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How to use LinkedIn to market your business

Social Media Marketing is the new media buzzphrase of the moment. The Internet is starting to burst with opinions and ideas of how to use social media to market your business.

We’ve not been afraid of that either, with our basic guide on how to use Twitter.

However, when people talk about social media they’re usually referring to Facebook, Twitter and sometimes MySpace.

The social network that is often overlooked is LinkedIn.

The traditional approach to LinkedIn is to use it to promote your own personal business interests and connections, often as a career tool. But the power of this business focused social network can be bring leads, sales & revenue too.

LinkedIn is a bit different

Whilst other social networks are good at reaching focused demographics, interest groups or the mass market, LinkedIn is a place to find specific individuals. For this reason, it makes more sense for sales of low volume high value products where decision makers are harder to find.

Using your employees’ contacts

LinkedIn is all about individual people reaching out to other specific individuals,. As a starting point, you need to utilize your and your employees network contacts, From there, you need to move onto people that they’re connected to (2nd degree contacts). And so the process will continue.

But don’t be Spammy

Every time you reach out using LinkedIn will will show your real, professional, and company name. Therefore its important not to turn off those contacts – or in other words, don’t be spammy. Every move you make, every contact you reach will be visitible to your networks, so bear that in mind so as not to appear over zealous.

How to get going

1. Find an ‘open networker’

An open networker is someone who has linked to as many people as they possibly can. They have messaged everyone in their network, and every new contact, to expand their contact list as much as possible.

To find an Open Networker (or LION – LinkedIn Open Networker), search on LinkedIn for ‘LION’. When you find one, invite them to your network. If they accept, you then have access to their 1st degree and 2nd degree contacts. Sometimes LIONs include their email address in their LinkedIn profile name, making it all the easier to invite them to your network, even though you’re not  connected to them at all.

You can also find open networks on TopLinked.com.

2. LinkedIn Answers

Anyone can ask a question on LinkedIn Answers. Anyone can answer. It allows you to interact with people who are not in your network, which of course helps to make new contacts.

If you ask a question many people can answer you. Once the question closes (after a few days or whenever you decide), you choose the ‘good’ answers. Of these “good” answers you then choose a ‘best’ answer.

The person who gave that answer gets an ‘expertise point’ that shows in their LinkedIn profile.

You could therefore use LinkedIn Answers to display your expertise.

In addition, people sometimes ask “where can I get a…” types of questions, often with regard to specific services. If you have a product or service that fits, you can answer these questions with a link to your website.

Sometimes it might be that you can offer a small answer, and then say ‘for more info’ or ‘for my full answer see…’ and then link to your blog, where you can answer the question in full.

3. Get recommended in ‘Services’

Another method is to get as many people in your 1st and 2nd degree networks to recommend you for a particular service. Some users will scour services to find a supplier. The more times you’ve been recommended, the greater the ‘reach’ of those recommendations. And the more positive your business looks.

4. Find ‘buyers’ in a organisation

Since every profile in a business includes a job title, its much easier to reach out to a specific person in order to try and sell to them. Most people will be connected to others in their organisation, so if your first degree contact is someone in a business you’re trying to target, the chances are that you can use their contacts to find the right individual..

5. Building Links

LinkedIn used to offer ‘followed’ links, which were an important method of link building as part of your Search Engine Optimisation program.

These days however, these links are either ‘no followed’ or redirected. Nevertheless, they can be an important source of referral traffic to your website. Links still get clicked on after all.

Make sure all employees have links to your website in their profile. Make sure the links are visible and can be crawled by the search engines by making all profiles include the “show website” feature. You can do this in “Edit My Public Profile“. Click “Full View” and also “Websites”.

That’s it

Often overlooked as a source of new business, LinkedIn is a powerful tool to reach specific buyers in organisations. Make the most of your network contacts using the techniques above.

If you want Euston Digital to help you with your Social Media marketing then get in touch. Any comments please leave them below.

Tags: Link Building, linkedin, SEO, Social Media

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 14th, 2010 at 1:08 pm and is filed under Link Building, Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.