Despite being a very popular social media platform amongst professionals, there is a chance that you haven’t used LinkedIn for your business yet. If you’re looking to provide products or services to businesses, sometimes known as business to business sales or b2b, then I think you should really have a look at establishing a presence on LinkedIn.
Similar to when you first started using Facebook and struggled to find people that you knew (because you need to know their e-mail address), LinkedIn works in a similar way. You either find someone through their e-mail address so you already know them, but what if you want to find new potential customers proactively. Well, you can add people, or ‘Invite them to connect’ and establish a connection. Similar to getting a friend request on Facebook, but more formal. How might you find people, well you can usually find people of interest to your business by going through groups specific to your business or industry. A group is essentially a forum.
My word of advice though in regards to using LinkedIn for business is there’s a much more polite kind of atmosphere and what I mean by that is that you have to play by the rules, and be professional. You can still advertise and market your business for free but not necessarily in an overt way like you can on Facebook or Twitter.
This is a much more discerning audience and if you’re spending time on LinkedIn then you’re more likely to be reading the broadsheets rather than the tabloids, or if you did you wouldn’t admit to it anyway.
The other thing you can do, is connect with your contacts and then see who they know. Its a bit like the theory of the seven degrees of separation, and it can take off quite quickly, as you build your network.
LinkedIn is definitely business focused, and although it can be quite addictive it tends not to take up nearly as much time as Facebook. There will not be pictures of cats doing strange things bouncing across your screen every five minutes for one thing.
Something that few small to medium sized business owners might realise though, is that you can create your own business profile and upload details of your products and services. Do you think that might be important when you connect to the Purchasing manager of a company that sells the kinds of products you manufacture? Because what’s the first thing they’re likely to do when they receive an invitation to connect, yep, they’re going to check you out and look at your profile and see what business you work for, except it will be the business you own/run/are marketing.
So if you haven’t had a look at LinkedIn as a possible avenue to promote your business maybe this has given you food for thought.
If you’re interested in having a business profile set up for you, its a very affordable service we provide, more details can be found here.
LinkedIn is a great tool for shining light on the rest of your social media sites too!
Tom, you’re right. It’s inevitable that there will be some traffic from LinkedIn to your social media accounts, thought the most efficient framework I personally believe in, is that everything should drive traffic to your website. In essence to your hub, imagine your business in the middle, you want everything else pointing towards it. Your website is, at the end of the day where you are going to convert traffic into customers into profit.