LinkedIn is an online website, an American business and employment-focused online website which provides its service through a mobile application and online websites. This is not similar to Facebook as some people think. LinkedIn is used for professional networking and career development, whereas Facebook is not career-oriented; it is just for chatting and connecting to new friends just for fun purposes. It was launched in May 2003.
Did you know?
LinkedIn has 332 million members, with 2 new users joining every second, which means 120 people join per minute.
Also Read: Instagram for Business: 15 Master Tips Explained
How to Use LinkedIn for Business
Before starting directly with the business on LinkedIn, one must have a LinkedIn business account opened in his company name. So, let us understand how to open a LinkedIn account for business.
- You need a personal LinkedIn company profile to set up a LinkedIn business page.
- Your personal LinkedIn company profile must be at an all-star or an intermediate level to be able to set up your LinkedIn business page.
- You can check your current level in your LinkedIn company profile dashboard, which is private to you.
- If you want your LinkedIn company page to be successful, you need to work on that personal profile to make it look neat and optimised.
- Your profile needs to be at least one week old, and you need to have at least some first degree of connections to create a company page.
Now that we know the requirements let's continue through the step-by-step LinkedIn company page setup.
Step 1 Select the type of LinkedIn company page you are creating.
Open your LinkedIn account in the top right corner, select work, and navigate to create company page section. You have these options creating a company page for a small business, a medium to large business, and there is an option for creating a showcase page for all the existing companies if you want to give visibility for its specific unit brand or product. There is an option for creating a page for an educational institution like schools, universities, colleges, etc., so select what would be your option.
Step 2 Fill in the details of your LinkedIn company page
Which will include filling in the name that best describes your business and many other details.
Step 3 Include your LinkedIn company cover image.
Adding a cover page will engage visitors to check out your page. Many brands upload their brand logo or their latest marketing or advertising campaign graphics.
Step 4 Add your company page summary in the about section
Add a summary overview in your about section, which is focused on the problems you solve and the benefits you provide.
Ways to Use LinkedIn for Business
LinkedIn can be an example of a social media marketing mix. The ways to use it for business are as follows:
Posting on LinkedIn
On LinkedIn, a business can post about their new products and a team of professionals so that people can start getting some idea about the business. This will help create goodwill and trust among the people reading/viewing the post and the company.
LinkedIn Advertising
As per the marketing mix, the company can do online advertisement at a very minimal cost, which will save the company advertisement expenditure. Examples could be advertising regarding the offers provided by the company during summers, winters, monsoon, etc.
For Hiring & Recruiting Employees for Business
LinkedIn plays a very important platform in hiring employees, and many individuals join in seeking job opportunities. It gets very easy for a company and an individual to recruit and get jobs. On the contrary, this online platform saves the company's expenditure, which was to be spent on advertising for recruiting and hiring employees.
Connect With People
In the starting phase of your business, start connecting with your colleagues, friends, and other people you may know and connect with people you don't know. At the starting phase of business, the main motive should be to spread the word about the company to the maximum number of people.
Important LinkedIn Marketing Tips
- Know your audience, who is your avatar and what they look like at surface level. So, in terms of geographical location, where are they based? What kind of companies do they belong to? Is that a solo entrepreneur? Is it a fortune 500 company? Not only at the surface level but also at their emotional level.
- It would help if you optimised your profile because it is the first place where the potential customer will interact with you on the platform. As more people use LinkedIn properly, they'll expect to see a nice headshot and a compelling and informative banner image. Not to mention all the information about who you are and how you can help them in plain sight.
- Be consistent in posting – Be it on LinkedIn or any other social media platform, to get views and followers, and it is a key mantra to be consistent with your posts. If you don't post regularly, you won't emerge as a big company/business. Consistency is the key to a successful business.
- Grow your network – Without people in your network to see your content, there's only so far it can go, and we want our first connection engaging, which will then show it to second connections and so on.
Also Read: Techniques & Tricks for Using WhatsApp for Businesses
LinkedIn Marketing Tools
Google Analytics
One can use Google analytics free of cost. Google Analytics is a powerful digital marketing tool that can help with several marketing decisions.
Mailchimp
This is also a free platform that does a lot for you; Mailchimp is an online program that sends emails and reminders to all of your clients. You can have it sent out as a campaign, as this is a great platform to send multiple emails. Mailchimp will keep track of all the emails people have subscribed to, or there was interaction before such other emails and give you stats and analytic data on top of it. Mailchimp also makes ad campaigns more effective while creating more appealing landing pages.
Hubspot
Hubspot's growth platform helps you build a flywheel for growth, with everything you need to market, sell, and service your customers the right way, all in one place. With a marketing hub, you can attract more of the right people by creating and sharing useful content, running tailored ad campaigns, and engaging with leads through personalised messages. Sales hub gives your sales team everything they need to sell in a more personalised and relevant way which is more efficient.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite is a social media management system or tool that helps you keep track of your different social media platforms and allows you to post to more than one place at the same time and schedule it ahead of time. So, it's very convenient if you want to set up your actual messages for the week or maybe even have the same message go out to multiple platforms at one time, then Hootsuite might be the product for you.
Hotjar
Instead of guessing what motivates your user's behaviour, you can know to see which bits of your site they love, where they click, tap, move, how far they scroll, and what they ignore. And by watching videos of users really interacting with your product, you get to spot your opportunity areas and bugs hiding in plain sight as your users see them. But it doesn't end there. You can also ask questions directly to your visitors and focus on just your most valuable user's cohorts, put all this together, and get something that likes to call a product experience insight. This leads to you getting buy-in faster, which leads to you doing work that drives real business outcomes.
Conclusion
Now you know all the details regarding how to do business on LinkedIn. We hope this article has been helpful to you in creating your business account on LinkedIn.
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