LinkedIn has always had a reputation as one of the most popular business social media tools, and it’s important not to neglect your LinkedIn account while focusing your attention on Facebook and Google+ for business. Most people use their LinkedIn personal accounts much differently than their personal Facebook accounts, making this an excellent tool for business networking. LinkedIn has been a business tool from the beginning (and arguably the original social media source for business networking and growth). LinkedIn is specifically a business tool because of your ability to post your resume and experience while searching for other professionals based on their skills and credentials listed on LinkedIn. You can endorse coworkers or business partners, and post others’ recommendations of your work on your profile. It is an outstanding tool for recruiting and building professional relationships.
From a business standpoint, LinkedIn’s tools allow you to build a very detailed and professional company profile to attract new customers. You are able to post your products and services and request recommendations for these services. LinkedIn also gives you the opportunity to post a “Recommend” link on your website (check out our button here: https://fastersolutions.com/services/design/). We recommend creating a fully optimized LinkedIn business page, and requesting all employees to create and optimize their own LinkedIn profiles. With these employees following your business page, you will begin to build more awareness for your company page through social networking.
An example of listing your products and services.
In order to fully optimize your LinkedIn profile, keep these additional tips in mind:
- It is important to make sure all information fields are complete and written with the appropriate keywords, particularly the company overview as this will appear as the meta description in the search engines. (Using keywords in your description fields is important for any social media company page.)
- Use your careers tab to post any job openings. This gives your page the opportunity to reach any job seeker using LinkedIn.
- You also want to make sure you are posting status updates from your company page with the appropriate keywords. Daily updates are recommended.
- Make sure you are taking advantage of every tool LinkedIn offers you, like the services page we mentioned earlier. This is a frequently forgotten area of the LinkedIn company page.
- Don’t forget about the analytics tab. While this doesn’t require any action from you, it will help you to understand what members are doing. This includes who is viewing your company page, how often they are visiting, and where they are coming from. A particularly helpful tool is the comparative snapshot, comparing the followers of your company to those of your potential competitors.
It will always be important to get out in front of the public eye by way of trade shows and networking events. A handshake and a business card may get the dialogue started, but people will turn to your business on social media sites, particularly LinkedIn, to keep the conversation going.
