LinkedIn is the largest professional social network on the internet and can provide valuable opportunities for your business. If you’re not using LinkedIn to it’s full potential, you could be losing out on potential business. This post is meant to give you a beginning guide to getting started with marketing on LinkedIn.
Complete Your Profile
Having a 100% completed profile is very important in succeeding on LinkedIn. It will allow you to tell everyone about you and your business. Take the time and fill out all the information, while including keywords for your industry in the description, headline and specialties.
Getting recommendations is also an important step in completing your profile. I recommend getting at least 3 recommendations. How do you do that? Well, you could ask for recommendations, but I prefer to get recommendations by giving them. If you give recommendations to people you have worked with and done business with, many will likely return the favor. Givers gain!
Building Your Network
- Now that your profile is complete, it’s time to build your network. These are a few good ways to get you started:
- Upload your email contacts
- Add previous colleagues and classmates
- Browse the network of your immediate network and search for people you know
- Join Groups – Interact with others in your industry, as well as local groups
- When you meet someone new at a networking event, search for them on LinkedIn
Marketing your Business
Now that you have built a network, you’re ready to start marketing your business. You can do this in a similar manner as other social media networks such as Facebook and Twitter, by posting content and status updates. Whenever you post to other social networks, post to LinkedIn as well. In fact, you can setup a feed to automatically post your tweets to your status.
Aside from marketing your business on your profile and status updates, you also need to create a business page. See our ClikWiz page as an example: http://www.linkedin.com/company/1252557. I suggest using industry keywords in the description and specialties. These pages can show up in search results, but only if you optimize for the right keywords.
This introduction to LinkedIn should get you started on marketing your business on LinkedIn. I hope you will use this information to help grow your business with this fantastic marketing tool!