How To Grow Your Business with LinkedIn
LinkedIn is great for a variety of different businesses and business owners as a stellar networking tool and a place to gauge what’s coming up next so you can "keep up with the Joneses.” Here’s how you can grow your business with LinkedIn.
Curate a robust personal page
When a LinkedIn member first clicks on your page, make sure they feel welcome. Include a warm and welcoming profile photo of yourself, a detailed work history and an easy path to discover your business from your main page.
Design a company page
In addition to your individual page, I recommend you create a page for your business where followers can stay in the know. Think of it just like a Facebook business page. One great thing about a LinkedIn business page is that you can schedule posts via platforms like Hootsuite, which makes your marketing much, much easier.
Get interactive
Like any other platform, LinkedIn is a social media channel and is meant to be social! To leverage the site, be sure you're engaging with what your connections have to say: reacting, sharing, or leaving meaningful comments on their posts. Watch and interact with their videos. Celebrate their new ideas, promotions, and successes.
Join groups
A great way to make your presence known on LinkedIn, especially within your niche, is to join relevant groups and interact with other members. Making new connections is just as important as keeping up with established ones. Groups are an even more specific way to showcase your knowledge, network and learn.
Leverage the latest features
LinkedIn recently added Stories, along with polls, live video and other interactive tools. When you use these features regularly, you’re not only remaining relevant to the online conversation and staying up on trends, you’re interacting with people in a fresh way, which helps you establish authority, reach new people and create authentic bonds.
Create rich content
Just like all other social platforms, video and image content perform better than text-only posts, so remember to create meaty content that always, always uses a strong visual!
Understand the algorithm
What shows up on your LinkedIn feed? Content that sends out the right “signals.” What are these? According to a post by The B2B House, signals are the individual bits of information in your post. LinkedIn uses thousands of them to decide what shows up on your feed. They fall within three categories:
Identity (Who are you? Where do you work? Is this someone you’ve interacted with before?)
Content (Is the content fresh, relevant and high-quality? Who’s tagged?)
Engagement possibility (Is this the sort of thing you’ve commented on or shared before?)
Measure your metrics
Just like other sites, it's important to track how your content is performing. Use LinkedIn's analytics feature to see how your audience is perceiving and engaging with your content and use these metrics as a guide for future production. Like other platforms, I recommend that you at least track your overall reach/impressions, engagement, and follower count.
Once you have a good strategy and get content creation production rolling, you’ll be able to meet more and more people on LinkedIn who value your work.
