How To Use LinkedIn To Grow Your Business Online
These past couple of weeks, we’ve been bombarded by clients asking us how they can best take advantage of LinkedIn and and other networking sites to grow their business. This has spurred us to write this post with a few tips on how to use LinkedIn to grow your business online.
LinkedIn is an online network of more than 8.5 million professionals from around the world representing 130 industries. People use LinkedIn as a tool to grow their database of contacts, find new ideas, partners, identifying the right people at as a customer or prospect and opportunities for growing their business in their chosen industry.
So how can you use LinkedIn to grow your business:
- When you have significant news about changes in your business, new product/service lunchings etc, a good platform to announce such is to update your profile on LinkedIn with this information. This creates instant awareness to all persons you are connected to on LinkedIn.
- You can use LinkedIn as a channel to connect with old colleagues and classmates who may now be prospects or potential customers of your products or services.
- By joining specialized groups on LinkedIn, you are in a position to gain expert advice and gather a broader perspective on how others in the same industry are able to cope with different challenges in the industry and also about your competitors.
- If you have a company website, you can place a link from your LinkedIn company profile to your company website and vice versa, just as we have done on our Mauco company profile on LinkedIn. This thereby helps to improve your visibility on search engines like Google. When people now search for you or your company online, they now have various channels from which get a proper understanding about you, your product and services.
- By your meaningful contributions to in group and forum discussions on LinkedIn and answering questions raised by other LinkedIn users, you are able to position as a leader in your industry and hopefully by word of mouth, referrals, etc you would be able to increase your client base.
These and many more are some of the benefits you derive from creating a profile on LinkedIn. Do you have a linkedin Profile? What other benefits have you got from having a LinkedIn profile? Feel free to comment below. You comments are welcome.
Tags: benefits of linkedin, internet marketing, LinkedIn, linkedin profile, networking sites, Online Business, social media, social networking, using linkedin for business