How to Maximize Your LinkedIn Presence and Effectiveness to Generate Business
LinkedIn is probably the best professional social network on the Internet. I have been using them for 6 or 7 years, since they launched, and I have seen them go through quite a few changes and improvements over the years. LinkedIn has definitely been expanding their services and functionality in the last year or so. I wanted to cover some of the things I like to do with LinkedIn to maximize my business and grow my own social network. Here are some of ways you can leverage LinkedIn to grow your business and increase your social networking.
1. Adding LinkedIn Connections – adding connections on LinkedIn is pretty easy and effective. One of the nice things is they let you do mass invites to your email address book, and also your other social networks. What this does is pulls all your contacts into a list and you can send a boatload of invites out and grow your network quickly. You can also send a connection request to someone you would like to be connected that’s connected one of your current connections, which is called forwarding a request to connect. As effective as this tool is at connecting with new people, it’s surprising how little it is used I have found.
2. LinkedIn Groups – LinkedIn Groups is a tremendous tool that allows you to start your own “group” of like-minded individuals that can join the group and then post topics and comments much like an online forum (check out my LinkedIn Affiliate Group here). The nice thing about Groups is people on LinkedIn look for Groups to join for things they are interested in and the Group grows on it’s own accord. You can also send out invites to your connections to join your Group to build the numbers. Also, when people join your Group their connections see that in your Network Updates and may join as well. The really nice thing about Groups is you can send an email blast to all the Group members every 7 days, which enables you to keep a good rate of messaging. But of course don’t abuse the privilege or people will leave the group. One of the problems with Groups is the posting abuse that goes on, which is why you need to set the ground rules and keep the Group moderated to ensure quality, otherwise it can get over-run with garbage.
3. LinkedIn Advertising - LinkedIn has their own pay-per-click advertising platform that runs on the site as well. Their minimum bid is $2 per click, which is a bid steep, but it does run on a fairly targeted basis, so it can be effective to exposing your ads to professionals in the industry and title you are going after. I have used this with limited success so far.
4.LinkedIn Contacts – One of the great things about building your LinkedIn connections is that you can actually download all your connections into a spreadsheet so you can manage and get a good grasp on your connections and what you want to do with them. Also, if you did want to share them you could forward the spreadsheet as well to colleagues or other people you want to share your connections with, but don’t share with just anyone obviously.
5. LinkedIn Network Activity – similar to Facebook, LinkedIn has added “network activity” which tells you what people are posting, who they have connected to, and some other nice info that you can then respond and interact with. By interacting with your connections in their updates you can get to know people better and build the relationship which is everything in social networking and business. I also like that LinkedIn shows you how many people have visited your Profile on a daily basis and how many times you have come up in the search results on LinkedIn. You can also add 3rd party “plug-ins” to your LinkedIn profile to add functionality which is really cool, so check that out as well.
6. LinkedIn Recommendations – this is my favorite aspect of LinkedIn because your Recommendations can be used to further your business. LinkedIn Recommendations can be given to others and they can return the favor. It’s kind of hard to grow your LinkedIn Recommendations, but the best way to grow them is to give them first and people will return the favor. You can also ask your connections to recommend you first and then return the favor. The nice thing about LinkedIn Recommendation is they tend to be written in a really positive light and make you look good to people looking to do business with you. So make sure to work on building your LinkedIn recommendations.
These are some great ways you can use LinkedIn to build business and increase your social networking reach. Like anything, the more effort you put into it the more you get out of it. I have gotten a tremendous amount of business from LinkedIn so I highly recommend putting a great deal of focus into building your network and reaching out to people to connect and do business…all they can say is no right?? Thanks for reading and let me know if you have any thoughts or comments. Thanks!
