Many LinkedIn users believe that the social media website is only necessary for when you are looking for a new job. They may have an account, but they ignore it until they begin to search for a new position. You might be surprised to hear that regularly checking in on your LinkedIn profile can help obtain a future career far more than sporadic visits, and that LinkedIn can help market your business.
Businesses can create pages that share their products and services, as well as give more information about the company. But the usefulness of creating a business page is not limited to recruitment – you can also use your page for marketing purposes.
- Start out by completely filling out your business page, including all of the product and services information.
- Ask employees to create profiles and also fill them out completely. In doing so, they should be able to connect to their place of employment. Now anyone who is connected to your employees will see your business. For bonus points, write recommendations for your employees to share on their profiles.
- Share new content on your company page. This works a lot like Facebook or Google+. You can share blog posts from the company website, relevant links or articles, or just simple status updates. Sharing posts from your company website will also help with SEO.
- If you’d like, you can buy a sponsored post from LinkedIn. Again, this works very similarly to Facebook: ads are targeted and shared with a certain number of viewers based on your budget. Your sponsored post will show up in their newsfeed. Before you do this, though, check out your analytics (which LinkedIn supplies for all business pages) and make sure it’s worth the money.
- Join groups. Your business page cannot join a group, but you can as an individual. Ask and answer questions related to your field. Post relevant articles and blog posts from your company. This will help you to network outside of your connections. It’s also a great place to recruit.
- Create groups. If you don’t see a group that’s meeting your needs, create your own and act as a manager for it.
- Spy on your competition. You can see your competition’s marketing strategies, and get a HR report on them.
Does your business have a LinkedIn page? How do you use it as part of your marketing strategy?
Guttman, Ilene. “Five Simple Tips to Use LinkedIn to Grow Your Business.” http://www.launchgrowjoy.com/how-to-use-linkedin/. (14 Oct. 2013).