LinkedIn can be a very valuable professional online networking tool that has many uses including finding jobs, finding opportunities to advance in one’s career, hiring employees, locating leads and business partners, meeting and discussing professional topics with other professionals to build an online relationship with them and get your name and brand out there.
From a business point of view, it is also a great way to get attention to your content and drive more traffic to your website.
LinkedIn will be effective to your business and it can be largely determined by your industry. This is technically a social network and the strategies that you use may be different from other types of social media marketing. There are many audiences which use this platform for many different reasons.
Here are some of the ways by which you can utilize LinkedIn more effectively to build up your personal profile, get involved with the network of professionals and promote your business too.
- Find current contacts:-
- Use LinkedIn search to find out your existing business contacts and connect with them.
- Try to pull out your little black book and start sending connection requests one by one.
- Always remember do not send invites via email. Always search through LinkedIn’s website and send connection requests through it.
- So, sending invites through emails is just a waste of time as some people are in habit to read their emails while some are not. Thus, avoid this practice.
- Make your profile an open profile:-
- With the help of premium LinkedIn account, an open profile allows you to message any LinkedIn member regardless of membership level or connections status if they accept open profile messages.
- This helps you to get into contact with members you would otherwise not be able to interact with.
- An open profile message is sent like a regular In-mail message.
- Export connections:-
- With the help of LinkedIn profile, you can export all your connections into a contact management system via a CSV or VCF file.
- This can be a very helpful and useful tool for tracking your contacts and getting an overall profile of your network.
- Search engine optimize your LinkedIn profile:-
- A completed profile may not be enough to get it to stand out from the pack.
- This is where it is very beneficial to optimize your profile with keywords that are relevant to your profile.
- These keywords will be added to your profile headline and sprinkled throughout your profile summary.
- Thus, through search engine optimize your LinkedIn profile get to stand.
- Take advantage of saved searches:-
- You are likely to smarten up your profile for a career move or to start your career.
- In LinkedIn, users can save 10 job searches and three people searches.
- After you do a search, you can save it by just clicking the Save Search button.
- This will enable you to run the search later as well as get daily, weekly or monthly email reminders and alerts for job searches only.
- Share your LinkedIn status updates on Twitter:-
- A good way to further showcase your company’s expertise is to share its LinkedIn status updates on Twitter.
- When you do so, your Twitter followers will also see your updates.
- When publishing your LinkedIn updates to Twitter, you can also maximize your reach even further by utilizing the @mentions Twitter feature. (an @mention works as a tag on Facebook).
- Simply use @symbol followed by the individual’s or company’s LinkedIn profile name.
- The company that is being mentioned will be notified that you have mentioned them and their Twitter followers will also be able to see the status updates.
- This will increase your customers too.
LinkedIn is a very powerful marketing and professional networking tool that can prove to be more beneficial if it is done in a right manner. Finding a balance between optimizing one’s LinkedIn profile and running a busy business can be intimidating and time-consuming at first, but if it is done right, there is a lot of potential over here.