When I meet business owners, I often ask the question – Are you able to get LinkedIn working for your business growth ?Take a look at some mind boggling statistics from LinkedIn and you will almost immediately realize the importance. The statistics are a bit dated, but interesting nevertheless. LinkedIn has 332 million members, 2 new users join every second, 42 million unique mobile visitors per month, 107 million users are in the USA alone, Average time a user spends on LinkedIn is 17 minutes per month, 25 million LinkedIn profiles are viewed every day, one in three professionals on the planet are on LinkedIn, you can increase your LinkedIn views by 11 times by including a photo
What are some practical things you can do to get LinkedIn working for your business ?
1) Complete your profile with keyword tagging
As you sign up for LinkedIn, one of the first things you do is to start filling in your profile. Nowadays, LinkedIn profiles almost resemble CV’s and can also be used by potential recruiters to consider hiring you.
While you build your profile, make sure that you highlight the keywords in each section. The headlines are meant to catch attention, so make sure that they are done with the target reader in mind. As you complete your education details and past employment details, make sure that you are able to link to respective universities and companies that you have been a part of. That way, you can start building your connections using your past colleagues or your university batch mates.
2) Create a LinkedIn company page
Company pages are your brand identity on LinkedIn and should represent information about your company at a high level. Below are some of the common objectives that company pages can help you achieve as well as some key metrics to track.How to create a LinkedIn business profile
Common Objectives:
- Brand awareness
- Thought leadership
- Lead generation
- Event registration
Key Metrics:
- Page Followers
- Post Clicks
- Engagement
- Comments
- Inquiries
- Leads
Action items to make your Company Page successful:
- Create a plan that enables you to post at least 3-4 times every week and then slowly graduate to multiple posts per day
- Dedicate resources to engage with and respond to followers’ comments
- Change header image every few months
3) Create LinkedIn pulse posts
Over 1 million members are publishing more than 130k posts a week on LinkedIn. Interestingly, approximately 45% of readers are in upper ranks of their industries, managers, VPs, CEOs.
LinkedIn is a great place to publish original content that aligns with your network on the platform. If you create content elsewhere on the web, you can also repurpose that content (and link to the original content) through LinkedIn to expose your community to more of the content that you’re creating.
Common Objective:
Thought Leadership
Key Metrics:
- Post views and profile views
- Demographics of your readers
- Likes, comments and shares
Action items for publishing:
- Create content that matches what you feel passionate about and what your target customers would be looking for
- Recommend bi weekly or monthly publishing
4) Share relevant posts on LinkedIn
Once you are up and running on LinkedIn, it does not make sense to be a silent spectator. Think about the people that you have among your connections. What will they be interested to read? Share relevant posts. As long as you are not sharing direct competitor posts, any good read will be helpful for your contacts. Â Engage with people actively, comment on posts, and participate in groups.
5) Participate in LinkedIn groups
LinkedIn allows you to join 50 groups. Find out the groups that are relevant for your business and join them. You can also participate in discussions happening in groups and showcase your thought leadership.
As you can see, there is no shortage of opportunities for publishing and amplifying content on LinkedIn. However, it takes time and effort to begin building your content credibility on LinkedIn. So go ahead and get started and get LinkedIn working for your business growth. If you want to get started but need the help of content marketing experts, contact Xenia Consulting for more information. I hope you found this useful.
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