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.