How to Use LinkedIn for Business

LinkedIn is a business orientated networking site that has over 75 million members in more than 200 countries. As of April 2010, there were over 12 million small-business people on LinkedIn, which is roughly 16 per cent of its total user database.

If you are a SMB looking for ways to promote your business online, you consider LinkedIn as it has proven itself to be a legitimate business tool for many SMBs, helping businesses connect with customers, prospects and other businesses, build traffic to their business, enhance branding, develop credibility and authority around areas that impact their business, and nurture opportunities.

According to the Optus Social Media Index for SMBs” report, LinkedIn is the fourth most popular tool used by SMBs (Facebook, YouTube and Twitter the most popular in that order). However, growth is expected across most sites as SMBs are seeing the value of social media. Unlike other social media tools, LinkedIn is specifically for businesses and enables you to make better use of your professional network, post and find jobs, answer questions, connect with like-minded people and build thought leadership, and help the people you trust in return.

LinkedIn is a great tool to leverage your existing contacts to connect with people and find potential new customers, partners, suppliers and useful information sources.

Getting started

• Before joining LinkedIn, spend some time exploring what it is all about at the LinkedIn Learning Centre.
• Setting-up a profile in LinkedIn is easy and it’s free. Just type in your details on the ‘Join LinkedIn Today’ on the right hand side of the home page, then click ‘Join Now’.
• You will receive a confirmation email to activate your profile. Complete your profile – the more you complete, the easier it will be for people to decide to connect with you or not. A complete profile will increase your visibility and help you get found by people within your wider network.
• Get recommended to help spread the word about your business and services. To help you get started, it might be easier if you approach friends, colleagues, partners and clients for recommendations.
• Promote your company. LinkedIn allows you to list up to three websites. Best to link to your website, blog or other social media tools.
• Link to your Twitter account (if you have one! Read Optus’ ‘How to use Twitter for your Business’)
• Edit your public profile to customise your public profile URL with your name i.e. http://www.linkedin.com/in/yourname. This is an easy way to brand yourself and a much easier URL to remember and share with others as you meet them.
• You have just completed the profile section of LinkedIn; continue to complete as much of the rest of the sections as possible. As mentioned previously, the more you complete, the easier it will be for others to see your experience and establish your credibility, and then decide whether to link to you or not.

Create opportunities

Create your network and acquire new customers – To help you create your network, connect with people with whom you have worked or done business with, or with others that work in your industry via the ‘Contacts’ tab in your account. You can search by profession, geographic area, associations and even interests to locate new contacts.

If you do find someone who is appropriate to connect to, LinkedIn will show you if that person is connected to you via someone within your network and help make the introductions to that person. For example, if you want an introduction to Joe Smith, and LinkedIn shows you that he is connected to Betty Brown (who is well known to you and in your network), you can ask Betty to facilitate an introduction to Joe. This is the ‘get introduced through a connection’ feature and can be quite handy for SMBs to widen their network and make business connections.

Engage with your network – once you have gone through the effort of creating your network, it is important to ensure you stay engaged. This can be achieved by updating your Status or by sending the occasional direct message. Also, note that you can sync your LinkedIn and Twitter accounts, meaning that if you update your Twitter status, it automatically updates your LinkedIn status, and vice versa. You can do this via the Twitter option in your Profile settings.

Join the right networks – LinkedIn’s Groups Directory will help you find the right networks for you to join and take part in. For example, if you are an accountant, there are over 200 groups for you to consider joining to participate and provide insight into the Q&A sessions. There are plenty of opportunities for SMBs to share content with others, but please note, there is little tolerance for blatant self promotion or trying to sell to others.

Join LinkedIn Events – LinkedIn also allows members to create events. These are great for you to monitor and join, also because some of your local connections (or prospects) may be attending them.

Spread the word and market yourself!

As mentioned above, once you create your new LinkedIn account, tell your customers, prospects, friends and family about it and encourage them to connect with you so you can create and expand your network, and have exposure to other relevant people in the industry.

Don’t forget to link to your website and other social media tools (i.e. Facebook, YouTube or Twitter) and email campaigns. Also, make sure you include your LinkedIn URL (along with other online media tools) in your email signature to let people know where you are in the online space. Your LinkedIn is now part of your overall marketing activities and should be given attention and maintained as appropriate.

Remember, social media is all about conversations and interacting with your audience. It is not just a one way information channel. So don’t treat it as a broadcast mechanism, engage with your audience.

Tracking and measuring your LinkedIn account

Under Contacts in LinkedIn, the Network Statistics tool provides you with statistics about your network, including how many users you can reach through your connections. If you want to create a more comprehensive measurement tool, consider the following:

1. Money – is it making you any money? Are you able to directly track sales made from direct engagement or from an introduction via LinkedIn?
2. Customers – Do you have new customers, or better customer relationships?
3. Traffic – has your website traffic increased from LinkedIn? If so, has the traffic resulted in sales or valuable engagement with your brand and business?
4. Increased brand awareness – have you increased awareness of your brand within your target and complementary audiences? How has this benefited your business?
5. Engagements – are your connections clicking on your links to your other websites or via bit.ly links you are providing (bit.ly links are the easiest way to make long links short, share and track them).

An extremely useful social media tool for SMBs

Over the years LinkedIn has proven itself to be a legitimate business tool, helping you connect with other SMBs and business targets. As with other social media tools, it is important to stay engaged with LinkedIn to ensure your brand is consistently top of mind with contacts within your network and others. As a rule of thumb, engaging or updating content twice a week is fine for LinkedIn, unlike other sites where content moves much faster, i.e. Twitter, where once a day update is recommended.

Find out how Optus can help you build your business with a great range of solutions designed for business builtforbusiness.com.au .

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