Why Your Business Should Be on LinkedIn

A lot of people have the impression that LinkedIn is a social platform designed to help people find jobs. That’s not totally wrong, but that narrow view would deprive you of some of the real value associated with belonging.

If you are interested in:

• Making more professional connections
• Generating highly targeted leads
• Developing your professional skills
• Increasing the visibility and credibility of your business

Linkedin can help do all of these things and more.

Like all successful relationships, you want to bring your best self to the platform. So step one is a professional profile. There are plenty of resources on LinkedIn and elsewhere that give you guidelines as to how to build you profile. Here’s one of the ones produced by LinkedIn, that covers the basics: Link to Profile Plan.

When you first join LinkedIn, you can opt for a free subscription. This will get you a lot of features, but I would highly recommend that you get the upgraded premium version. It basically gives you more access to people along with features that will help you grow professionally and connect up with a wider range of people. More about that later.

One other way to participate in LinkedIn is through Groups (sometimes referred to as forums). If you or your company has a specialty interest, there is almost certainly a group that you can join. There, you can both share your experience and get information and experience from others on the subject of interest. For example, if you have an expertise in industrial coatings to protect against corrosion, just type "corrosion" into the search bar. Filtering the results by "Company" inn this example gives me 106 companies that are active and interested in the subject of corrosion and are members of a group. Participating in group discussions can help establish you as an expert in that field.

If you have a company profile (as different from a personal profile) you can use that connection to keep your community and customers informed as to what you are working on. Any posting that you do will appear in their feed. This gives you an easy way to interact with your customers and prospects on a regular basis. New visitors to your LinkedIn page can "follow" your company. More followers gives you more credibility as a source of information.

Another way in which you can create Social Proof for yourself or company is to get recommendations.

Recommendations on LinkedIn are different from testimonials on a website. A LinkedIn recommendation is a direct link to the person recommending you, giving it greater legitimacy in the eyes of your profile readers. It is usually a short paragraph written by a colleague, co-worker, or a customer that highlights the skills or illustrates expertise or customer service experiences. Since it is based on their first hand experience of working with you it carries a high credibility.

As promised, here’s a little more detail on what the premium level membership provides for you:

• Linked in learning - professional development courses
• Ability to send In-Mail. Internal to LinkedIn. Send mail to people that you do not already have an established connection with.
• Analytics. You can see who is viewing your profile with some analytic breakdown of them by location or company position.
• Expanded opportunities to develop a contact list for marketing purposes

There are over 500M people on the platform and some studies show that as much as " 80% ofall B2B leads on social media come from LinkedIn,and 94% of B2B marketers use LinkedIn to distribute content." This is clearly a platform that is designed to support business.

There is a lot more to LinkedIn than I can easily cover here but if you’re serious about your business and your career, you owe it to yourself to set up a profile and get in the game. You’ll be glad you did.

P.S. If you are a fan of the "Dummies" series you can easily search on line and find versions of LinkedIn for Dummies that will help answer your questions as well.