If you have any presence in the business world, you know that LinkedIn is the first place that prospective employers, clients and colleagues go to learn more about you and your company, and to assess your level of professionalism. But it’s also a sophisticated networking and business development tool that has more to offer than being the biggest online resume bulletin board in the world.
Here are five things you may not have realized you can do on LinkedIn to better market your company:
- Use personal pages to promote your business page. Business pages are an important asset that will enable your team to share
updates about your company, but LinkedIn’s roots as a networking tool remain strong. All key company leaders including C-suite executives and top management should have their own comprehensive, up-to-date LinkedIn pages. Content that you share on your business page should also be shared on these personal pages, to leverage the one-to-one relationships and name recognition of your leadership. Since only individuals can belong to groups, membership in key groups where information can be strategically shared is also important for top brass. - Grow your mailing list. You’ll want to be careful with this one in order to avoid seeming spammy, but you can do some personal outreach to develop a mailing list. You can send a direct message to up to 50 of your connections at once (here’s a great article to guide you). Thank them for being connected, (apologize for the group email), and offer them to be on your mailing list, telling them what they will receive, and offering to look at something of theirs.
- Receive regular alerts with qualified leads. If you do an advanced search using multiple terms, once the results come up, there’s a little button on the top right of the screen that says “Save Search.” If you choose this, LinkedIn will send you notifications with leads that fit your criteria on a regular basis. How cool is that?? This article contains 18 more outstanding LinkedIn tricks you won’t want to miss.
- Blog. In addition to posting regular status updates on your home page, you can post original content directly to the LinkedIn Pulse blog. Simply hit the button that says, “Publish a Post,” and you will be taken directly to a page that looks like the back-end of a WordPress blog. Your work will be seen by many people in your industry and the posting will contribute significantly to your SEO. This function is still relatively underused, so it’s worth investigating as a branding platform.
- Find a job. OK, so you already know you can find a job on LinkedIn, but let’s put on our entrepreneurial thinking caps for a minute and have a look at what we mean by the word, “job.” We’re not talking about submitting a resume to respond to an ad for an open position. By job, we mean task or assignment, and we most certainly are looking for opportunities to make our companies useful to others in this regard.
These days, more and more companies are outsourcing specific functions and projects to third parties who offer their expertise in packaged doses. Think about what sorts of problems you or your company are capable of solving, and let your target clients know what you can do. Establish yourself as a thought leader by sharing the content that best shows off your expertise. Use LinkedIn’s robust publishing and networking tools, and make yourself visible to the right people as the expert you are. You may be surprised at the kinds of connections you establish, and where they may lead.