LinkedIn for business does what it says on the tin – it connects people. Mainly it connects businesses to other businesses, but is fast becoming much more than that.
The network is also being used for brand awareness, providing career opportunities, driving business and conversion results, as well as gaining and educating potential clients about your services and products.
Getting the best out of LinkedIn – See your brand flourish
By using LinkedIn for business platform to its full potential, you will be able to see your business page establish many more relevant connections and see your brand flourish.
Remember, you need to have a personal profile before creating a business page. The standard factors for all social media profiles stand; ensure you have profile and cover pictures, include rich and engaging content, complete all descriptions and bios, optimise, and create a marketing strategy and content calendar. There’s a few LinkedIn-specific tips to follow also:
Get your employees and current customers to connect with your page
By having your employees and ideal client connect with you is the ideal way to grow your audience. Personal profiles will most likely have more first-degree connections than your business page, and most certainly connections that are relevant and useful to your LinkedIn for business page. If employees add where they work and become advocates for your company, you can ensure a vast increase in connections. Connecting with clients means you can view who they are interested in, and networking with.
Valuable and rich content
Although with LinkedIn, it’s business first, it is also vital to post and share rich and valuable content and business news. LinkedIn recommends posting once a weekday at least. Business updates and news is important, and should be posted in a variety of ways, e.g. blogs, videos, images (posts with images included on LinkedIn get 98% more comments.) It’s also good to share relevant and current articles from industry leaders and LinkedIn influencers. This will not only help prove your knowledge and status of your industry on the platform, but link you to other industry leaders and influencers, again, expanding your connections. It doesn’t matter how small your business, why not be a leader in your field? Read our advice on useful places to find content marketing.
Showcase Pages
Showcase pages in LinkedIn for Business act like your tabs at the top of your website – they allow you to shine a light on different areas of your business, such as a new product or CSR project, which members of LinkedIn can choose to follow as well as your business page, or on its own. A company page can have up to 10 showcase pages and are great for attracting specific audiences and building relationships, and of course showing the different areas of the business.
LinkedIn Groups
Joining and being active in LinkedIn groups, will highlight your presence in the industry, attract people to your page, and open up connections to other professional networks and potential clients. There’s groups for beauty therapists, construction companies, and many more. Or why not go for it and create your own group on a specific industry topic and add it your page? If you think packaging on a certain product is too much plastic, make a group about it. Get people talking. Raise your brand awareness. Be brave.
Plan and analyse
This is something EMS recommends for all marketing. We spoke briefly about a content calendar and strategy, In the case of LinkedIn, there are certain tips you can follow when creating this, such as the best times to post and how to get more engagement. LinkedIn also has a very comprehensive and detailed analytics function that will help you learn from each post, show you which content your followers most engage with, who your main demographic is, and track activity on your page. The key here is to learn and improve from the results.
Want to find out how to take your LinkedIn presence to the next level? Our LinkedIn Marketing Mastery Meetup on 12th November will teach you how to make the most of the business social network.