Social Media Marketing – LinkedIn

Most articles on social media marketing start with a discussion of FaceBook and Twitter, however, I’m going to start with LinkedIn because I think it’s an often underestimated contributor to social traffic. For many small businesses, if you have a good LinkedIn strategy, it can generate as much traffic as FaceBook. Here’s how…

The key to LinkedIn is that it sends a weekly email to everyone in your network summarizing all the updates from the previous week. If you make a change to your profile or you add someone to your network, you will get mentioned in that email. Since the email is from a trusted source (LinkedIn), it usually gets past people’s spam filters and will likely get opened and glanced at. Getting your name in that email which goes out to everyone in your network every week, is like free email marketing from LinkedIn. All you need to do, therefore, is add at least one new person to your network every week and you will get a mention in the summary email. If people click on your name to see what you are up to, it takes them to your LinkedIn profile and from there they can click over to your company’s website. As a result, we’ve seen LinkedIn frequently at the top of the list of referral sources on websites where people at the company are taking advantage of LinkedIn. Here are some other things to do to make sure your optimize your LinkedIn exposure.

1. Complete your profile. Make sure that you have completed as much of your profile as you can. The more complete your profile, the more professional it looks and the more likely someone will be to explore it. Make sure to add at least one website link and include your twitter ID and a blog if you have one.
2. Request Recommendations. Ask people you’ve worked with to recommend you. This is not only great PR, but your name will show up on their profile under “Recommends”. This is yet another way people can find you.
3. Create a Page for Your Company. A company page gives you another location on the web to describe your company and add keywords which helps your SEO. It also enables other employees at your company who are on LinkedIn to all be connected through a single page.
4. Join Some Groups. Joining groups on LinkedIn is easy and is a way for people to see what you are interested in as well as to connect with like-minded business people.
5. Motivate your Co-Workers. Your LinkedIn strategy will work the best if everyone at your company is following the above recommendations. Since it has to do with work, it shouldn’t be too difficult to get them to do it. If all else fails, assign it as a weekly task to everyone who reports to you (or get your boss to do this if you are not high up in the organization).

If you follow these simple recommendations, you will quickly find that LinkedIn becomes a regular source of traffic and business leads for your company.