Last week, we outlined how to use Twitter to build your customer service presence. We included how to use Twitter for your business, how it differs from other social media platforms, and two ways to utilise the app. You can access this blog here. Today, we’ll go through the platform LinkedIn and give you a guide of how to use it for your business.
What Is LinkedIn?
LinkedIn is a business and employment online service that operates via websites and mobile apps. The platform is generally used for professional networking, marketing campaigns for businesses, gaining clients and job searchers. Launched in 2003, LinkedIn has 774+ million registered users from over 200 countries and territories. The platform is a B2B focused platform and unlike other social platforms, focuses on connecting professionals from all over the world. This is what makes it so great for businesses.
How LinkedIn differs from other social media platforms
As previously mentioned, LinkedIn is a professional platform dedicated to connecting professionals and networking. Other social media platforms focus on socialising as a ‘regular’ person, regardless of profession, skills or even identity. Twitter, for example, encourages profiles that have no connection to a person’s real-life identity or appearance. LinkedIn allows you to create a professional profile. Focusing on skills, job title, qualities and even your CV. This means that as a platform it’s great for networking. It also means that unlike Twitter and Facebook, there are much fewer angry comments. This is because your comments will be tied to your professional identity and thus, reflect poorly on you and your company.
Advantages of using LinkedIn
Due to there being less of a focus on customer service and little to no negative comments, you can share updates from your business without the extra time needed for responding to negative comments. In this way, you can simply focus on sharing your business achievements, story, ads and target businesses.
LinkedIn should not be used like other Social media platforms. Instead of generating only advertisements or customer service, LinkedIn is more focused on the day to day life of a professional as well as their business updates. The main advantage of this is that by updating other professionals on your business, you are marketing your business and its values. This allows prospective clients to receive a rich understanding of your brand story and follow along, creating potential clients that you can follow throughout the entire customer journey.
If your business has products or services that cater to other businesses, LinkedIn is the perfect place for you. With detailed targeting, you can reach your exact potential client base to kickstart B2B marketing.
So, how can you use LinkedIn?
Update your company page
The first thing you need to do is to make sure your company page is ready for your marketing campaigns. This means that you need to take care of a lot of stuff, starting with the basic info and up to the branding elements.
Here are some good pieces of advice to take into account:
- A name and description
- informational branding elements such as website links etc.
- design a good looking banner or logo
Create engaging content
In an upcoming blog, we’ll go through how to create engaging content for your viewers in detail. However, the most important things to remember include creating content that looks professional, clean and captures attention. For example, using websites that allow you to create templates of good looking content to grab your audience’s attention. Video content is great for LinkedIn as it helps your audience learn new things about your product, brand or even interesting information that suits your brand. Infographics build up brand trust as they share important information that looks professional and knowledgeable. Clients want to know that brands they work with know what they are doing and can demonstrate it to others.
Write and share articles
Like infographics, articles are another way to show potential clients and your audience that you know a thing or two about what you’re talking about. It’s a great way to interact with your audience as well, building a discussion about an interesting topic. These discussions can attract audiences from around the world who may not have known about your brand before but are now aware of your brand. This awareness is very important as it is the first step of the conversion process so make sure to create lots of content to make audiences aware of your brand, story and products.
Share ‘how to’ videos and testimonials
Once a customer is aware of your brand, they need to make up their mind over whether your product is what they are looking for. They will likely be viewing other options and therefore need some convincing on your part to help make up their mind. In order to do this it’s important to create content that highlights good reviews of your product, frequently asked questions and how to videos that can help your audience to make a clear decision about your brand and products.
Interact with other brands
A great part of LinkedIn is that you can build up your professional connections within your field. One way to do this simply is to interact with the posts of others by commenting and liking. Joining in on other discussions will allow people to see you and your business and this engagement can encourage others to follow your posts as well.
And that’s all for today. If you want to use LinkedIn for your business we hope this article has been useful. If you want help in running your social media campaigns however, we can help. With our team of experts, we can help you run your social media campaigns. call 01708 952952 today to find out more or visit our website here.