Social Media Marketing: LinkedIn

LinkedIn

Statistically, very few small businesses use LinkedIn. But when you look at the rest of the numbers, you have to wonder why this is. It’s a large network of professionals, and is extremely successful for large companies.

People do get on the site regularly, especially college students right around graduation. It’s a great resource for both hiring and connecting with other professionals and experts in your field.

This site also allows you to specifically target people who might be interested in your brand, bringing better, more focused marketing. It, similarly to Facebook, allows you to build a following by creating content and engaging with this target audience.

You can create ads, job postings, blog posts, status updates, and ‘make connections’ with individuals interested in your company.

LinkedIn Tips

Figure out what your audience is and research them. Figure out what subjects they follow and build your page from there.

Brand your page. Make sure all of the images are branded and that your description is accurate.

Fill in all areas of the profile page. Make sure your information is as accurate as possible to attract the people who will be interested in your company.

Bring in employees. They’re going to be the best people to promote your brand. Encourage them to put your company as their current position if they haven’t already, which promotes you on their profiles.

Use your page for your customers. Integrate it with your website and encourage them to share positive experiences on the company page.

Joining LinkedIn groups also helps promote your company’s brand. Get into conversations with big names. Just like on Twitter, this can bring you some brand recognition. You can also start your own groups if you don’t’ find one you’re happy with.

Create a steady flow of content. Post company news, interesting articles, and other important pieces of information to engage your followers. Make sure you’re posting regularly as well.

Make sure you’re posting different kinds of content as well. Photos, links, videos, presentations, etc. Don’t just post articles or announcements.

Your content also needs to be interesting. Establish yourself as a thought leader, and if your content is interesting enough LinkedIn will promote it themselves.

Encourage engagement. Don’t just post static content, add calls for action in your posts, even if the action is something like commenting to start a discussion.

Engage with your followers. Answer their questions and comments, and use their feedback to build your business better.

If you can, ask for recommendations from previous clients. These promote trust and credibility as well as building your page.

Cross promote. Tell members of your other social networks about your LinkedIn page and encourage them to follow you.

LinkedIn Messages can help grow your email marketing list if you have one. Make sure that if you do this, you 1) apologize for the lack of personalization and 2) include a direct link for email signup in the message

Claim your custom URL. This helps with search engines as they look for your page.

Avoid the hard sell. Integrate yourself with trends and interesting topics and allow people to find you for themselves.

So What?

As with every marketing strategy, social media marketing is more about the long haul. If you keep posting regularly, your reach will grow. It can be a slow process sometimes, but the increased marketing is worth it.

Short bursts of posting, on the other hand, will indicate to the algorithms that this marketing isn’t as important to you as it may truly be, and they will focus on those who are willing to go long.

LinkedIn is an excellent example of this, as it really requires time and effort to make work. It’s not as prevalent as many of the other social media sites that we’ve been discussing, which means you have more competition for reach and access to people’s feeds. On the other hand, the smaller number of people encourages person to person interaction, which is one of the best marketing strategies out there.