Is it time to consider LinkedIn?

If you are not familiar with LinkedIn and how it could benefit your business, then this simple article is for you.

What is LinkedIn?

LinkedIn is a social platform for businesses and professionals. As a professional networking site, it is designed to help people make business connections, share their experiences and resumes, find jobs and get business-focused news updates.

How many people are on LinkedIn?

There are currently over 850m users worldwide. 190m in USA, 13m in Australia and 2.3m in New Zealand.

Some of the benefits of LinkedIn

• It’s purely for business so you are free to talk about your business and career as you wish.
• It has many useful free features
• Great for connecting and networking
• Useful recruitment tool
• Good source of industry news
• You can advertise on it – pinpoint targeting allows you to speak directly to decision-makers
• Has critical mass – it’s the biggest network in the world

LinkedIn for FREE

You can set up a LinkedIn profile page as an individual, to promote your personal brand. You can do the same for your company brand too, and it will only cost your time to do it.

Once you have set up your profile, you actively go out and invite people you know (or want to know) to connect to your network. Once you are connected to a person you can direct message them.

You can also post news items on your news feed. People in your network can like, comment on or share these news items you post.

Paid LinkedIn Services

If you are prepared to part with some cash, there are several ways you can get your message to a wider audience on LinkedIn. The big advantage in advertising on LinkedIn is the pinpoint targeting available. You target people by country, region, job title, industry, interest group and more.

Some of the ways you can amplify your message on LinkedIn:

Boosting Posts

If you write a news post that you want to send beyond your network, you can boost it to a wider audience.

Advertising

LinkedIn offers a wide variety of advertising formats to get your message out there. LinkedIn Campaign Manager offers several ways to build an ideal audience to advertise to. Once you have built an audience you can integrate text, motion, video, and static images for added impact. You can set budgets and timelines, and get excellent data on your campaigns too.

Direct Messaging

If you pay for a premium subscription, LinkedIn allows you to direct message people outside your network. If used respectfully, this can be an effective prospecting and sales tool

Sales Tool

Another useful paid tool that LinkedIn provides is Sales Navigator. This handy prospecting tool gives you more information than you would normally get about LinkedIn members and allows you to create ideal prospect lists to make direct contact with.

Recruitment Tool

LinkedIn was started as a platform to post resumes and find jobs. Because of this, the recruitment tools on LinkedIn are excellent. They provide a great way of attracting and filtering prospective team members.

If you are in business and are looking to grow and expand, then LinkedIn is a great platform to start with. If you haven’t already, make a start, and set up a profile today.