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LinkedIn is definitely where the professionals of the globe come to hang out. You will be surprised by the number of companies that recruit employees through LinkedIn contacts! Do you have a LinkedIn profile but yet to get any significant benefit out of it?
How effective is LinkedIn Marketing?
Lead Sources
Then it is probably time to look at what you are doing with your profile and how you have designed it up. Here are some killer tips to make a star out of you through your LinkedIn page:
How to create an All Star LinkedIn Profile
Linkedin Marketing Guide: Steps to Achieve All-Star Profile on LinkedIn
Connect
Do not sit idle with a LinkedIn profile! Connect with people around you. Start with your existing colleagues and then work your way through to ex-colleagues, peers and friends who are professionals in their own domains. Do not ignore connecting with a web designer just because you are into selling soaps. You never know which connection lands you up on that dream opportunity!
Be cooperative when it comes to networking with your LinkedIn contacts. Be proactive about sharing updates with others and helping your contacts find what they are looking. If you know a web designer in your contact list and meet someone looking for a web designer, help them connect and make something happen. The good deed will rub off on your side sooner rather than later.
Interact
Talk to your LinkedIn contacts regularly, even when you don’t have something to get out of them. Invest in that professional networking so that you are able to be in the loop always. Industry news filters down to you when you interact with professionals in your domain and also outside it. Another advantage to this method is that you don’t look like an opportunist when you actually need assistance!
Strategize
Your LinkedIn profile is your online resume. Just like you put a lot of thought into what goes into your CV and what remains unwritten, your LinkedIn page must have that insight as well. Pack in effective keywords about your profession in the profile so that people who are searching for your domain come across your page. Be crisp about your bios and other details. Attach recommendations and also offer to recommend others.
Top 5 Ways to Leverage your LinkedIn Profile
LinkedIn is regarded as the numero uno professional networking site. It is now known to most professionals that LinkedIn is useful to connect with peers, look for jobs or if you are a recruiting manager, hire people through this network. It is time for you to brush up your LinkedIn profile. You must not regard LinkedIn profiles as extensions of your Facebook or Twitter pages! Instead, make it look like your resume that makes the first impression on people interested in your profile as a professional.
Here are the top 5 ways to brush up your LinkedIn profile:
- Profile Picture: The display picture that leads your LinkedIn page is of paramount importance. Get rid of those puffy eyes and disheveled hair! Bring on board a picture that smacks of professional behavior. Your picture will reflect who you are a professional. Do not take chances here.
- Headline: The headline of your profile must contain keywords that define you as a professional. It is important to do that because people who search for professionals in your domain will use keywords like ‘Web Designer’ instead of your name. Draft a short, snazzy headline that grabs eyeballs.
- Experience: Write a brief experience paragraph on what you have achieved as a professional. State facts and interpret them to signify what those parameters are. That will help others not from your domain of work to understand the value of your numbers. Be objective and precise. State only relevant experience. For example, if you are a web designer, do not talk about how many years you played bass for a neighborhood rock band.
- Summary: This is the section where you can dive into your professional career in detail. Speak about your professional details, your achievements, awards and the likes. Because you are allowed more leeway to write here, you can state your professional objectives and what you intend to achieve in the days, and years, to come.
- Recommendations: Get authentic and credible recommendations from past employers, team leaders and peers. A sincerely written recommendation can be immediately distinguished from a sycophantic one. So, do not edit what your ex-employer writes about you and take off the not-so-flattering remarks! No one expects you to be perfect from every possible angle. Instead, the desire to overcome your weakness and move on is what distinguishes you as a professional.
Digital Marketing with LinkedIn
LinkedIn, since its launching in May 2003, has become the largest online portals for professionals where one can connect with people from similar and various other industries. With over 150 million members, LinkedIn’s growth rate is about two members per second.
Besides, there are over two million company pages as well as millions of several other small business pages in this site. These statistics alone are more than enough to prove the potentials of this professional networking site in terms of marketing in the digital sphere.
The following are some tips to jumpstart your online presence with LinkedIn:
Ensure all your employees have profiles on LinkedIn
Ask all your employees to open an account and remain active on this professional networking site. Better yet, encourage them to create exceptional LinkedIn profiles. Many fear that employees with such profiles will be highlighted as potential targets for competitors and prospective recruiters. This might be true in some cases, having employees with professional profiles on LinkedIn reflects highly upon your business and you as an entrepreneur and thus, improves the credibility of your business.
The “Answers” forum of this professional networking site is a great place to share your expertise and knowledge with other people from your or related domain. This forum also serves as a global platform to demonstrate your knowledge in your particular field to potential clients and business owners. One serious tip, please don’t use the “Answers” forum to sell your product or yourself. It will only hamper your reputation. Rather, join the conversations, work as a supportive resource and be honest in your approach.
Join groups
LinkedIn offers a Groups feature where likeminded people can discuss and posts information on specific topics. Join groups that are related to your industry and start interacting with possible partners, business associates and clients. Besides, many of these groups organize offline events, providing an excellent opportunity to meet with people for face-to-face networking. As a member of the group, you too can participate in such events and increase your business network.
Finally, stay active in the LinkedIn community.
This is the most important factor of your online marketing effort with LinkedIn. Apart from improving your LinkedIn presence, it will also help in finding new business leads and customers. Join groups, participate in the discussions of relevant groups and forum posts, act as a resource, and share your expertise. Follow these tips and your LinkedIn profile will be skyrocketing in no time.
30 LinkedIn Marketing Hacks To Grow Your Business
- Create a company page & optimize
- Post actionable high quality content via updates & pulse.
- Maintain a post calendar or regular schedule.
- Go for LinkedIn Live.
- Go for matched audience LinkedIn Ads.
- Search & build network with professionals
- Join LinkedIn groups & be active.
- Start your own group
- Send In-Mails
- Target LinkedIn influencers & build connection
- Grow your email list
- Use sponsored updates
- Add your employees to your company page
- Claim your custom URL for company page
- Keep a clear & prominent summary in your profile
- Avoid aggressive push selling
- Build relationships
- Target to add people to your network consistently on regular basis.
- Promote your company page outside LinkedIn too
- Tag people in post
- Use relevant hashtags and image alt tags
- Upload native videos
- Include visual content to your LinkedIn profile
- Focus more on local discussion groups
- Check LinkedIn trending contents
- Create LinkedIn showcase pages
- Get more linkedin endorsements
- Do SEO for your linkedIn profile
- Put your blog & website links in profile
- Tag your company page from your posts
Adding LinkedIn to your Business Website
LinkedIn is essentially a social channel for professionals. Businesses can use this social channel to make new and targeted business contacts. In addition, it serves as a large-scale recruitment platform. In fact, LinkedIn is becoming a leading social networking site for job recruiting, according to a research conducted by online software and services company Bullhorn. The inbound marketing company HubSpot too conducted a study claiming that LinkedIn is 277% more effective in generating leads, compared to Twitter and Facebook.
These studies prove that integrating LinkedIn to your business website helps to enhance your success. Simply use the following plugins of LinkedIn and see how it makes the difference.
Company profile plug-in is essential:
The company profile plug-in is your virtual business card for your company. It should feature the logo of your company, a brief summary, the number of your employees who are on LinkedIn, and a follow button. The follow button is most essential, as it allow the visitors to follow your company on this social networking site.
Place the company profile plug-in on your website’s homepage as well as on your careers, about, and contact pages. You are using the largest version of this plug-in, feature it lower on the page. Similarly, you can add the smaller versions of this plug-in wherever you want.
As marketers, we all are aware of the importance of social share buttons. Just place the LinkedIn share button next to your articles, technical product guides, white papers, and other pages including professional content on your site.
And don’t forget to place this button throughout your blog. This will help you to increase your exposure on LinkedIn, as your visitors click the button to share the content on this professional social networking channel.
The audience of this social network is business-centric, which means providing a quality content specific to your industry will encourage your readers to use this button more sparingly than the other social sharing buttons. To improve your chances to get more exposure on LinkedIn, install the share button on your company’s blog. Also, provide some insightful content related to your specific industry.
Recommendation is one of the unique features of LinkedIn. And we all know the value of recommendation in the world of online marketing. To leverage upon this feature, place the recommend button in the product and services sections of your company’s LinkedIn profile allowing visitors to recommend the products or services of your company on this social network. The best way to leverage upon this plug-in is to use it to feature your highly recommended products, generating even more recommendations via LinkedIn.
How members are capitalizing on LinkedIn – Infographic
Drop us a comment to share your tips to increase exposure on LinkedIn.
LinkedIn Endorsements: What to do with them?
LinkedIn has progressively become the hang-out zone for professionals. Hiring managers are increasingly turning to LinkedIn to get recruits that match their requirements. LinkedIn is in the thick of things for another reason as well: endorsements.
This is a value-add of this professional networking site that some are using, while most others are misusing! The endorsement section of your profile allows you to publish words of appreciation from colleagues and peers, past and present, and their experience of working with you. You can approach your contacts on LinkedIn to ‘endorse’ you through a short write-up that you can put up on your page for people to read.
How can this endorsement be of value to you? Hiring managers are interested in references. It is a policy that makes them call up your professional references to check up on how you are as a professional and employee. Now, with LinkedIn, they can do so through your endorsements! If they feel like, they can contact the ‘endorser’ through LinkedIn itself.
The LinkedIn endorsement ensures that people who are interested in dealing with you professionally know what they are headed for. On a personal note, you can get to know what your colleagues think of you! That is extremely important for self-evaluation. A sincerely written endorsement can really take you places!
The sad part about LinkedIn endorsements is that many tend to misuse it. They write up an endorsement of themselves and ask a colleague to ‘endorse’ that! This kind of an approach is self-defeating.
You might be blind to your negatives and positives as well because you are in the loop and cannot judge objectively. On the other hand, your peers can do that and point it out to you. Of course, if you find something in their endorsement that is too damaging for you as a professional, you can always politely ask them to edit it or simply not publish it! But do not write it out yourself.
The same goes for endorsements that you write for others. Do not bring personal grudges to the table while drafting endorsements. Segregate your personal feelings about the person and think in terms of your professional dealings. Give credit where it’s due and not because you want the person to write you a favorable endorsement in return!
Digital channels and tools have enabled a new strategy, account-based marketing, which uses highly personalized messaging to communicate with individual prospect accounts as markets of one.thank you seven boats for help me out
Thank you Sovan. Yes, relationship marketing is the trend. More personalized communication through digital media is preferred. Use of intelligent tools, marketing automation & lead or sales funnel can help. LinkedIn is a very good marketing tool if it can be used effectively.
LinkedIn is that it enables you to join groups and network with key personalities and influencers within your industry.
From LinkedIn Marketing
1.We can Create awareness
2.We can Sell and generate leads
3.We can build Traffic
4.We can Listen and gain insights.
You have properly summarized with a bullets point about “LinkedIn Marketing Hacks”. It’s really informative.
Yes LinkedIn is very effective for quality lead generation if correctly used. Thank you for your comment.
Didn’t know how to use Linkedin effectively till I read this article. This is a wonderful thing explaining it in such detail.
Thanks for your comment