Use the Power of LinkedIn to Grow Your Business

Over the past couple of years, LinkedIn has received positive results in terms of attention and growth. For a long time, Facebook and Twitter were considered to be the best options to market a business. However, things are changing now. LinkedIn has pushed its way forward to become the most important social network for business and networking.

LinkedIn has grown to over 550 million worldwide users and is continuing to grow at a fast pace as more and more professionals have realized its true potential. They have made some recent changes to their design interface to make it easier to navigate and added new tools that can be valuable for businesses and individuals in promoting their brand.

This article will provide you with some valuable tips on how you can utilize the power of LinkedIn to grow your business and expert advice from Dennis Koutoudis, a renowned LinkedIn speaker, author, coach, social media influencer, and founder of LinkedSuperPowers.

Create Videos

2017 was the year when videos became essential in promoting your brand. 2018 will see a huge shift for businesses as they transition text-based promotions to video-based, as that is what almost all businesses are focused on. This trend will continue to grow over the next couple of years, and LinkedIn has jumped on this opportunity. You may have seen on your LinkedIn feed that almost every post is a video, as they get a lot more engagement, shares, likes, and comments.

Ever since LinkedIn introduced video to their tools, they stated: “video content is shared 20x more than any other type of content on the platform”.

With those results, it is essential to work on adding video content to your 2018 marketing strategy.

According to Mr. Koutoudis, if the goal of using LinkedIn effectively is to get people to know, like, and trust you, (and of course, ultimately hire you, collaborate with you, refer you to others) a well-produced video is one important rung on your ladder to success! The ladder to becoming a LinkedIn All-Star starts with creating a profile that is of a LinkedIn expert level!

Join and Engage in Groups

There are thousands of groups on LinkedIn that you can join for various industries/niches. If you are looking to network with people in your professional field, this is one of the best strategies to implement.

Most groups have hundreds of thousands, some even millions, of members with different skill sets and are an ideal place to network and find like-minded people. You can add new connections when you join groups, you can share content, videos, ask questions, and always expect a reply from someone who is knowledgeable. People are generally willing to help each other out on this platform.

If you are a startup and looking for content, resources, or need to hire someone, utilizing groups is the way to go.

I use LinkedIn groups almost every day to share my blog content there. Most of my traffic to the blog comes from LinkedIn alone.

LinkedIn Advertising

LinkedIn Ads is just like Facebook Ads, but the best part is you can target all professionals in your ad. I have found LinkedIn Ads to be a little bit more expensive compared to Facebook, but if you are selling a product or service you can reach your potential customers easily and with laser precision. Hence, you are bound to make a sale if you are in the B2B business.

By creating ads on LinkedIn, you can also connect with influencers or other experts in your industry. This will allow you to build valuable relationships with them and there is a chance that they share your content with their network. This can give your business a huge boost and exposure to audiences you would not be able to reach otherwise.

LinkedIn is Great for SEO

Hubspot recently did a study into link sharing via social media and SERP placements. They noticed that LinkedIn is the top network compared to Facebook or Twitter in terms of improvement in search engine rankings. This means that each time your content is shared by someone you will receive an inbound link, which helps your website rankings and will create a snowball effect of links to your site.

Make New Connections

The best part of LinkedIn is that you can add people to your connection list very easily. In fact, LinkedIn encourages users to do that. Compared to Facebook, which is more personal, it is difficult to add people, as not many people would want to add and share their personal life with you.

However, on LinkedIn, almost 90% of the users will be open to connecting with you if they find any value in doing so. The LinkedIn user’s mindset is business oriented. Therefore if you give them the right reason to connect with you, chances are, they will.

It is always advised not to spam people, message irrelevant things, or discuss personal stuff. Always keep it professional and network to help grow your skillset and business.

Paid LinkedIn Membership

Even though this is a paid feature, it is one of the best features to take advantage of. Apart from more credibility (premium badge on your profile), it will give you additional search capabilities, contact options, and benefits that will help you in your career, business, sales, hiring, and networking. Moreover, it will allow you to see 90 days back of who’s viewed your LinkedIn profile, something extremely valuable and something that consists of a trigger event for you to approach these individuals. All users are given a free trial for a month to test and utilize the benefits of this feature before you become a paid member. I highly suggest you try it out.

Including LinkedIn to your marketing strategy will definitely help you expand your network, find new customers, highlight you as a professional, and give a positive light to your brand. If you haven’t thought about adding your business here, then I suggest you give it a try, as it will have great potential in the next coming years.

Mr. Koutoudis believes that LinkedIn is the most powerful tool nowadays to help us achieve our professional goals, whether we are job seekers or companies trying to find more clients for our business. We just need to know how to use it in the most effective way.