The 5 Tip Guide to LinkedIn
LinkedIn is a great social network, but there are not too many organisations who are maximising the LinkedIn opportunity. If you are a B2B business, then LinkedIn is where your suppliers and prospects hang out, so what are you waiting for?!
Check out these five quick tips to get you started on LinkedIn:
Get your profile right:
- Your photo needs to be you in a relaxed state – not drunk or a prison mug shot, just a photo that represents you
- Complete your profile – LinkedIn search uses the keywords and specialities that you put on your profile
- Connect with your contacts in the offline world
- Ask customers for recommendations – it’s like electronic word of mouth
- Have a look at my LinkedIn page for some inspiration!
Get a company page:
- The new style company pages mean you can list all of the products or services that your company offers
- While you can still get recommendations for individuals, you can also get recommendations for your individual products and services – include this as part of your customer feed-back process
Join groups:
- LinkedIn groups are great ways of hooking up with people who are in the same industry as yours (to develop thought leadership and understand the trends of your market)
- Also use groups to target prospects – there are thousands of groups that you can join to find out what issues your customers are facing, and to increase your network
Post updates:
- The LinkedIn status box allows you to share updates to your connections
- Think what your audience would like to see and give it to them – this is unlikely to be the hard sell, so consider your content
- Watch the frequency – a LinkedIn update ‘lives’ for longer than a tweet, so don’t go posting 20 updates per day – 2 or 3 per day is ample
Get involved:
- The best way to use LinkedIn is to be a participant – spending time on groups or the excellent Answers section are good ways of expanding your knowledge and network – don’t be an observer, this is a social network remember?
That should be enough to get you up and running!
What tips do you have? Drop me a comment and let me know.
