LinkedIn is considered to be the top social networking platform for professionals in the business world. With more than 200 million members, it is a powerful choice for making deals and discovering new prospects for building up your business with the leads you need to gain profits and stay in business.

Here are some of the ways that you can best use LinkedIn to get new leads and turn those leads into prospective customers that will help your business to grow and thrive for years to come:

Be Specific In How You Present Yourself to People

Being specific is vital if you want to be able to get leads using LinkedIn as your tool. The only way any potential customers are going to know what your business is and what it can do for them is to explicitly tell them who you are and what your products and services can provide.

This can be done by ensuring that your profile page is relevant and up-to-date with everything a potential customer would need to find out about your company. This would include your email, address, phone number, etc., as well as a professional and current photo of you so they can put a face to the name of your company. A profile is the first thing someone sees on your page, so don’t let it be the last thing because it wasn’t relevant or current.

Make Your Profile Different and Welcoming

Another fact about LinkedIn business profiles is that many of them are extremely boring. If you want yours to stand out and get attention from potential customers you have to do things like add a welcome video that starts to play when someone goes to your profile link. This can even include some real life testimonials from satisfied customers that will give you their recommendation.

However, don’t make it too sales sounding or you could lose potential leads. Just give some info about your company and tell them what it can do for them, not what they can do for you.

Don’t Forget to Add Your Websites

Some people create their LinkedIn pages and forget all about their business websites. It’s vital for you to customize the website section of your LinkedIn pages. LinkedIn lets users add URL links to your profile and it works best if you call them something better than “my website.” You need to give them some unique names that will attract potential leads to go and check out your site and possibly become paying customers who may even bring you more customers through their recommendations and endorsements.

Ask For Connections From Other Members

One simple way that could get you leads is just by getting more connections. You can find people you know that have accounts on LinkedIn and ask to connect with them. This can lead to getting even more names of people they are connected with and ultimately build up your leads listings.

Once you get some connections, you can help them out too by giving them some recommendations or endorsements if you think they have a good product or service. Be sure you can credibly do this, as it’s not ethical to do it just so you both can trade off on recommendations or endorsements. This can help you to get the leads you need to grow your business.

Use Your Groups

LinkedIn Groups are another great tool for helping businesses to get needed leads. Groups offer the potential of hundreds of people seeing information about your business and what it can do for them via your products and services. If you post relevant and interesting content that is up-to-date, plus interact with them in other conversations by offering data that they need, then this too could end up helping you to get leads that could turn into customers or clients.

LinkedIn is not going away. It’s growing steadily every day and your business needs this valuable tool in its toolbox to get the leads it needs to grow, thrive and be successful. Be sure to use it to your advantage.

There’s a lot of content being shared through LinkedIn these days. If you’re like me, though, you’re more of a consumer of content rather than a constant producer.

Can you still build your network if you’re not uploading your own unique content? Of course! Here’s how.

Like and Comment

I don’t create a huge amount of content on my feed. What I tend to do more of is consume content. Instead of just passive reading, though, I do a lot of commenting and sharing. In a lot of cases, the content that I share is my comments on other people’s posts or articles.

In many social media platforms, a like or a comment becomes a vanity metric. If you like or comment on a post on Facebook, then you’re just making that post popular but it has nothing to do with your own Facebook account.

LinkedIn is different. If you like or comment on a post, then that act brings that post into your network. So, you’re bringing the content creator into your network and you’re entering their network as well. This makes liking or commenting a powerful tool for network building.

There’s No Right or Wrong Way

Everyone has their own way of doing business. Even though some organisations manage profiles, at the end of the day, it’s still the individual that builds that human relationship.

You may want to upload a video of your achievements. You may want to upload content that you feel your network will read. It’s all up to you, but you need to constantly think which techniques will effectively connect you to the right people and to have those people look at your network.

The Power of Likes and Comments

I’m a third-generation breast cancer survivor. This cancer runs in my family. My mother had it, her grandmother and there’s a chance that one day my daughter or neice may get it. So, I volunteer for a breast cancer network in Australia by publicly speaking and sharing my family’s story with this illness. One day, a lady I did not know came up to me and thanked me for sharing my story. She said that I inspired her to get a mammogram and the doctor was able to detect the early onset of breast cancer so she could get treated right away. She said that I saved her life.

You can imagine how much of an impact her words were to me. From that moment on, I decided that if someone makes a difference to me or makes a difference in my life, I try to tell them about it whenever I can. I practice this even on LinkedIn.

I once read an interview that Daniel Roth, VP at LinkedIn News, did with Kai-Fu Lee, an artificial intelligence (AI) expert. I was listening to the interview, which was a high level of technical discussion, when Daniel started to talk to Kai-fu about his cancer journey and how his cancer impacted his business.

It was such a great example of high-level thinking that was brought back to a human level that I shared the post and tagged Jeff Weiner, the CEO of LinkedIn. I just wanted to comment on how great Dan’s soft skills were and how much we all need to develop and hone such skills. Within 15 minutes, Jeff liked my shared post.

Here is a man who probably gets tagged millions of times in a day and possibly has more posts coming up on his feed, and he liked my post almost right away.

I also sent a mail to Daniel (since I’m not connected to him) just saying that it was a great interview. He replied that I would get more reach by sharing the interview as a post. Now, I didn’t share the post just to get some reach; I really, genuinely liked the interview and thought that it made a difference in my life. So, I told him so. Instead of another reply, he liked and commented on my post. Now that post has about 55,000 views.

Conclusion

It takes a lot of courage to reach out to people and talk about your views through likes and comments. But, if you take that scary first step, you might just develop a network that goes beyond what you can imagine.

What strategies do you use with your LinkedIn content? Share them with me.

All of the Fortune 500 businesses have formed accounts on LinkedIn, which shows you that this platform is taken seriously in the business world. Nearly every second another business is forming an account on LinkedIn as well and as of this year it has more than 582 million users, with users spread across the world and industry, looking to grow their business as every other company.

Grow Your Business through LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a powerful social network for professionals in all kinds of work. It can help business people to boost their turnovers through being able to reach targeted customers, grow their brand and credibility, advertise their products and services, grow their network through their followers and groups, and much more.

Marketing through social media networks like LinkedIn gives business owners a quick and nearly instantaneous method of reaching out to their potential customers, clients, and fellow businesses. LinkedIn allows them to reach millions more customers than ever before and best of all, most of these services are free or cost much less than traditional forms of advertising like print or broadcast.

LinkedIn Advertising Helps Businesses Succeed

One such method is called LinkedIn advertising. This platform lets business marketers talk to their sales prospects, get their personal details and be able to easily follow up with them and convince them to buy your products or services. LinkedIn advertising is not free, but it can help you to make money through being able to advertise your products and services.

The advertisements on LinkedIn can be targeted by job title, location, and several other parameters. Even though the advertising options on LinkedIn could be expensive depending on how it is used, it is also very highly focused and so can be very effective. This means you can grow your audience easily and get people to come to your website or blog as well.

LinkedIn Helps Grow Your Business Brand

Branding is vital to any business if he wants customers to recognize his company. With LinkedIn your business profile is what visitors see first and it should give relevant and up-to-date data on your company and what it can do for potential customers and clients. That’s why all businesses should create a Company Page on LinkedIn.

Each Company Page has a profile page, just like in a personal LinkedIn account. For your profile on you Company Page, you should post a business-related picture of yourself so your potential customers and clients can put a face to your name if you are the company owner. The picture you place here will be what shows up in your posts and people will use it to recognize you and your brand. You could also use your logo if you have one. Plus, it’s vital to list the URL for your website or blog and link people who read your postings back to it.

Your Company Page can be used to talk about new products and services, help put out answers to questions relating to your niche, create groups of like-minded people in your field, advertise for job openings in your company, etc. It’s one of the best ways to market your Internet business and is much more cost effective than many other methods of advertising.

You promote your business through your Company pages and through this medium, you should see an influx of lots of new visitors to your website that you can entice to become new customers.

Don’t forget to optimize your Company Page content by using relevant and trending keywords for your business niche. Keep in mind that Google indexes LinkedIn pages and they can be searched and will show up in a search engine query by a potential customer or client.

Attractive presentation on your Products and Services Page Vital

A Company Page also has a Products and Services section you can use to place things like testimonials, endorsements, recommendations and more that concern your Internet Marketing business ventures. The more your followers talk good about your products and services, the better your profits should ultimately become.

A simple, but effective method of advertising your business is to put a LinkedIn button onto your website or blog. Then, you can get people going back and forth from your website to your LinkedIn account and vice versa.

LinkedIn is a very popular networking site with more than 200 million users and it is growing every minute of the day. It’s easy to create a LinkedIn page and the big businesses have the money to buy a premium account on LinkedIn, which gets them even more opportunities and tools to help promote their causes.

What Big Companies Are On LinkedIn?

There are hundreds of big companies with Linked In Company pages. Some of these places and how they are benefitting and using LinkedIn to help them to be successful include:

IBM – The computer giant IBM is one of the big name companies with a LinkedIn account. Their representatives reported that LinkedIn gave their company a chance to directly communicate with potential job candidates and they considered it their best tool for recruiting potential new hires. They were one of the very first big companies to try social media networking sites like LinkedIn to recruit new employees.

Home Depot – Home Depot is another big company using LinkedIn to help them to fill positions that were difficult to find qualified candidates for in the past. These include jobs like information technology, supply, and more. They have learned that using LinkedIn recruitment, engaging with LinkedIn groups and responding to questions from contacts have all helped them in finding great employees that perfectly fit the bill in their stores.

Amazon.com – Amazon.com is one of the biggest retailers online and one of the most successful. They too are using LinkedIn company pages to help promote their brand, advertise their company and help them to hire future employees.

Hewlett-Packard – One way Hewlett Packard uses Linkedin is by giving peer-to-peer advice to other businesses. They have worked to help these businesses through discussions on problems other businesses are having and helping them solve them.

These are only four of the hundreds of big companies using LinkedIn. Others include businesses like Kraft, Lockheed Martin, EMC, Intuit, Allstate and ConAgra to name a few more.

How do Fortune 500 Companies Use LinkedIn?

According to LinkedIn facts, every existing Fortune 500 company is represented in one way or another on LinkedIn. The method that Fortune 500 companies use on LinkedIn is through the use of headhunters to help them to fill open positions. These headhunters contact people who are already employed and try to recruit them and get them to accept positions elsewhere. They also use groups and other LinkedIn tools to help them to get prospective leads and to learn about potential profit making ventures.

How are B2B Marketers Using LinkedIn?

When it comes to B2B marketers, there are also plenty of them who have learned to use LinkedIn to their advantage. It has become the go to place for B2B marketers for many reasons. In fact, statistics report that more than 90 percent of B2B marketers prefer using LinkedIn over any of the other social networking sites.

Hence, there are plenty of B2B marketers that have realized the possible ways that LinkedIn can help their businesses to succeed and thrive. This is due to things like building relationships with customers, clients, potential employees and other businesses. They can promote their brands and get more well-known and in the end everyone involved benefits if they do it effectively and correctly.

Just like anyone else, the B2B marketers use things like LinkedIn Groups, and relevant and up-to-date postings to help them to become popular on LinkedIn and “go to” businesses in their niche. This helps everyone involved in the long run because everyone gets new info in their line of work and gets the chance to network with fellow business professionals who can lead them to future contacts that could take their business even further.

LinkedIn therefore can benefit all businesses big or small. No matter the size of the business, LinkedIn gives it the tools to potentially get new employees, and to make valuable connections in their fields that will help their companies be successful in the future. So if your business hasn’t made the plunge to creating a LinkedIn account, don’t wait a second longer or you could be losing millions of opportunities through potential connections with the more than 200 million users.

Social networking has also become a way for businesses to make money in new and innovative methods via Internet Marketing. While some places like Facebook may seem like just a place to have fun with your friends, social networks like LinkedIn are made more for professional dealings and connections. It is a world of business people looking to connect with like-minded business people to share information of a business nature, not a place to discuss what you had for lunch or play a silly game.

The similarity between LinkedIn and other social networking sites is that you can still do things like make status updates, share content, recommend posts or people, post videos, and interact with your connections. It’s just meant to be a more serious sort of interactions that are business related.

But is there really a way to make money by using LinkedIn?

LinkedIn and Money Making Opportunities
LinkedIn doesn’t really give business people a direct way to make money; however there are ways to use it to your advantage that can make money for you and your business if it is used correctly. This money can come from the way that LinkedIn members interact and how they promote their products and services through their websites or blogs via the use of LinkedIn tools.

LinkedIn is actually its own community full of experts and business professionals all looking for ways to help themselves or others. Through connections made with these people your business can discover ways to connect and to make money through those connections. Big businesses like Apple and Amazon.com have learned this fact and they are far from being alone in the world of big business and they wouldn’t have formed a business account on LinkedIn if it wasn’t going to help them to profit in many ways, including money.

Groups Can Aid in Making Money Through LinkedIn

Groups on LinkedIn are formed by like-minded individuals or businesses who want to discuss various industries, fields of work, and other topics. LinkedIn members can either join a group or create their own. Either way can lead to ventures that could possibly help your company to earn money in various ways.

Joining the right groups can lead to a business earning money through the use of LinkedIn. There are plenty of groups on LinkedIn that can teach you better ways to conduct your business, or better ways to handle problems in your field, etc. that will lead to your company getting better at what it does and therefore making more profits.

These groups can help you make the contacts that can help you to get leads that can turn into more traffic to your business website and that can lead to more customers and clients that will buy your products and services and help get you even more profits if they in turn give you recommendations and endorsements on their LinkedIn pages.

Groups are also good ways to get more employees that can fit perfectly into your open positions. You can pick and choose potential candidates that will help make your business more successful due to their experiences and skills. This is another way to help your business make a bigger profit through your connections on LinkedIn because better employees are more successful and help your company to make money through their actions.

Other Ways LinkedIn can Help You To Make Money

Some of the other ways to make money through your networking ventures on LinkedIn include learning how to use some of their apps like the LinkedIn Mobile app. This gives businesses even more chances to connect to influential people or fellow businesses that can help lead them towards money making possibilities. With nearly everyone carrying a smart phone these days, your business is definitely losing opportunities that could turn into potential profits if they don’t take advantage of the benefits they can get through the use of LinkedIn Mobile Apps.

All in all, LinkedIn doesn’t have a direct route to making money, but if it is used effectively then it’s possible to make a profit through the connections you make and the information you share with others.

LinkedIn is a professional networking site where companies can post job openings, look for prospective talent, and even check their references. All of these things save time and give you a much better chance to find the perfect employee that I fit the need for your company.

The following are several steps to using LinkedIn to help you to get good employees for your business:

Get Your Company Page in Order

In order for potential employees to find out about your company, you need to create a Company Page for your business and keep it up-to-date and relevant for your business niche. A Company Page is like a resume for a business and lets potential talent read all about your company and find out if they think it is a good fit for their skills and experience.

Millions of professional people have LinkedIn accounts and are out there searching for jobs in your industry. If you ensure that all of the data on your Company pages are attractive, current, and give a true look at what your company is and what it does, then you will likely be able to get some leads for filling open positions in your line of work.

Make sure all the contact information such as email, phone, address, etc. is clearly there in your profile. Your potential employee needs to be able to find you, then locate the proper person to talk to about a job.

Use Your Network to Find Employees

Next, if you are searching for someone to fill an open position in your company, be sure to share this fact with everyone in your LinkedIn network. Tell them the kind of job you need to fill, as well as the kind of candidate you want. It’s possible that one of your contacts may know someone who is perfect for that job and can help you get in touch with them.

Good examples to contact are your present or previous workers, old managers, other business owners, etc. Perhaps another business in our niche will remember a great candidate that they couldn’t hire because they didn’t have an opening and that person would fit what you want in an employee.

Use LinkedIn Groups to Find Employees

LinkedIn Groups are another great place to recruit a new employee for your open positions. Some of the people there may know candidates that would be perfect for your company and can hook you up with them so you can schedule an interview. That’s why it is vital to stay in touch with your groups and participate on a regular basis.

Post Open Positions on LinkedIn Jobs

Companies can also post open positions for jobs on LinkedIn Jobs. Many people are looking at these postings every day that need a job and could be perfect for your open positions. While posting a job opening on LinkedIn is not a free thing, it is well worth the cost to your company and could ultimately be cheaper in terms of more than just money since your time is valuable too. Plus, LinkedIn automatically sends out messages to individuals on LinkedIn whose experience and qualifications meet your requirements.

LinkedIn Talent Finder Can Help Find Employees

Another tool on LinkedIn is called LinkedIn Talent Finder. This feature on LinkedIn can help you to track down potential candidates through searches that include their experience, years in the industry, education, where they live, and other parameters. You can also check their profiles and find out if they are worth contacting to talk to them about your job openings.

LinkedIn InMail

LinkedIn InMail can also be used if you have a premium account. You can send messages to other LinkedIn users who you are interested in interviewing for open positions.

Searching for Potential Candidates

You can also simply use the LinkedIn search feature and search by using the advance people search option and searching by keywords such as location, job title, college, language they speak, or a name if you know it. If you have a premium account you can search by their current company size, years of experience, when they joined LinkedIn, etc.

LinkedIn Recruiter

LinkedIn Recruiter is another paid tool that allows recruiters to find talented members that could fill open company positions. It allows searching through tools like InMail, plus being able to use specialized filters to track candidates down better, and make folders that are specialized to hold potential names.

All in all, there are indeed many LinkedIn tools that can help your company find future employees, so don’t forget to use it the next time you have unfilled positions in your business.

This is where social media comes into it’s own.

An excerpt from the article below describes 4 main benefits.

• Better, more meaningful communication with customers. Rather than see people as a number, businesses are able to provide them with individualized attention by addressing their needs immediately.
• Overall savings. Marketing campaigns can target customers online through free social media networks.
• Brand recognition. By plastering a logo and slogan all over social media networks, businesses increase brand recognition worldwide which helps them to sell products.
• Greater overall customer satisfaction. Men and women want fast results. They want 24/7 access to companies. By deploying social media marketing teams, businesses provide customers with the information and support they need to resolve the issues that they have. This builds faith in a company and makes customers loyal.

This article by Jack Humphrey emphasises the importance of being authentic, offering value to your customers and networking with people that are already working with your ideal clients.

What if I told you that’s not marketing you’re doing…

Online marketing is a completely different beast these days compared to the old days of “megaphone” marketing. If you’ve been at this for a while, you might remember how everyone was just shouting at each other on their websites and with advertising and social. Straight up “Hey come see my product or service right now!” […]

The post What if I told you that’s not marketing you’re doing… appeared first on Jack Humphrey.