What is LinkedIn?
LinkedIn is a social media network that is built for professionals like job seekers and business owners who are marketing their skills or promoting their business online. Unlike Facebook and other social media networks where you interact with friends and family; using LinkedIn, you build your social network with your colleagues, professionals you have worked with earlier, people you are working with today, and people you can work with in the future. LinkedIn is a great platform to build a personal brand for yourself, for your company; creating new connections for future career or business opportunities, partnerships, and customers. LinkedIn has emerged as one of the most popular social networking sites today and is has been the premier platform for professional communication and career seekers to connect with people online.
“There are giant social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, but LinkedIn can be a goldmine if you want to reach powerful people.“
~Neil Patel.
How to Use LinkedIn for Marketing?
Using LinkedIn’s marketing solutions can trigger action; since it’s a premium platform people trust what they read and act on it. Millions of companies are already marketing on LinkedIn. Business owners can use LinkedIn to help them promote their products and services through their LinkedIn Business Page. Building a good profile for your business page and creating valuable content that is engaging with potential customers is very important.
Create a Company Page
This is the first and the foremost step on LinkedIn to grow your business as it will represent your brand to the audience. Creating a strong company profile can instantly bring value to your business and also encourage users to follow your page. It is completely free to create a company profile. You just need to enter your company name, upload your company logo or picture related to your business, add a company description, website URL, and any other details relevant to your business.
Add valuable content
It is important to create and publish content that serves some purpose to the audience. The content should educate, inform, guide, inspire and/or entertain your audience. When you add value to the content, the audience is more likely to engage and build connections with your business. Your content should also showcase to your audience your expertise in your respective field.
Join active groups
You can join groups on LinkedIn with members having similar fields of expertise, jobs, skills and discuss topics that can engage everyone in the group. It helps everyone as they learn from each other’s advice and experience. This is a great way to interact with professionals and audiences revolving around a similar field.
Update Regularly
Regularly updating or adding new improved content, images to the company page is important to keep your audience actively engaged with your business. You could also post announcements or development about the company and its products or services. Consistently posting updates and new content will keep them informed about your company and its commitments. Or else, the audience will lose interest and will no longer be interested to stay connected with your company page.
Use Hashtags
When hashtags are used in LinkedIn posts, it will enhance your reach. Adding a hashtag before any word or a phrase related to your niche can highlight your LinkedIn post. Search for some popular hashtags relevant to your post. Using the hashtags that are most followed by the audience, will increase engagement letting people find your content easily and connect with your business. Always remember not to pile up a lot of hashtags as it might create confusion and might disrupt your reach.
Check Analytics data
A close look at the data about the performance of your posts will give you an idea about what can be done next to maintain or improve the performance. The analytics data will provide information about audience demographics, growth, and engagement details. These pieces of information will help you get a clear idea about your marketing strategies and you can make certain changes to the strategies based on this information.
Useful Features in LinkedIn
LinkedIn Profile
This feature in LinkedIn lets people know about what your brand is all about and the purpose it serves. LinkedIn Profile is a professional landing page where you can manage or make any changes to your profile.
LinkedIn Groups
This feature is a space in LinkedIn which allows you to share your thoughts, experiences, or opinions and also build connections. LinkedIn Groups include professionals who are from the same industry or niche and share a common interest. You can either join a group by simply searching for a topic relevant to your interest or create a group mainly focusing on a particular topic.
LinkedIn Stories
LinkedIn Stories follows a very similar path as stories available on Facebook and Instagram in terms of functionality. However, one thing that is different in LinkedIn stories is that it is not available for desktop version and only works on smartphones or tablets. This feature allows you to interact with viewers in turn helps boost brand authority by sharing useful tips, data, and insights from a new blog post or industry report you’ve published.
LinkedIn Polls
This feature in LinkedIn enables you to get useful and instant feedback from the audience. You can create polls on the LinkedIn platform on topics you need advice and input from your audience. This will help you know about current market trends and thereby take optimum decisions.
LinkedIn Events
Within the LinkedIn platform, you can set up and create and promote your own online event, though it doesn’t host the event itself. It directs the attendees to a Zoom Call, Google Meet, or any other software equivalent. This feature allows its users to find and join communities, grow their businesses, network with others, and learn new skills. As an event organizer, you can enter and manage all the details of the event and your attendees will get notified about these details or any changes with the event. This feature is great to increase engagement with LinkedIn users.
Network
This feature in LinkedIn will show the list of professionals you are connected with. The network feature in LinkedIn will also show the list of people who are most likely to connect with you.
Source of Hire
This feature in LinkedIn will allow you to mention whether you found your job in LinkedIn or outside of LinkedIn. The source of hire option will appear when you add a new position to your company profile.
Connection suggestions
This feature in LinkedIn will show you the member’s connections you may know or which are relevant to you after accepting the invitation from a LinkedIn member. The connection suggestion feature will allow you to expand your network on LinkedIn.
People also viewed
This feature in LinkedIn appears on the right side of your profile or other people’s profile and shows a list of LinkedIn members’ profiles whose viewers are similar to yours or are having similar job titles and descriptions. This feature will enable you to increase your profile being discovered by others.
Open for business
This feature enables business owners to connect and engage with potential clients or members who are most likely to search for their services.
Name Pronunciation
It is a feature appearing on people’s LinkedIn profiles right next to their name as a speaker icon. The idea is one can record a short 10-second audio clip that gives you the opportunity to correctly pronounce your name so when people click on the speaker icon, they get to hear that recording.
