Special Release: LinkedIn Business Essentials

In today’s marketing environment, it is crucial that businesses have a presence in social media. Social media marketing can be intimidating and time consuming if you do not plan and establish a foundation from the beginning. It’s one thing to set up your LinkedIn page, but planning how and when you are going to post to you’re your clients, fans and future customers is another story. Keeping your followers engaged is where most businesses fail in the social media atmosphere.

But why Social Media you might ask? Social media marketing has many benefits. Through the different channels available for social media, you can increase exposure for your business, increase traffic to your website, increase search rankings, generate leads, develop raving fans, improve your sales, grow business partnerships, and best of all reduce your marketing expenses.

No longer do you need to take out costly ads in the yellow pages or in newspapers. Those are still great options, but social media provides quicker results you are able to measure and track month to month.

In this report, I will walk you through LinkedIn and how you can create your vision and goals for your LinkedIn profile. While it isn’t vital for you and your business to participate in LinkedIn, it is a good idea to at least have a presence here and point them to your website or a way to interact with your business. You do not want to lose a potential client just because you’re not found on LinkedIn.

So, Let’s get started.

1. Critical Areas to Consider

In each of the social media sites, there is a basic funnel every business should follow. First, create the social media platform. A platform is “A raised floor or stage used by public speakers or performers so that they can be seen by their audience.” You want to be seen by your audience, or in this case, your clients and customers. In the next chapters, I’ll explain the LinkedIn platform and how to build it to fit your business.

Next, every business needs to build a community of followers.

Please understand, your goal should not be to sell within LinkedIn. Instead, you want to create a raving fan base that will be interested in what you have to say and what you’re giving away so you can build an email subscriber list, and then convert them to buyers.

There are seven very critical areas each business or individual must consider in order to be successful in social media marketing and LinkedIn.

1. LinkedIn Vision

• LinkedIn Goals

• LinkedIn Voice

• Building the LinkedIn Platform

• The LinkedIn Publishing Plan

• LinkedIn Community Building

• Measuring and Tracking Results

We’ll discuss these in detail in just a few moments.

2. Reasons to Use LinkedIn

But first, let’s discuss why someone should use LinkedIn. The #1 advantage of LinkedIn is it’s all Business! LinkedIn is a business oriented social media networking service. It allows businesses to build a personal and business brand by providing both personal pages and a business page. LinkedIn can also increase visibility of products and services for your company. Through LinkedIn’s groups, you can participate in targeted and relevant business groups to establish your authority and leadership in your area, build connections with prospective clients, and develop new strategic partnerships.

You might ask yourself, “What can LinkedIn do for me?”

Great question! LinkedIn is an easy and effective way to find like-minded people and business associates. LinkedIn allows users to read a person’s business history on a single page. You can also see whom they associate with and other people they know, allowing you to reach out and make a connection with them as well.

Top 8 Reasons to Use LinkedIn

1. Build your Social Reputation. LinkedIn is a great tool forpeople to outline their experience, accomplishment, organizations and network.

• Find Qualified Employees. Looking for an employee? Useyour connections to search out qualified candidates. LinkedIn also has a job posting board, for a fee.

• Make New Connections. Use LinkedIn and do a search forpeople in your niche or area of business. LinkedIn has an introductions tool that you can use to give you a written introduction for a person you want to connect with.

• Increase your Google Ranking. Well-written LinkedInprofiles typically earn a high rank on the front page of Google. The more information you have such as LinkedIn (or Blog articles), the higher your Google ranking.

• Check out Competition, Customers, Partners. LinkedInis a great tool for research and to see what groups your customers and potential customers belong to.

• Groups. Groups are a great way to network. Use groups tomake connections with others within the group.

• Recommendations. LinkedIn has a recommendation systemwhere you and your contacts can recommend individuals and other companies, and in turn, they can recommend you.

• Use it on your smart phone/tablet. Log in just about anywhere to post an entry, make a recommendation or find a new contact.

Now, let’s discuss the seven steps to a successful LinkedIn plan;

12. Evaluating Results

In order to determine what efforts are making a difference in your business, you should measure and track those results. You need a base to start from and then measure weekly, monthly and quarterly to see those results. By this, we are looking at your numbers in your LinkedIn accounts.

As a result, you should also track the business side of these. Was there an increase in website traffic? How many new blog subscribers? Any new email leads? How many new buyers? What were your revenues?

To measure your success with LinkedIn, you’ll need to track and record some stats for both LinkedIn and your website. For LinkedIn stats, record the following in your spreadsheet.

• # of connections

• # of profile views

• # of recommendations

• # of skill endorsements

• # of company follows and recommendations
• # of new group members

• # of new discussions and overall activity

Website stats to track are:

• # of new website visitors

• # of new leads

• # of new blog subscribers

• Growth in revenues

ACTION STEP: Document your current LinkedIn stats in preparation for future evaluation.

Conclusion

LinkedIn is a powerful tool to use for both your personal career and your business. Through LinkedIn, you get access to people, jobs, news, updates, and insights that help you be even better at what you do. If you haven’t experienced the power of LinkedIn, explore the endless possibilities today!