Hopefully you are following along with our series on social media for small business. Today the topic is LinkedIn. If you’ve been in the business world you are probably familiar with the LinkedIn platform, and may not understand how beneficial it can be for your small business.
LinkedIn is considerably different than all previously covered social platforms. It was launched in 2003 and designed specifically with businesses and career networking in mind. This space isn’t as light and is used more for career building – staying in touch with past and current coworkers and clients as well as finding new ones. Best practices used for other platforms can fall short here.
- LinkedIn has 250 million active users.
- 40% of users are on the platform daily.
- 25% of adult internet users use LinkedIn. (Pew Research Center, 2015)
- LinkedIn is the only major social media platform for which usage rates are higher among 30- to 49-year-olds than among 18- to 29-year-olds.
So how exactly do you use LinkedIn?
- Keep it PROFESSIONAL: LinkedIn is not the place for your political views or pictures of your children and pets.
- Make sure your header and profile image are relevant and properly sized.
- Make sure your company page has all information filled out.
- LinkedIn has a feature where you can highlight your services and products. Use it.
- Ask your clients for recommendations of your services/products. The same way that other platforms offer reviews, the recommendations feature is powerful.
- Build thought leadership by posting blog articles to the page. Publish content that shows that you know what you are talking about.
- Respond to questions or comments on posts or through messenger
- Use LinkedIn to keep an eye on your competition and gain some valuable insight!
Examples:
Our first example is a small technology company page on LinkedIn. They are B2C, and while they are following some of the best practices, many of them they are not.
The positives:
- Their about us is filled out with all company details.
- It appears that they have recently updated the page.
- They have employees on the website which adds legitimacy to the company.
The Negatives:
- They have no header on their company page and their profile picture leaves a little to be desired.
- Their feed has not been posted to in 6 months
- This hurts their credibility as well as hurts their thought leadership
- The have a small number of followers meaning they are not actively trying to grow their network.
An example of a technology company also B2C killing it:
- This company has around the same number of posts, but almost 11k followers.
- All their posts are about their company – not just posts to a blog
- Company culture
- Company ideals
- Jobs
- Photos are bright and engaging, not a solid feed of text and minimal images.
This company is excited and they want you to know all about it.
The Takeaway
LinkedIn is a place to talk about your business professionally. It is the platform where you need to create a network of individuals you may be able to pitch to down the line, after you’ve developed your thought leadership through posting. You want to ask your clients to review you on LinkedIn, and maintain your activity posting relevant, interesting content.
Keep an eye out for the rest of our “Social Media for Small Business 101” blog series, as we still have Twitter, and Instagram left to cover. Find our Social Media basics here, and Facebook 101 here. If you have any comments or concerns reach out to us today!
