Expert Tips For How to Use LinkedIn for Business: A Step-by-Step Guide for Marketers

LinkedIn is an excellent place for businesses that are looking to network and grow their reach. Unlike many other popular social networks out there today, LinkedIn is aimed at job seekers and professionals. At its core, it is a professional social network. It is all about business-related activities, including industry discussions, professional connections, career development, and much more. With that being said, let’s take a look at using LinkedIn successfully for your business below.

Set up your page effectively

Many different elements come together when it comes to creating the perfect LinkedIn page. Firstly, you need to fill out your company description. This should make it evident in what your company does, the services and products you sell, your mission, and your vision. Make sure you write in your brand voice. Aside from this, a professional cover photo is needed, and you can add as many as three hashtags to your profile, which will make your profile more searchable, so select your hashtags with care.

In addition to this, you should add the locations your business is based in, i.e., your store or office locations. You need to add multiple locations, which will help you become more searchable when people do local searches on LinkedIn. In addition to this, you can manage your language.

If you have a multilingual audience or global brand, add your description, tagline, and name in more than 20 different languages. Finally, it would help if you thought about adding a custom button to your LinkedIn page. This will encourage visitors to take action. Options include the likes of sign up, register, learn more, contact us, and visit a website.

Find connections and customers that are highly targeted.

Targeting on LinkedIn is a must when it comes to using this platform effectively. The targeting on LinkedIn is unlike any other when it comes to digital advertising. Small companies can zero in on specific industries, job roles, and company sizes they know would typically be interested in their job or service.

For instance, let’s say that you sell inventory management software to small companies in New York. You can set your advertising so that you will only show your campaigns to companies in New York with less than 100 employees.

Add LinkedIn buttons across your online presence.

Aside from the suggestions that we have mentioned so far, we also recommend that you add social media icons to the footer or header of your newsletter or website, which will make it a lot easier for people to find your LinkedIn page. You can also add these buttons to your emails as well.

Consider the right time for your posts.

Use analytics to find out the optimal time to post content to reach your desired audience on LinkedIn. Some of the optimal times for posting on LinkedIn include 5.45 pm, 12.45 pm, 10.45 am, and 7.45 am, according to Hootsuite. Use your research to continue to refine your strategy, though.

Optimize posts for impact and rich

In addition to the benefits that we have mentioned so far, when it comes to posting from your business page on LinkedIn, there are several practices you should consider. The algorithm used by LinkedIn will rank posts based on several different signals, including engagement probability, interest relevance, and personal connections.

This means that you should be looking to create posts that interest people and are highly engaging. You can also notify workers if you believe they would be interested in something you have posted. As an advocate of your business, they will get the engagement started on the post and, therefore, increase its visibility.

Some of the things we recommend you do to boost your LinkedIn posts include:

• Respond to any comments left on your post to increase engagement 
• Write solid and robust headlines for your articles 
• Add a few relevant hashtags to your posts, but do so in a natural manner 
• Boost engagement and feedback with LinkedIn pools 
• Lead with a question that encourages people to respond 
• Tag pages and people mentioned in the post 
• Name the type of audience you are trying to reach, for example, remote workers or working parents 
• Include a call-to-action that is simple, clear, and eye-catching 
• Call out key quotes, points, and statistics 
• Keep the copy short – If the post is long, make sure it is readable by including bullet points, numbers, and paragraph breaks. 
• Use video or imagery to capture the attention 
• Share content that is relevant and timely

Share posts with rich media

Last but not least, another suggestion that we have for when it comes to LinkedIn marketing is to share posts that have rich media, i.e., videos or photos. Posts like this tend to perform much better across social media platforms like LinkedIn. In fact, according to the social media powerhouse themselves, posts with images generate 98 percent more comments when compared to posts that do not have any rich media.

When it comes to adding rich media to your posts, we recommend using custom photographs whenever you can. Avoiding stock imagery is a great way to stand out. You can also support your posts by uploading the likes of SlideShare presentations, PowerPoints, or PDFs.

One of the great benefits of native video on LinkedIn is that it will play automatically whenever someone scrolls by it. As a consequence, it is highly effective in terms of catching people’s attention! When compared with other types of content, videos experience five times the amount of engagement on LinkedIn.

So there you have it: some of the different approaches you can use to maximize LinkedIn when it comes to marketing your business. We hope that the ideas and suggestions mentioned above will help you make the most of this unique and exciting social media platform.