How to leverage LinkedIn:
STORY OF LINKEDIN: LinkedIn’s early revenue streams were founded by launching job listings and subscriptions, which was enhanced communications and search capability. People need to talk to people they don’t already know in order to get the job done. Advertising has been successful with them because they have the ability to have a good professional demographic and their ability to build unique business products. Hoffman transformed the way people could take control of their professional lives and easily work together to find the right people and the right information. “Linkedin” wildapricot. Share answers to Faxs. Use the top 10 lists. Ask “Let me know what you think?” Your employees can help you build out your content. Check out Keith Ferrazzi and Barbara Giamanco.
LinkedIn = Human Resources Database of the 21st Century.
LINKEDIN STATISTICS
- More than 80% of members are decision makers
- The standard user is a male 25-45 years old, the average user is aged 35 or over
- 50% of Fortune 100 companies hire through LinkedIn
- 200,000 Industry Groups and 70% of Jobs are found through networking
- Highly educated: 75% hold college or post-secondary degrees
- Affluent: 39% of users earn over $100,000
- LinkedIn: 300 million active users
LINKEDIN BASICS
Your employees are updating their personal profiles to show where they work. LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network with 161 million registered users in 200 countries and territories, more than two million LinkedIn Company pages, and professionals signing up at a rate of approximately two members per second.
“People go on linkedin to make themselves better and organization better.”
B2b Marketing Nirvana, Click Intelligence to know who you want to talk with. Advertising in Linkedin groups, look at Salesforce and HP for brands that have been successful. Target your status updates, but you need a certain number of followers Currently there isn’t anything for spammers or how to post on other company pages. Some clicks are coming from Bots. Look into your Data Science Team. Products coming soon from LinkedIn include things for colleges.
PROFILE
Create a personal profile that details your current position, past business experience, publications, awards, and skills. Make a list of available multimedia items to use in your LinkedIn gallery including videos, PowerPoint, Keynote, or Google presentations, Infographics, White papers, reports, or other helpful documents in .PDF form.
CONNECTIONS
Add college alumni, former co-workers, colleagues, clients, vendors, local businesses, and super connectors in politics and law, head of your local Chamber of Commerce or Rotary. You can add contacts to your connections by going and adding the people you communicate with through email. Every person that connects with one of your employees may potentially click on your company name and be navigated to your company page. There are several groups, professional and alumni based, that you could join and post discussion topics. These serve as forums to pose questions on best practices in your field, ask for job search tips, and to stay up to date on current industry news to further seek advice for your career. You can identify networking paths by using the unique feature of identifying how you are connected to various professionals. Those that you are directly connected with are 1st contacts. A 2nd contact icon will show when you have a 1st contact that knows the 2nd contact personally. These icons show when you look at group members, company profiles, and so on. Here’s a MAJOR tip for success when building your LinkedIn network: change the standard “I’d like to invite you to join my personal network” message to something personal. Follow-up after a networking event or conference, to make permanent connections with those people you met at the event.
POSTING
Post text-only status updates (no photos) and post links to interesting articles and videos. The new posting blog feature on LinkedIn is also another way to stay top of mind with your network and establish thought leadership in your industry.
LINKEDIN SEARCH
Find College alumni, people, companies, status updates, jobs, inbox, groups, past colleagues, or previous bosses you’d like to connect with using People search. While they may not be a direct source of leads, you never know who they’re in touch with. Growing your network strategically is one of the best ways to generate new business. Do an advanced search for people with job titles, experience, and keywords in their profile that would be potential sales lead for you. For example, a small business consultant would search for keywords like “entrepreneur” or “startup” in keywords. Note: You’ll learn how to save this search and have it emailed. Search for keywords relevant to your business and review the results. Are any of these potential leads for you?
You can generate leads with search by saving more than three searches, you need a LinkedIn paid account. You can however, edit existing searches and change their criteria to adapt to changing business needs. Perform a basic or advanced search for the criteria that will generate the best-targeted leads for your business. When LinkedIn displays the search results, you’ll see Save Search with a green plus icon on the right part of the screen:
Click on Save Search and LinkedIn will allow you to name the search and identify how often you’d like leads emailed to you. To change an existing search, select Saved Searches, which appears under the Save Search plus icon. Identify the people on LinkedIn who would make the best leads for your business. What do they have in common on their profiles? Those commonalities will be the search criteria you use for your Saved Searches. Save each search and review them when LinkedIn delivers the results to your Inbox next week. Were these the types of leads you were looking for? If so, great! Reach out to them, invite them to connect, and begin building a relationship. If not, then return to the Saved Search section and edit those searches to more narrowly focus on better leads.
WHO’S VIEWED MY PROFILE
Tells you how many times your profile has appeared in search results. What it doesn’t tell you is why or what LinkedIn users were searching for. You need a LinkedIn Premium account to see that. This is a “tease” to get you to upgrade to their Premium membership, but I have found: 1)the keywords you use in your profile; and 2) the group discussions you participate in effect this the most. LinkedIn is not officially saying anything about your post’s reach, but in making your “Views” public, it’s easy to calculate. Your post reach=views/network connections
FINDING JOBS ON LINKEDIN
Click on the “Jobs” tab on the homepage when you log in. Click on the “Jobs” tab located in-group pages. Be sure to click on “Career Discussions” to see job postings from group members. Did you know you could see what companies have been recently hired in various positions? Search for your company of interest, look for the “new hires” section and benchmark yourself against your competition.
ENDORSEMENTS
LinkedIn added the endorsements feature as a way to boost their revenue from employers looking to hire: they’re hoping an impressive collection of endorsements will encourage employers to consider candidates for hire and get them using LinkedIn more for job candidates. Display recommendations & endorsements from colleagues who are also LinkedIn users. LinkedIn’s most popular new feature is the Endorsement: a one-click recommendation of a connection for a specific skill. LinkedIn emails you when you receive a new endorsement on your profile. Use this as a reminder to send that person a gracious “Thank You” in a LinkedIn message. Most people don’t thank their endorsers, and you’ll stand out from the rest as someone who went the extra mile.
RECOMMENDATIONS
Name & title of the person offering a recommendation with the nature of the professional relationship (colleague, client, employer, etc). You can add Recommendation content that will really speak dividends of your experience.
3. LinkedIn
This new social media is meant to be more professional. Obviously, you don’t want future employers seeing UGA game-days, but you still need to keep you networks. LinkedIn creates a strategy that is effective and measurable, has a professional target market, shows the main message of brands. Yet, do businesses spend more time on LinkedIn because of the professionalism it is know for carrying? Overall strategy for new media needs to show where target customers are online by having a strong content strategy, producing and re-purposing, making people engage, implementing consistently, using tools that are free and not, and know what is working and not working. Thus, experimentation in a new innovation will need to take place, but not without careful consideration.