7 Tips for Marketing Your Business on LinkedIn

Let’s face it, LinkedIn is probably one of the most overlooked social networks today in terms of marketing, and yet it is one of the best social media outlets available to connect with other businesses and professionals in your industry. LinkedIn allows you to develop a professional identity online and connect to your peers, contacts and other professionals to help generate leads and visibility for your business online. Here are our tips (that we've tried and tested) for using LinkedIn to market your business.

• Create events. LinkedIn Events are a great way to engage with your clients and leads online. Any event, whether online or offline can all be posted here, with a blurb about the event and a link to a register page (or instructions on how to register). The events can be created by anyone, including attendees, and you are able to invite anyone in your network to the event or just let them know about events you are attending or are interested in.
  
• Use groups and connect. LinkedIn groups can help you connect with other thought leaders in your industry, discuss events, news and issues in your space and to market your company and services. Many people join groups but don't really participate past the initial few days. A great way to avoid this is to start a group about a topic that interests you, invite your network and connections and grow a group where you can monitor and engage with your current connections, and potential customers.
• Increase your visibility. With LinkedIn it's easy to use your profile to generate leads (connections), establish partnerships with professionals that complement your business and expose your brand to others in your network.
• Optimize your profile for SEO. LinkedIn is actually a relatively good site to get inbound links from. Optimizing your profile with your website and blog (and including the proper anchor text like the example below) can help you get relevant, inbound links. A great opportunity to use this feature is to get every person in your company with a LinkedIn profile to include a link to your company's website with appropriate anchor text. This can help you rank higher in search engines, increase your inbound links, build targeted traffic to your site and help to improve your authority in your niche.

• Answer questions. The LinkedIn "Answers" feature is a good way to help you display your expertise and establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry. In this section you can answer questions from other LinkedIn users on specific topics that relate to your product or services, and you can drive readers to your website's educational content or blog posts as well. 

• Promote your blog on your company’s page. Your company profile has a "news" area that can connect to an RSS feed and automatically update your company profile with new blog posts. Promoting your blog on your company's profile can help increase inbound links, and drive traffic to your blog, while you establish yourself as a resource.

• Follow other companies that interest you. LinkedIn now allows you to follow other companies with LinkedIn profiles. If you type a company into the search box and arrive at their profile, it's simple to click follow and your profile is automatically linked to their list of followers. Following companies in your space can help you connect with other companies and potential clients (especially if you work in the B2B industry). 

Posted by Amberlie Denny at June 1, 2010 10:15 AM

Comments

Web Design Richmond

I really love to see your new posts so that I can get some new pieces of information. So finally to maximize your LinkedIn group:

1. Add keywords in the description of your group to increase your search rankings on LinkedIn’s search section.

2. Add keywords in the title of the group to be found on Google.

Justin

How do I add the Recent Blog Post or Twitter link to my LinkedIn company site? I see a place to add the web address for these sites under the company edit feature, but when I place the addresses there nothing happens. Do I need to have a paid subscription to turn these features on?

Amberlie Denny

Hi Justin,

To add the recent blog post/twitter information to your company linkedin page, all you need to do is this:

1. Login and go to your company's page.

2. In the upper right hand corner choose "edit"

3. Once you're on the editing page, under the tab "overview" you should have the option to add both your company's Twitter information and the RSS feed for your company's blog. Once you enter that info LinkedIn will automatically start grabbing posts from your RSS feed.