SOCIAL MEDIA

LinkedIn is most definitely THE professional social network. Very often underestimated by marketing professionals, it could be a great source of traffic and potential customers. The main reason you probably don’t use LinkedIn to its full potential yet is because you don’t really know how to benefit from it. So let’s look at what you can do to increase your brand visibility.

Who is LinkedIn

With over 500 million accounts, LinkedIn is a giant in the social media sphere. The only difference with Facebook, Twitter or Instagram is that LinkedIn is cleary a professional network. You may already have a LinkedIn profile with your different jobs and companies you worked at in the past or present. Most people think of LinkedIn as a networking tool or an interactive resume but it’s so much more than that.

Over the years LinkedIn acquired for example:

• Slideshare.net, the number one content platform for PDF and Powerpoint presentations
• Talent Solution, the candidate search engine
• Sales navigator, a prospect search engine
• Bright.com, a job matching website
• Lynda.com, an online classes website to learn business, technology, software and creative skills

For most people, LinkedIn is not a site you visit every day like Facebook. However it is no different than Facebook. LinkedIn IS a social network and if you only visit it once in a while to add a few more people in your network, may be do a few searches or like a few articles here and there, you won’t see much return with LinkedIn.

The great benefit of LinkedIn is to build relationships and engage with people, exactly like you would with your friends on Facebook.

Your LinkedIn profile

Here’s a few things to consider when you create your LinkedIn profile:

1. Headline

Write a punchy headline that describe in a few words who you are and what you have to offer. In other words, this is your elevator pitch!

2. Profile picture

Pic a good picture and not a quick selfie you just took on your phone. Know that your profile has 11 times more chances to get viewed if you have a (good) profile picture.

3. Contact information

Include your email address, company website, phone number and your other social media.

4. Short description

Write a short description about yourself.

5. Customize your url

Make your profile even more professional by customizing your LinkedIn profile URL. It’ll be an address that looks like this www.linkedin.com/in/yourname

6. Optimize your profile for search engines

Make sure you use keywords that are relevant to your business to your profile can get found by people searching specific terms.

7. Your professional skills

You have even more chances to get found if you add your skills to your profile.

8. Recommendations and endorsements

Get recommendations and endorsements from colleagues or ex colleagues, employers, and customers who can speak to your abilities and contributions. it will give you even more credibility and help you find potential business contacts.

9. Add your publication

To increase your credibility even further, you can write articles.

10. Groups

Search for groups that are related to your business or your interests and join them! But don’t stop there. Be an active participant. Don’t join too many though that you won’t be able to participate. Just pick 2 or 3 and participate as much as you can till you become an important figure of that group for your expertise and valuable input.

11. Honors and awards

If you have any, share them! By now you should understand why it will optimize your profile and increase your credibility.

LinkedIn Pulse

LinkedIn Pulse is a blogging platform like WordPress and allows you to publish your content easily. It’s probably a good idea to use it. At the beginning you can simply share all the content you already have, if you have any, from your company blog or personal blog. Share eye catching content, use infography, videos… Remember all those posts and sponsored posts you see every day on Facebook that you can’t help but read because the title or the image or the video is very attractive. Do the same. Choose your visuals and titles very wisely.

If you are going to re-post existing content from your blog or someone else’s, make sure you do NOT copy-paste the exact same content which would be considered duplicate content and has little to no value as far as SEO. Just take a few excerpts.

Add connections

Since LinkedIn is a social network, go ahead and add people and make your network bigger. Try to add influencers. Remember the 6 degrees of separation idea. To reach whoever it is you are trying to reach you are just a few steps away from him or her. You got it, your future customers will be somewhere in your network, just a few degrees away.

It’s probably a good idea to download the LinkedIn app so you can add contacts very easily and also because the app will connect to the contacts in your phone and suggest you who is already on LinkedIn that you know.

Be careful though. Don’t add too many people. Just add the ones that are directly connected with your expertise, avoid profile without pictures or with no activity. Your goal is not to have a huge network that are never gonna interact with you and vice versa or that are irrelevant to you and your business. Choose quality over quantity.

For more tips about LinkedIn profiles, click here.

If you need help with your LinkedIn profile or need more tips, feel free to contact us.