LinkedIn is the largest professional social network online. Every professional and business owner, regardless of industry or type of business should have a professional and company LinkedIn profile. When you understand how to use it and benefits to your brand, LinkedIn is a highly powerful tool. LinkedIn provides an opportunity to build relationships and credibility with potential customers, clients, partners and peers. It allows you to tap into a powerful audience that you can engage and interact with, and ultimately influence. It can be used as part of your sales, marketing and recruitment strategy.
Follow these tips to establish personal and company brand credibility on LinkedIn.
- Enhance your connectability through a complete LinkedIn profile.
A complete profile enhances both your personal and company brand credibility.
- You should fill out your profile like it’s your CV or executive bio; include past positions and companies, education, affiliates, skills, activities, and so on.
- Also, reach out to your network, ask for recommendations and join groups relevant to your business, in addition to groups where you might find potential customers.
If you are a business owner and your individual profile stands out, it will encourage people to check out your website or to look at your company LinkedIn page – so your individual profile page is highly important to get right.
- Incorporate LinkedIn with other online marketing strategies.
- For example, promote your blog through LinkedIn using an application called BlogLink. Visitors to your profile are able to read your blog posts directly in your LinkedIn updates feed, and this, in turn, encourages traffic to be driven back to your website.
- Include a link to your profile as part of an email signature. The added benefit here is people can see your credentials directly.
- Mention your LinkedIn profile on your website and also provide the option for visitors to share information via LinkedIn directly.
- Commit to regular and relevant status updates.
- Use the status bar frequently to share useful information and engage with your network.
- Strive to be visible and valuable during business hours when many people are actually on LinkedIn.
- Your status updates should add value to your target markets and be updated two to three times daily.
- You might want to attach articles via LinkedIn, announce an interesting conference, recommend a book or website that you find interesting, etc.
- Use applications and other tools to get the most out of LinkedIn.
My favourite applications are BlogLink, Company Buzz, WordPress and the LinkedIn Today function. A combination of these tools works brilliantly, for not only profiling, but also keeping on top of the latest news and industry trends.
- Improve your Google ranking and enhance your search engine results.
LinkedIn allows you to make your profile information available for search engines to index. Since LinkedIn profiles receive a high page rank in Google, this is a good way to influence what people see when they search for you or your company.To do this, when you create a public profile, select “Full View.” Also, instead of using the default URL, customise your public profile’s URL to be your actual name. In addition to your name, you can also promote your blog or website to search engines like Google.
LinkedIn can significantly raise your personal and brand credibility, thereby resulting in new business.
LinkedIn is becoming a key reference tool to check the credentials of individuals and companies and therefore, it must be high on your marketing agenda, along with your website and other online initiatives. Like any initiative, you need to invest time and effort into it in order to see the benefits. Once you do this, you will see significant business results. Manning and Co. is testimony to this; we have won new business through our own participation on LinkedIn!
