LinkedIn is like a more business-oriented Facebook. While consumers and businesses successfully connect on Facebook every day, it is a less business-oriented site by nature. Facebook is where people tend to look for the latest funny image or video and where they check on how their friends are doing.
LinkedIn, on the other hand, has a slightly narrower focus. People are there to do business and to learn about opportunities and companies. There is plenty of marketing potential if you know how to leverage it. Here are seven ways you can most effectively do that.
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Spend 10 minutes a day monitoring, posting and responding to comments on a LinkedIn company page.
You will spend more time organizing that company page than updating it. Creating one post per day is fine—two at the maximum—as long as you remember to go for quality over quantity. Make each post useful and interesting to your audience and do not inundate them with lots of daily messages. Three per day, even if they were worthwhile, would probably be too many.
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Build a large collection of LinkedIn recommendations.
Yes, they’re useful, and not just for individual profiles. Think of these as testimonials, reasons why people should trust your messaging. Testimonials are always more effective than paid ads at gaining trust, and that remains true on LinkedIn.
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When looking to hire, showcase the personality of your brand.
As with all social media, visuals will engage people better than text. This will be incredibly useful if you are trying to hire users from LinkedIn. Rather than showing potential applicants long blocks of text to tell what it will be like to work for you, use images to show the lead a message. Photos make a better emotional connection than text, and you need to convince an applicant that they want to work for you.
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Generate leads by posting appropriately to LinkedIn Groups.
LinkedIn will not currently let you post to groups as a company—only through your personal profile. This is great, however, because the basic point of social media is to communicate with people. If you join a marketing network and create a post inviting others to a marketing seminar, it comes from you. The invitation has all the authority behind it that you carry as a professional marketer, and more importantly, it comes from a person.
It’s possible to share this responsibility with employees and other company members, so you can leverage their credentials for the purpose.
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Keep a professional tone at all times.
This is not only a matter of how you use words, but the type of media you post. Articles, eBooks and webinars are great ideas. Cartoons and memes are better left for Facebook.
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Spend the most time in groups meant specifically for your industry.
LinkedIn can deliver you better quality business prospects than you would find on other social media, but only if you direct your efforts wisely. Groups that are organized based on topics which fit your industry and your target market (such as condo buyers or real estate developers groups) are always a better bet than groups based on more general topics (such as a Toronto group or a writers’ group). Though the general topic groups may contain more people, none of those users are necessarily interested. People who chose to join a group based on your topic of interest are virtually guaranteed to pay attention.
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Use group discussions to establish your reputation.
While we did mention the power of recommendations, those are not the only way to build a reputation among colleagues and leads. Find discussions in groups on your topic of expertise. Use those as an opportunity to show that you know what you are talking about. People are more likely to become interested in your work strategically marketing real estate if you can show unique insight into condo development or how to increase condo sales.
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