Are you using LinkedIn to grow your business?
With 161 million members dedicated to different businesses, LinkedIn offers many opportunities. The real value of LinkedIn for business is connecting one-on-one with professionals and business people.
Why LinkedIn to generate a network of contacts?
Many of your LinkedIn contacts can introduce you not only to influential business people and partners, but also recommend your company to new clients, so today I’m going to talk to you about 10 LinkedIn tips to boost your business.
“It is preferable to be the best connected than the most connected.”
In addition to teaching you new skills with this article, I also want to show you how to be better connected. A personal LinkedIn profile is often thought of as an online resume or digital business card, and using it that way is a good start. However, you can do more than that – go beyond the basic features of LinkedIn – build a more powerful medium to attract and manage your connections and create business opportunities online.
10 LinkedIn Tips to Boost Your Business
The following 10 characteristics and best practices for LinkedIn will allow you not only to make connections on LinkedIn, but to take advantage of the network to be more visible, more participatory and act smart to accelerate the growth of your business.
These practices are organized into three different categories so that you can realize the synergy of their benefits when combining them.
A word of clarification before you start – all of these features are available with a standard, free LinkedIn account.
Optimize to be found through searches and ranking
A main reason for having a comprehensive and descriptive LinkedIn profile that speaks to your experience and ability is to rank well in general search. In fact, Google is one of the easiest ways to find people related to business, simply by putting a name followed by the words “on LinkedIn.”
Going one step further a particular advantage that LinkedIn has over other networking sites is its internal search capabilities. You can improve your search and ranking position on LinkedIn in just a few weeks by optimizing your personal profile with the following four tips.
1: Use the right keywords and phrases in the title and header.
Many people consider their LinkedIn header to be synonymous with their title, but there is a difference. The title is really important to be easily found through a LinkedIn search, but the header is a valuable opportunity to boost your profile even more, emphasizing the writing skills, areas of expertise and ideal clients.
2: Reflect your online and offline business
Networks on LinkedIn
To maximize the benefit of LinkedIn, you should consider importing all of your online and offline business contacts, and make a habit of making frequent updates.
Each contact is a network of connections, which are known as social charts – digital maps that lead you to new connections. By importing all your business contacts to LinkedIn, you not only keep your profile more complete and give it relevance, but you also maximize your LinkedIn network giving it added value.
3: Tag your skills and experience
While tagging your skills and knowledge today doesn’t seem to make a significant difference to LinkedIn search, this can be very helpful in the future when this feature is out of beta. For now, keep tags in mind as additional information that may be useful to someone passing through your LinkedIn profile.
4: Create a link to your websites with keywords.
LinkedIn offers the ability to link your personal profile to up to three web sites or pages, including your web page, personal web site, or blog.
If this is done correctly, you can have these sites linked to your selected keywords and phrases, thus improving your search engine optimization (SEO), both on LinkedIn and on the web. This option is activating “Other” in category.
5: Personally welcome and meet your new connections
My experience is that few people take the time to get acquainted with their new connections through a personal response, something that takes only a few seconds.
This is why this strategy is so valuable for developing relationships and distinguishing yourself from others who are just collecting connections.
6: Add Video to your profile to spice it up
There are two applications for adding video to your LinkedIn profile – Google Presentations and the SlideShare application. Having worked with both, my experience is that the SlideShare app is more reliable.
If you know how to embed a video in a PowerPoint presentation, then you can put a video on your LinkedIn profile with the SlideShare app. You can embed the video on the first slide and set it for when your profile is viewed or use the first slide to present the video.
7: Notes for important details and Opportunities for next action.
In the days before the digital age, when we exchanged business cards at a hookup event, a common practice was to make a note on the card about business opportunities to follow up. If you scroll down any profile, you will find a field for inserting notes. Considering that many of us have hundreds of connections on LinkedIn, the additional information can be very helpful in customizing your follow-up communications.
8: Tag and filter your connections to organize and build relationships
Asking for a favor when you first meet someone is not the smartest way to build relationships. A better way is by tagging your connections so that you can share information and create value over time, thus creating a mutually beneficial relationship that will serve you much better.
Classify your connections as you add them, this will create a filtering reference that will become an advantage for your contact creation strategy.
9: Use context for Business Intelligence acquisition
One way to use LinkedIn to acquire business intelligence is to study the interrelationships of your contacts. For example, if one of your competitors is connected to your new contact, then you can use that contextual intelligence to minimize risks – just as you can also discern potential opportunities from your second and third degree connections.
Another way to use the context of the network is to search for the best LinkedIn groups. There are thousands of groups on LinkedIn, but your trusted connections can lead you to the ones that may be most appropriate for you as a result of their contextual relationship.
10: Periodically update your client list with their LinkedIn data
One of the challenges of customer service is that you have to constantly enter new data to get the most value out of it. Take advantage of the fact that most of your LinkedIn contacts are keeping their contact information regularly updated.
LinkedIn has a function to download the connections in a CSV file (such as an Excel file), which can then be imported into your customer list. If you do this at least a couple of times a year, you’ll always have the latest contact information at your fingertips to stay connected.
LinkedIn is a network designed for professionals, one in which the individual is the center of the ecosystem. This is the reason for taking steps to improve your personal profile, as it is the best strategy to get the best of LinkedIn for your business.
Now it’s your turn?
What do you think? Which of these 10 best practices will help you get more business from your personal LinkedIn profile? Leave your questions and comments.