Last month we shared an article on leveling-up your LinkedIn. This week, we’re sharing more pro-tips to take your LinkedIn game even higher.
LinkedIn is the largest database in the world, and a powerful vehicle for connecting you with prospects, customers and vendors — so if you still aren’t using LinkedIn for your business, here are five additional tips to help you go even further into getting the most from your LinkedIn account:
1. Be active. Once you have a company page, you need to start consistently updating it with useful, engaging / relevant content, strong visuals and timely topics related to your industry. What you post should be based on a sound inbound marketing strategy with carefully identified personas, tailor-made content and a carefully laid out plan. Make sure your plan is manageable. Start slow if needed; it’s more important to be consistent than frequent. Respond to each comment on your posts and start conversations — do more than just “like” other posts. Your activity on LinkedIn is directly connected to how much you can grow your business.
2. Create a Showcase Page. Showcase Pages are the perfect tool for marketing your business to more than one audience. Showcase Pages allow you to have a main company page, as well as separate Showcase Page(s) for your different audience segments or products / services. These pages can target different client segments by offering specialized information particular to that audience based their needs, interests or specialization.
For example, if you are an architect and you market to homeowners but you also design schools, banks and government buildings, you may wish to have Showcase Pages for education, financial and municipal clients. The content on each page should be projects and up-to-date information specific to each clientele.
Learn more about Showcase Pages here.
3. SEO applies to LinkedIn. LinkedIn is one of the top sites that Google indexes regularly for search results (YouTube, Wikipedia, Facebook and Twitter are the other four). That means it’s critical that you apply SEO to your company page for better search results. Here are a few simple SEO tips to get you started increasing your SEO ranking on LinkedIn:
- Integrate some keyword-rich copy strategically to your company profile page.
- Build quality backlinks. Backlinks are created when one website links to another (also called inbound links). This will give your page a boost. Begin with linking your website, blogs you’ve written, press you’ve received, your YouTube channel, etc. Then think about other backlinks you can add.
- Publish posts with relevant, unique content — including keywords — in your niche area(s).
- Complete your Showcase Pages’ profile with as much information as possible.
- Participate in groups. As you engage and offer relevant information to the conversations, your reputation as a thought leader will grow and bring you increased traffic.
- Google searches for text and doesn’t “read” images, so be sure to name your your graphics and images to get SEO credit.
- Use the right hashtags to help point viewers towards your topics and content to make it searchable.
4. Advertise on LinkedIn. There are so many businesses and contacts on LinkedIn, you may wish to consider moving some of your marketing dollars to promote your business on LinkedIn. This is an entire topic on its own that we will write about soon, but to get started, visit LinkedIn’s Marketing Solutions page for more about all the options here.
5. Did you know you can manage your invitations on LinkedIn? First, click on “My Network” at the top of your LinkedIn page. Next, click on “Manage Invitations”. Toggle from the default “Received” view to the “Sent” to see how many invitations you sent that are still pending. You can opt to withdraw your invitation; don’t worry, the recipient won’t know but they will stop receiving reminder notifications. If you feel that the recipient may have missed your invite, this is a good time to send them a quick reminder to accept your pending invite (which they can find in the same window under “Received”). It’s also a good idea for you to take a quick look at the ones you have received to see if you missed someone you do wish to connect with.
There is still so much more to LinkedIn than you might realize, and I hope I’ve encouraged you to keep exploring this powerful platform to grow your business. Please let me know if you’d like more in-depth tips, if I can help answer any questions or if you’d like Elements to help you manage and enhance your LinkedIn presence / digital advertising. Remember that the power of LinkedIn is in its ability to network and make connections, so try spending some time each day on LinkedIn and watch your network grow!
— Amy
