photograph is also an integral part to a complete profile. LinkedIn views are said to be increased by 11 times if you upload a photo. Keep in mind that this is not your Facebook profile picture, not your Twitter avi. This means that you ought to make sure that your or your company’s picture is professional and doesn’t give a casual vibe. Get your picture snapped by a professional, if you must.
Pursue visibility. After all, visibility, mostly ensures that your business is set to the path of development and growth. This can be done by publishing content that is likely to attract your target audience’s attention, engaging in LinkedIn groups as well as build networking connections.
Businesses need to connect with their audience regularly. Publishing an article, no matter how good, and then going MIA for some time is the perfect recipe to choke your business development. You need to stay connected with your audience, reply to their comments and just engage, generally. Monitoring your LinkedIn notifications will help you keep up with the interaction. IBM is one such company which topped the LinkedIn rankings in 2012 with a whopping 1.8 million interactions. They have continued to interact with their audience which has increased their follower count hugely.
Avail LinkedIn ads. Though the minimum charges of running an ad starts from $10 a day, they offer great value in terms of the publicity and promotion on LinkedIn. Since you get a limited space for your ads, make it count. Images, questions or even brief descriptions can grab the attention of your potential audience.
Do not forget your connections or prospects once you have connected them. While making connections is that major part in order to build relationships, it doesn’t end there. In fact, you need to continually engage with them.
The unique features that LinkedIn has to offer has made it out to be extremely good for business development and overall growth. It offers inbound opportunities and leads for your businesses. Active participation and acquiring as much recommendations as possible is the key to gain success for your business through LinkedIn. Thus, if used wisely, it can be a very powerful tool to grow business, as well as reinvent it. However, we understand handling it can be a difficult task, so let us do it for you as part of our social media management service. Get in touch with us today to know more.
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