LinkedIn has emerged to be one of the most popular social media platforms for the business community in the last few years. It’s a great place to network with professionals, enhance your online presence and accelerate your career trajectory to greater heights. However, it’s a common misconception among corporate peers that LinkedIn is just a networking platform for job seekers and recruiters, and thus, ignore the bigger opportunities offered by the app.
LinkedIn also allows companies and small businesses to build an effective community of employees and customers and expand your business prospects. Of late, LinkedIn has become an integral part of any business’ social media strategy and virtual presence. Take a look at how you can use LinkedIn to stimulate your business growth.
1. Networking
The primary function of LinkedIn is to help you connect with your acquaintances, employees, colleagues and potential clients or customers. The very first step to start building a strong and effective network on LinkedIn is to optimize your personal profile and/or business page with latest updates on your professional and personal experience. Next set your profile and/or page to public view and open to connecting. Now all you need to do is head over to the profiles you want to network with and click on the ‘connect’ option. A free bit of advice: Always send the request with a personalized message. A cordial note of invitation to accept your request and why you want to connect with the person will most likely increase your chances to connect with the desired individual. Not to forget, you can create an amazing impression and also stand out amidst the crowd.
2. Enhancing Online Presence
Content creation on LinkedIn is a great way to enhance your virtual presence and increase your reach. Sharing your story, personal and insightful experience and valuable life lessons will allow you to put forth your genuine and authentic self and have more people connecting with you and boosting your engagement. A few quick tips on escalating your engagement:
(A) Post knowledgeable content
(B) Join or create relevant groups
(C) Engage with other people
(D) Use relevant hashtags and post consistently
3. Lead Generation
LinkedIn offers a great avenue to generate leads and drive sales and website traffic irrespective of your business domain i.e. B2B (Business to Business) or B2C (Business to Customers). The best feature of LinkedIn that allows you to generate genuine leads is by targeting the right people using filtered demographics such as job profile, company, industry, so on and so forth.
A key aspect to generating worthwhile and effective leads on LinkedIn is posting relevant and unique content consistently and promoting your products and/ or services. You can also publish relevant ads to spread brand awareness and establish market acceptance.
4. Expanding target audience
One of the most important components of a successful business is a satisfied consumer. LinkedIn offers yet another great opportunity to expand your customer base and entice your target audience to buy your products and/or services.
Different ways to expand your target audience:
(A) Promoting products and/or services through content creation
(B) Engaging with customers through DMs and comments
(C) Taking into consideration their demands and desires to improve your brand
(D) Posting testimonials and reviews online
You can also create a LinkedIn group for your target customers wherein you can deal with them and solve their issues on a one-to-one basis. What’s better than happy customers, right!
5. Hiring new and competent talent
The building blocks of a strong organization are its employees. Coming back to the elementary function of the platform, LinkedIn can be used to recruit new and competent workforce for your company. The best part about LinkedIn is that it provides you a detailed overview of the professional and personal experiences, skills and achievements of an individual. To ease up the cumbersome recruitment process, you can either search for the relevant candidates with custom filters on the search tab (for eg: MBA graduate, marketing experience), go through a few profiles and reach out with the hiring prospect or simply post a recruitment advertisement on your feed.
To conclude, LinkedIn is a great and potentially useful platform to amplify and strengthen your business prospects. Make the most out of the opportunities and avenues that it offers as we mentioned above and take your business domain to the next level!
Overwhelmed with seeking business growth on LinkedIn? You’re perhaps lacking the right guidance and direction which we can offer! UpfluencingYou will help nurture your vision by providing appropriate professional guidance in framing the perfect marketing strategy for your business. Contact us now!