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LinkedIn is 277 percent more successful for sales & marketing than other social networking platforms. Hence, while drafting a social media strategy for your business, you should not disregard LinkedIn.
But, to be successful on LinkedIn, you cannot just begin sending promotional updates to your network. You need to optimize your profile, share updates, and enhance your connection base.
That is what we will cover. In this guide, we will tackle the best practices for networking for small businesses that will help improve your connections base and create an ideal brand presence on LinkedIn.
Let’s begin.
Create a company page
If you need prospects on LinkedIn to see you as a legitimate business, create a company page. It will help you communicate your brand’s practices, products & services, and culture, to 500 million professionals on the platform.
For instance, if you run a marketing agency, then you need to introduce your business and marketing services to your network.
Make sure that you update all the sections such as profile picture, banner, and summary, correctly to fully utilize the benefits of having a company page.
Further, the LinkedIn headline is extremely important for your profile. It should be in line with the target industry, so add pointers around your expertise and services here.
Build a network connection
On a social networking platform, you can connect with anyone. But, let’s say you run a local closet manufacturing company and you want to expand your network base on LinkedIn. So, connecting with a professional from another country and a different functional industry is not ideal for your business.
That is why you need to carefully choose the people you add to your network. Here is how you can achieve that:
- Update your functional industry to improve the connections recommendations on your profile.
- Use advanced search to add people to your network and update filters for industry, location, etc.
- Try using the nearby feature to connect with professionals within 31 miles to your location.
Personalize your requests
Before submitting a connection request, LinkedIn allows users to “add a note” in 300 characters to add a personal touch.
There are a lot of unscrupulous sales professionals who add people to their network base just to send irrelevant promotional messages. By adding a note, you can portray yourself as someone who actually went through the prospect’s profile and can be of value.
The idea of personalizing the request is to achieve common ground in the note in terms of functional industry, mutual connections, alma mater, LinkedIn group, etc.
Join LinkedIn groups
By joining groups on Linkedin, you can make connections with industry professionals and even find potential clients. So, search for groups that are relevant to your target industry and join them.
For instance, professionals running a marketing agency can join groups that are relevant to their functional industry. But, adding groups to your profile is not your only goal.
You need to interact with users by being involved in discussions. Also, post updates that can be genuinely helpful to the group members.
Use recommendations & skills endorsements
Recommendations are format statements testifying the professional/company’s expertise and character. Having recommendations from former clients can be of great value to your profile because users want to connect with brands that are credible.
Further, you can use skills endorsements to showcase your expertise. Ask your connections to endorse the skills you have mentioned in your profile. This will help you create a concrete impact for the services you are selling on LinkedIn.
Key takeaways
To end, here are a few key takeaways from the article:
- Create a company page to showcase yourself as a legitimate brand.
- Add people to your network by using the advanced search and nearby features.
- Personalize your request by adding a note.
- Join LinkedIn groups to connect with industry professionals.
- Use recommendations and skills endorsements to showcase your credibility.
- Like
- Digg
- Del
- Tumblr
- VKontakte
- Buffer
- Love This
- Odnoklassniki
- Meneame
- Blogger
- Amazon
- Yahoo Mail
- Gmail
- AOL
- Newsvine
- HackerNews
- Evernote
- MySpace
- Mail.ru
- Viadeo
- Line
- Comments
- Yummly
- SMS
- Viber
- Telegram
- Subscribe
- Skype
- Facebook Messenger
- Kakao
- LiveJournal
- Yammer
- Edgar
- Fintel
- Mix
- Instapaper
- Copy Link