If you’re still wondering how to use LinkedIn for business, you’re in the right place!

LinkedIn is a social network whose goal is to bring together professionals from around the world to increase their success, productivity, and career growth. Do you know how to use LinkedIn for business? 

Since it’s a social network, it allows you to gain substantial benefits for your business, particularly in the B2B niche.

According to the research, as much as 80% of B2B leads come from LinkedIn. It’s a big portion of the market and you should seize the opportunity to grab your own share.

But in order to do so, you need to create a sustainable LinkedIn strategy.

This article will present you with 10 tips on how to increase the productivity of the online business using LinkedIn.

Let’s take a look!

 

LinkedIn Is More Productive Than Other Social Platforms

 

 

Yes, we all know that social platforms such as Facebook or Instagram gather millions or even billions of users on a daily basis, while LinkedIn can’t get anywhere near these figures.

However, LinkedIn is far more productive business-wise than all other networks combined.

There are a number of reasons for making this statement and we will discuss some of them below.

For the time being, we will briefly explain what makes LinkedIn superior to other social media channels:

• LinkedIn is a network of professionals who don’t look for entertainment but rather search for new business ideas.
• Young people who create LinkedIn profiles don’t do it for fun. Instead, they want to explore job opportunities and find a reliable company to launch a career. This also makes the job easier for businesses which are looking for young talents to join their teams.
• LinkedIn is more authentic than other platforms. Contrary to Facebook or Twitter, there are almost zero fake profiles and it’s relatively easy to check the authenticity of each account.
• Other social media don’t really adore textual content. On the contrary, it all comes down to posting visual content followed by a brief caption. LinkedIn takes topics more seriously and you can really learn a lot about business reading articles over there.

 

Increase Awareness of Your Business

 

In the abundance of both big and small enterprises, it is becoming increasingly difficult to raise the awareness of your business and present your company to the wider audience.

But LinkedIn can help you make a breakthrough.

How come?

First of all, it will present you to the right audience.

You are probably not targeting high school kids or retired factory workers. On the contrary, you want to reach companies and professionals who can help you expand the business.

According to social media specialists at Rush My Essay, the second step is to prove authority and professionalism by making a well-designed LinkedIn account: “Always use quality images, include website URL, and add links to your landing pages and other social media accounts.

Besides that, you also need to engage and become an active community member”.

Nothing can help you raise brand awareness like posting comments on other people’s posts and asking questions about their topics. It’s the part where you reveal expert knowledge and write insightful industry-related comments.

With all this effort, you can hardly stay unnoticed among LinkedIn community members.

 

Become a Key Opinion Leader (KOL)

 

 

LinkedIn for business doesn’t only give your company the chance to increase awareness.

You can use it to build a personal brand and become a KOL in your niche. It’s a long-term process, but it’s definitely not a mission impossible.

Here’s what you ought to do:

• Create quality posts:

Your job is to write in-depth analysis and give readers the reason to follow you. Avoid short posts unless you have something really important to say. Use longer format to express your ideas and prove them with case studies and statistical findings.

• Follow industry trends:

Stay up to date with your articles and use the hype to grab the attention of your connections.

• Reveal your personality:

The best LinkedIn authors personalize their posts. They build unique styles, which makes them more interesting and memorable. You should follow the same pattern and reveal your personality – it will make you look more natural, so you can strengthen relations with your followers.

• Consistency:

Even if you write the most outstanding posts, it won’t help you become a KOL in case you don’t do it consistently. Find a rhythm that suits your personal schedule and publish articles regularly. That way, you will keep reminding people of yourself and your business.

• Add CTA:

Don’t forget to add calls to action to your posts. Always invite people to share articles, like them, or leave comments.

 

Grow the Network of Professional Acquaintances

 

Your content creation efforts cannot go unnoticed and you will surely grow the network of professional acquaintances quickly. This is extremely important since LinkedIn users are decision-makers.

According to the study, more than 90% of executives rated LinkedIn as their number one choice for professionally relevant content.

After all, you can’t do any kind of business without some serious personal connections.

But how can you increase the number of LinkedIn followers?

The first step is to promote the page on other sources such as company website, social media accounts, emails, blog posts, etc.

Another thing you can do is to invite employees to act as brand advocates on LinkedIn. Besides being loyal followers, they should also contribute to the promotion of your page by sharing interesting notifications, content, and news.

If you want to attract a highly specific group of followers, we suggest you build a Showcase Page as an extension of the Company Page.

It’s a convenient way to focus on a particular brand or product, thus allowing people who don’t have interest in other areas of your business to concentrate on this segment exclusively.

 

Find new business opportunities

 

You’ve learned a lot of stuff about the LinkedIn promotion so far, but this is where things get even more interesting.

Namely, LinkedIn can help you find new business opportunities and take your operations to the whole new level. How is this possible?

There are essentially three ways to use LinkedIn for business expansion:

• Research potential clients:

You can conduct a research to find potential clients. Analyze their online behavior, posts, and comments. It will help you learn more about business prospects and probably give you the idea of how to approach them.

• Ask for testimonials and endorsements:

Prospect research is a proactive LinkedIn tactic, but you can also use the passive strategy and that is to ask for client testimonials and endorsements. It’s good to have a lot of customer endorsements, but it’s even better to accumulate many client reviews. This way, you receive non-biased testimonials from people who actually worked, which is the best kind of word-of-mouth marketing you can get.

• Write a compelling statement:

Once a prospect visits your page to check you out, you should welcome him with an appealing statement. Use this feature to briefly describe your business and add just a few details to evoke curiosity.

 

Recruit Talented Professionals

 

Successful businesses rely on high-quality staff.

LinkedIn gives you the benefit of finding and reaching out to talented professionals, so you should use it to strengthen your team. 

LinkedIn profiles are filled with candidate information. You can examine each prospect and check out their employment history, academic background, credentials, and skills.

At the same time, you get to see their endorsements, interests, and recommendations.

Using LinkedIn Recruiter, you can look for prospects by a number of indicators – job titles, employers, locations, management levels, education, previous positions, and many other features.

And it’s fairly easy to reach out to these people since you only need to send them a private message in the LinkedIn inbox.

What makes this platform even more interesting is the fact that you can analyze the professional interests of the targeted candidates. You are able to see their posts and comments, but also to learn more about their connections and online influence.

In case you notice someone familiar among connections, you can ask this person to tell you more about the young talent.

 

Optimize Linked Page to Improve Search Visibility

 

LinkedIn page optimization is extremely important if you want to let people find you easily. You need to implement the best SEO practices in order to improve search visibility.

As an online business, you need to make sure everything you write about your company is accurate and up to date. This means adding the right contact details (emails, website address, phone numbers, etc.) and other basic information such as locations, number of employees, products, niche, awards, and so on.

Besides that, LinkedIn enables companies to customize their Products & Services pages. You can use this possibility to target different clients based on niche, locations, company size, job titles, or any other feature for that matter.

Of course, keyword strategy is crucial for LinkedIn optimization so you have to carefully choose terms and phrases that describe your business the best.

Keep in mind that you need to conduct a keyword research for each new article you write to maximize the SEO potential of your content.

 

Use LinkedIn for Product Promotion

 

LinkedIn is the perfect place to promote your new products or services, particularly in the B2B industry.

If you are organizing a product launch or have important news to share about your brand, don’t be afraid to invest some extra time and resources in LinkedIn marketing.

We already mentioned the Products & Services page. Exploit it and upload new items from your portfolio, but don’t stop there. You should also add high-resolution images of the product followed by thorough and keyword-rich descriptions. In case you can afford and handle video marketing, don’t hesitate to create a video tutorial. It’s the most effective way to explain product features and highlight the benefits of using it.

There is one more very important detail – always add a link to the landing page to allow potential clients to take action immediately. Bear in mind the ultimate goal and that is to raise awareness, generate leads, and increase conversions.

Without a strong CTA, reaching the goal is almost impossible.

 

Utilize Paid Advertising

 

It would be so cool if you could raise LinkedIn awareness only organically. Unfortunately, it is almost impossible to reach wider audiences without the help of paid advertising.

But that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Using paid advertising, you can target the audience according to dozens of relevant features. For instance, you can aim at clients based on names, seniority, groups, skills, degrees, company size, age, gender, titles, and tons of other personal or professional traits.

At the same time, LinkedIn’s Lead Accelerator tool has the power to facilitate lead generation by displaying ads at just about the right time and in the right position within the sales funnel.

This is one of the main reasons why paid advertising on LinkedIn costs more than ads on other social media, but it’s worth every penny.

 

Follow Trends and Analyze Competitors

 

Regardless of your niche, you are going to face a harsh competition on LinkedIn.

There are probably dozens of similar companies that want to do the same thing – nurture leads and find fresh business opportunities. It makes LinkedIn marketing a lot more difficult, but it also gives you a couple of advantages.

First of all, you can stay up to date with the latest industry trends and avoid missing out on important developments. And secondly, you can analyze the biggest competitors to learn what they do well.

This way, you can embrace things they are good at, while you can exploit their weaknesses and beat them in areas where they don’t perform perfectly.

 

Conclusion

LinkedIn is not the largest social platform, but it’s definitely most influential among professionals from the B2B niche. As such, it gives you the chance to increase awareness of your company and generate fresh leads through networking and discovering business opportunities.

If this sounds interesting enough, you should prepare a LinkedIn strategy to give a new push to your company.

This post showed you 10 tips on how to increase the productivity of the online business using LinkedIn.

It might take a while before you get things going, but the outcome will be very beneficial – so don’t hesitate to make your move!

The post LinkedIn for Business: 10 Tips and Tricks for Online Businesses appeared first on Unamo Blog.