In “How to Improve Your LinkedIn Marketing Part 1,” we offered five tips for making the most out of LinkedIn. Let’s quickly review those tips:
● Connect with everyone: The more connections, the more opportunities
● Add your company profile: Establish your actual business on LinkedIn, not just on your personal profile
● Publish an article once a month: Establish yourself as an industry expert, build rapport and stay relevant
● Endorse others: Support others professionally because the more you give, the more you get in return
● Join targeted groups: Join niche networks within LinkedIn to spread your message faster and make more efficient connections
So now that the “Part 1” tips are fresh in your mind, let’s move onto to some more tips that will get you to make the most out of your LinkedIn…
1. Perfect the Summary Section of Your Own Profile: This section tends to be overlooked. If you know that many people prefer to go to LinkedIn rather than your website, you will understand how important it is to be pitching your best within the LinkedIn summary. You only get 2,000 characters in this section so it’s important to speak directly and persuasively to your audience. It’s recommended to speak in first person, use complete sentences, and at the end of the summary section include your contact information. Sure, it’s available to them elsewhere on your profile, but why not make it even easier for them to contact you?
2. Beef Up Your Company Profile: Add a photo! The default icon is boring and discouraging for viewers. Add lots of links — to your blog, to your website, to your social media accounts. Don’t be that company that’s only known on LinkedIn. Get the branded URL. During editing, you can change the URL from a combination of numbers and letters to something more on-brand and easy for people to remember.
3. Answer Questions, Ask Questions: A really useful and underused feature of LinkedIn is the Question & Answer. Similarly to publishing articles, answering questions thoughtfully establishes your expertise and increases your visibility. Users are drawn to those who are able to provide the best answers within online communities. There’s even a rating system on LinkedIn like on other online forums to highlight the best answers. Make a point to sit down and answer some industry-related questions once a week.
Inversely, it’s also beneficial to ask good questions on LinkedIn. This will not only yield good answers, but good connections.
4. Make Use of the Introduction Feature: Did you know that your 1st-degree connections on LinkedIn can introduce you to their 1st-degree connections? This is a great tool for seeking prospects for sales. By requesting an introduction from one of your connections, that person can set up a message introducing the two of you. And voila! — a prospect connected!
5. Make Use of the Recommendation Feature: Did you know that you can write recommendations for your connections and also request recommendations? By going to a connection’s page, clicking the “Send a Message” drop-down menu, and selecting “Recommendation,” you can write a nice message about that connection that will appear on their page. We highly recommend this recommend feature because they set connections significantly apart from their competition, and writing the connections builds rapport between you and that connection.
Not to mention, it motivates connections to write recommendations for you as well. You gotta give some to get some! But don’t be shy in requesting a recommendation from someone if you know their words would look attractive on your page.
Make the most of your LinkedIn! As we said in Part 1, you want to limit yourself to three social media sites to really focus your marketing efforts. LinkedIn should definitely be one of the three. Your efforts on LinkedIn will drive meaningful connections and yield prospects that would take you much longer to get offline or through any other social media site. For more information about features on LinkedIn, check out the LinkedIn help page: https://www.linkedin.com/help/linkedin
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