Should you use LinkedIn for your business?

How is LinkedIn Marketing Important?

Making connections, generating leads, improving brand awareness, fostering business partnerships and relationships, sharing content, driving traffic to your website—are some of the things that LinkedIn is capable of doing for your business when used wisely as a marketing tool. 

It is tempting to put your entire social media marketing budget into the big three: Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. While there’s nothing wrong with these platforms for reaching your target audience, not choosing LinkedIn is doing your business an immense disservice. LinkedIn generates leads 227% more effectively than Twitter and Facebook, so it is an indispensable platform for your business. 

So, how can you use LinkedIn for your business?

Networking

LinkedIn is great for networking. To take full advantage of its networking capacities, you need to do three things:

• Connect with people
  Use LinkedIn to connect with friends and colleagues, and people you don’t know. Are you following someone’s blog? Try to connect with them on LinkedIn. Keep your profile set to public and be open to connecting—you never know what opportunities your LinkedIn network will create.

• Build an amazing profile
  However, you can’t just stop at connecting with others. You need to invest time and effort to build your business page. Keep your profile free of jargon and make sure it’s concise. Use a professional-looking headshot and a legible logo for your page. If you’re using a header photo, ensure it’s sized correctly and the imagery is neat. Fill out every relevant field and attach media, such as white paper, infographics, blog posts, etc.

• Interact with others
  It is important to interact with others and build connections. As you share your content, comment on other people’s content as well. Respond to comments about your content. Ask questions that will lead to discussions, provide recommendations and ask for them too. Lastly, participate in LinkedIn groups that are relevant to your business.

Publishing

LinkedIn is a great resource for content creators. Not only can you post status updates and link back to content on your website, but you can also utilise LinkedIn as a native publishing platform and make content for your LinkedIn audience.

However, you might be wondering why can’t you directly publish on your website or blog? LinkedIn can be used to drive social engagement and create brand awareness rather than simply drive traffic to your website. When you publish on LinkedIn, all your connections are notified, which is an immense advantage. Additionally, 45% of LinkedIn article readers are in upper-level positions, so it can lead to great B2B opportunities. 

Lastly, LinkedIn also provides analytics for all the articles you create, which makes it easier to determine the articles that are getting the most traction.

Reputation Management

The foremost rule in online reputation management is to have control over every result that shows up on Google’s first search page results when someone looks for your business name. 

Everyone wants their content to rank, but it’s also a good practice to maintain all the social profiles you can in the name of your business—even if you aren’t planning to be notably active on them. Why do this? It is because social media profiles, including your LinkedIn profile, nearly always show up on the first page of the results for a business’ name. Therefore, you need to make a page on LinkedIn, if only to claim a good spot on the SERP. The more real estate you can accumulate on the SERP, the better.

Generate Leads and Drive Conversions

Whether your business is B2C or B2B, you can generate leads and drive conversions on LinkedIn. In fact, LinkedIn comes with a Chrome extension that can help you with this purpose. It’s called the LinkedIn Sales Navigator that connects with your Gmail. 

With this extension, when someone emails you, their summarised LinkedIn profile will show up in your inbox. This is useful if you want to quickly research leads or new people. You also get insights into your leads. The advanced search functionality allows you to zero in on decision-makers and you get automatic lead recommendations.

It is important to remember that LinkedIn is a professional network that lets you develop credibility, build a significant network, and gather insider knowledge from established experts in your industry. It is a valuable tool in your social marketing arsenal, so you should use every opportunity it offers.