Having more than 700 million members spread across the globe, LinkedIn has evolved into a powerful marketing tool. With all the social media platforms taking up space on your smartphones, there’s not a single one that compares with LinkedIn! From maintaining your personal brand to generating qualified leads, using LinkedIn is an important part of being a full-fledged professional in any industry these days.
If you are looking for some reasons why LinkedIn is important to grow your business, here are 10 ways it can help to reach and engage your audience.
Create awareness and improve brand reputation
LinkedIn’s company page is a great way to tell your brand’s story and increase awareness. It is the sole social media platform meant for professionals, making it the ideal place to improve brand reputation. With an average of two professionals signing up on the platform every second, businesses have the opportunity to connect with an ever-increasing number of prospects.
LinkedIn offers a plethora of features that you can use to improve visibility and credibility, both as an individual and as a brand. By scheduling LinkedIn posts consistently on the platform, you have the potential to reach a wide audience, even the ones who are not following you.
Generate genuine and qualified leads
Out of all the social media platforms, LinkedIn is one of the best to generate qualified leads. Along with putting out informative content and driving traffic to your website, LinkedIn can be utilized to personally identify potential leads, engage with them, and convert them into customers or clients.
This can be done by working on a perfect balance of listening, analyzing, participating, sharing, networking, and responding. LinkedIn provides the opportunity to easily increase your sales by enabling you to network with potential clients and market to them directly.
Promote your business’ products and services
Using a company page on LinkedIn, any business can reach its target audience. It can be ideally used to showcase your business’s core values, talk about your brand’s offerings, nurture leads, and improve the visibility of any job opportunities currently available.
You should ideally maintain an 80:20 ratio in your content: 80% of your posts should be informative or educational while 20% of them should contain promotion of your products. To maintain a regular stream of content on your profile, you can create a content calendar and use a social media scheduling tool for LinkedIn to schedule posts beforehand.
LinkedIn also lets you run targeted advertisements and promote your business directly to the desired audience. Using its precise targeting options, you can craft campaigns around clearly defined goals including but not limited to lead generation, brand awareness, engagement, or reach.
Establish thought leadership
LinkedIn is a platform that allows you to establish yourself as an industry expert by showcasing the knowledge that you possess. You can position yourself as a leader in your domain by sharing high-quality content like industry-specific articles and webinars, improving your personal profile, participating in LinkedIn communities, and answering questions of people.
This networking platform is a fertile ground for thought leaders who aim to become trusted advisors. You can also network with other leaders in your industry and engage with them. This leadership and reputation also slowly lead to building influence on the platform.
Rank your brand name on Google
Today, Google is the first way that comes into the minds of people when they have to search for a business. And if you have a LinkedIn page, its link will appear right after your website in search results.
Google is quite into LinkedIn because of its huge networking capabilities which makes it easier to get your LinkedIn page to rank on Google as compared to your website or online portfolio. Thus, it is also a good practice to link your website and your blog to your LinkedIn company page.
Tap into the power of LinkedIn Pulse
LinkedIn Pulse is a micro-blogging platform where users can publish articles. It is a great way to improve your credibility, reach a wide audience, and build a good reputation in your niche. The Pulse feed is tailored according to the interests of each user, showing them content that they would actually want to see.
Thus, the articles that you publish will be shown to a highly relevant audience including professionals at every level of many different kinds of businesses. Also, LinkedIn notifies your connections every time you publish a post. That way, you can ensure that your posts won’t get lost among the crowd.
Leverage LinkedIn groups
LinkedIn groups can be effectively utilized to connect with other relevant industry leaders, influencers, and customers. You can create your own LinkedIn group along with joining other existing groups in your niche. Groups allow you to interact with leaders from your industry as well as from other niches.
In these groups, generally, discussions take place between users and industry leaders where you can get an opportunity to showcase your expertise and interact with like-minded people. Within the group, you can also send messages to the members using LinkedIn Announcements, which go directly to their email inboxes.
Research competitors and their employees
Apart from publishing posts and building professional connections with your clients, LinkedIn has other uses too. It can be effectively utilized to research your competitors and their methods of operation.
Given the huge network on the platform, it is safe to say that your competitors might have their own LinkedIn page where they update company information, share company news and insight, and showcase current employees. You can analyze how a particular company is operating, what kind of content it is putting out, and how it is handling its employees as well as customers.
Source and engage top talent
Top talent across the world holds a LinkedIn profile and stays active on the platform. LinkedIn makes it incredibly simple for employers to connect with potential candidates and vice versa. You can grow your professional network by sending connection requests to ideal prospects.
Using LinkedIn InMail, it is possible to customize the connection requests with a note, which is super helpful while hiring for your organization. LinkedIn also offers premium features that let you find prospects faster. It enables you to enjoy unlimited browsing capabilities to find new business prospects or partners without restriction.
Create the most legitimate professional network
The most important reason for using LinkedIn to grow your business lies in the fact that it is filled entirely with forward-thinking professionals similar to you who are also looking to grow their professional presence.
Thus, the connections that you make on LinkedIn are far more effective than the followers on any other social media platform. It helps in creating a unique culture of individuals who make business easier for one another.
In a nutshell,
LinkedIn is voted as the most trusted social media platform by Business Insider. More and more people are turning to the platform to find and share quality content that is perceived as honest and valuable. Above are just a few reasons why you should create your own LinkedIn page today and start building your professional network. Happy networking!
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